It’s the season of resolutions and I am completely over them as a means to accomplish life goals. I’m working on a new book right now with a chapter called There’s Nothing Worse Than a Clean Pair of Hiking Boots. It’s my chapter on doing the things you really want to do. Take that trip, learn that skill, reconnect with that friend. We spend so much of our lives on autopilot that many times, we buy the hiking boots fully expecting to go hiking more often and yet there they sit in the back of our closet.
So, for those of you who have amazing goals this year, but no actual plan or system yet to achieve them, I’d like to share the following first draft from my new book. This is the most basic way that I know to create a plan that will help you actually accomplish your goals.
Planning To Help You Achieve Your Life Goals
Note: Earlier in the chapter I share a technique in which you list out your life goals by the decade in your life in which it would be optimal to achieve them. For example, running a marathon might be something you shouldn’t wait until your 70’s to do. This technique helped me tremendously to realize that I needed to get moving on some of my goals. It’s at this point where we pick-up the chapter.
I see your decade list as a great group of goals, but until you put a plan in place they’re really just resolutions (you know, the goals you set every year that by January 16th you’ve completely given up on). Don’t let your goals be resolutions, let them be something that matters. Something that you’ll actually do someday.
Having spent the last 20 years in the corporate world, largely as a Project Manager, I have my thoughts on how to set-up a good plan and then stick to it. Here is the easiest way I’ve found to achieve your goals. And let me tell you, you don’t need any fancy software or incentives, you just need a good system to make sure you reach your goals. Now that I’m semi-retired, I still use these practices and they work, whether you’re using them professionally or personally. I recommend doing the following.
Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)
Those of you who use OKRs in your corporate jobs might get a little flashback of PTSD when you read “Objectives & Key Results”. That’s because a lot of us were forced to use these during annual performance reviews and almost no one uses OKRs the right way which can render them useless. I find them to be effective because it takes the goal-setting process once step forward to a place in which you’ve also set-up a series of steps to reach that goal.
Objectives & Key Results have two parts. Your goal, or objective, and then the key results which are smaller, concrete things that help you reach that goal. Your key result format is correct if when you finish them each one contributes to your finished objective and you can either say, true you got this done or false, I did not. It should be obvious. I’ll give you a very simple example of one of my actual personal OKRs for the year.
Example OKR #1
Objective: Read the four Jane Austen books I haven’t read yet this year.
- Key Result #1: Read Sense & Sensibility by the end of Q1
- Key Result #2: Read Mansfield Park by the end of Q2
- Key Result #3: Read Northanger Abbey by the end of Q3
- Key Result #4: Read Persuasion by the end of Q4
You see, OKRs can be used effectively for fun things – those things on your decade list that you just really want to get to in life. I happen to really love Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice and Emma and thought I should read her other four books. I find setting yearly OKRs to be incredibly effective in checking those “someday” things off my list. Why? Because they allow me to take a goal and then break it down into its smaller pieces. Note how each Key Result above, when finished, contributes to me reaching my overarching goal of reading all of Jane Austen’s books. Notice how I’ve added a timeframe to all of my Key Results as well to help me stay on track throughout the year. Here’s another example from my OKRs list last year.
Example OKR #2
Objective: Hike the Inca Trail.
- Key Result #1: Determine the timeframe for the trip by end of December
- Key Result #2: Determine who is coming by end of December
- Key Result #3: Book the trip by mid-January (outfitter & flights)
- Key Result #4: Hike the Inca Trail by end of September
Hiking the Inca Trail had been on my someday list for TWENTY YEARS and I finally got it done last year in May, right after my 42nd birthday. It was incredible and I’m so glad I didn’t wait another twenty years to do it. It was so difficult and if I’d gone in my 50’s it would have been even harder.
Now, the next piece is key if you want to make continual progress on these Objectives & Key Results.
The Weekly Review
Early in my career, I read a book that completely changed my life called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity by David Allen. Before reading this book, I was disorganized and let work pile up around me and in my inbox. I’d been missing emails from my manager and just felt generally behind. Getting Things Done gives you a framework to stay organized and while I don’t follow it to the letter, I do have a version of this framework that I’ve been using since 2007.
One of the key things I do on a weekly basis is a “Weekly Review”. In a nutshell, I gather up all of my loose ends and organize them. I go through all of my emails and either answer, delegate, file them, or put them into a to do list. Then, I take care of loose papers and I add things I know I need to do to my to do list. I look over my calendar and make adjustments. I follow-up on open issues. And I close the million open tabs I tend to have in my browser. When I’m done, I feel incredibly organized. I know what I’ll be doing in the next week and I typically do this on Friday afternoons so I can go into my weekend feeling calm and collected.
One of the things I’ve added to my “Weekly Review” list is to go over my OKRs for the year and update them. If I’ve finished something I mark it as done with the date (which feels really damn good, by the way). I also pull to dos off the list and make sure I’m making progress on each goal. It’s checking up on you OKRs every week and making sure you’re working towards your goals that most organizations miss. This is the secret sauce to actually getting things done. It’s not about creating the goals, it’s about following through on them.
Finding Accountability
Which brings me to accountability. You can do this completely on your own as long as you carve out the time to work with your goals every week. But, what if sometimes (maybe always) you kind of…forget? Or get too busy?
In this case, you need some accountability.
Accountability can come in many forms. It could be checking in with a spouse or partner on a regular basis. It could be working with a mentor, coach, or manager. I am a huge fan of coaches simply because they are trained to draw out your goals and to help you find habits that allow you to achieve those goals. However, I’ve found that other people in our lives can be effective accountability buddies too.
Finding Your Groups
Right now, I am on a zoom call with my online writing group. We meet every weekday at 9:30am. There is time at the beginning of the call to chat and then we hunker down for 25 minutes to write. We meet at the top of the hour to chat and stretch and then we write for another 25 minutes before chatting and ending the call. Just knowing that there are other people on the other end of that zoom call doing the same thing as me is incredibly helpful. I tend to write longer and get more done, all because I have this group of like-minded people doing the exact same thing as me.
Another form of accountability is simply to talk about your goals. If you’ve mentioned to your parents, a friend, or a work colleague that you’re planning a trip to France this year, you may be more likely to follow-through on it, knowing that they will be asking you about it. Accountability doesn’t have to be formal. It may be as simple as getting the message out there that you’re doing something. And there’s a bonus effect to this one. You might end up finding more people like you doing the same thing that you can lean on along the way.
Find some form of accountability and you’ll find a greater degree of success.
You’ve Only Got One Wild & Precious Life
Let’s take another look at the quote that started this chapter:
“Every action you take is a vote for the person you want to be.” -James Clear
He’s right, you know, and it’s both comforting and alarming. We might have the best of intentions around the life we want to live, but it’s our actions that really prove who we are.
Seth Godin was the one who woke me up to this. He essentially said, if you want to be a writer but you’re not writing, then you should either start or give up on that goal. Right now. There’s no sense in not acting on what you want to do. So, I started writing. And I want you to start writing (or traveling or playing the guitar or studying to be a neuroscientist – whatever it is you really want to do). Right now.
My favorite quote of all time is this one from Mary Oliver:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Because that’s exactly what we have. We have one wild and precious life to live and then it’s over. We’re the only ones that get to live it. What is it you plan to do? It’s time to get started.