Simplification Series: Setting Goals

This is Blog Post #1 in my Simplification Series: Take Advantage of the COVID-19 Situation to Simplify Your Life for Good. There’s no point in simplifying your life if you have no idea where you’re headed. So, in my opinion, the most important part of simplification is setting goals.

But wait, wait, wait — don’t run away already just because that sounds daunting! You can make this a big deal and come up with an overarching vision for your life, or you can jot down a few things that you know are important to you and then move on. There are three sections in this post. Use one or all of them, depending on what seems helpful to you. Let’s start with a quick, but powerful technique.

Setting Goals By Decade

This methodology works best if you already have a few life goals bouncing around in your head (and, let’s face it, you probably do even if they don’t come together as a cohesive vision). Here’s how to organize them a bit more and get them on paper.

Get out a sheet of paper or open a document on the computer
Write down every remaining decade of your life, leaving some space in between for bullets

Take each of your goals and add them to the decade in which you’d like to accomplish that goal
Make some adjustments to spread out your goals, if needed

A few goal categories you may want to consider:

Financial goals
Fitness goals
Relationship goals (significant other, kids, parents, friends, etc)
Travel goals
Career goals
Education goals
Those crazy things you always pictured yourself doing someday (e.g. learning to make the perfect sangria or writing a book)

If you sit down and nothing comes to mind, jump to the last section below about figuring out your life vision.

Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)

Writing goals as Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) gives us a better chance of achieving them. Many of us already use them at work, but the same technique is great for personal goals too.

Quick OKR History Lesson

So, what are OKRs anyway? OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) is way of writing goals that forces you to think about not just your goals, but specific, measurable results that prove you’ve achieved that goal. OKRs were introduced by Peter Drucker in 1954, used by Andy Grove at Intel, and made famous by John Doerr and Google.

How to Write OKRs

Start with an objective. This is your basic goal statement. The more specific you can get here, the better. For example:

“Write a book and publish it by December 2021.”

Now, even this is a bit vague. If you can get really clear on the details, you’ll be better off. So, polish that objective a little bit and use one that’s more like:

“Write a book about the process of self-selection and self-publish it through Amazon by January 1, 2022.”

Now we’re talking! Next, come up with a list of specific key results that make it crystal clear whether you’ve achieved your goal or not. This is very important. We’re not talking about steps. For example, I could say, “Write 45 pages a day”, but that is not a result, that’s one potential way of getting to the result, which is to write the book. A good list of key results might look like:

First draft of book finished by December 2020
Feedback incorporated from at least five reviewers by June 2021
Book professionally edited by October 2021
Book published on Amazon’s Direct Publishing platform by December 31, 2021

More examples are usually helpful, so here is a great Medium article by niket with another explanation and a lot of good examples.

OKRs: Dive Deeper

If you’d like to dive deeper into OKRs, I talk about them in these keynote slides from Business Agility Midwest 2019. John Doerr is the master of getting the word out on OKRs and he has a great TED Talk and book called Measure What Matters, both of which I highly recommend.

Create An Overarching Life Vision

This section is for those of you that want to go all-in on life goals and/or just don’t know where to start. Many years ago, I read a book called Living Forward: A Proven Plan to Stop Drifting and Get the Life you Want by Michael Hyatt & Daniel Harkavy. They’ve got a whole system for figuring out what’s most important to you in life so you can set appropriate goals and check-in on them every quarter.

It is a really good method for clarifying your life, but it’s not quick. They recommend you set aside one whole day without interruptions to get your plan in place and then review it for half a day each quarter.

I did, in fact, follow their advice back in 2016. I escaped my young children and husband at the time and found a quiet place in the Kings Park Library in Burke, VA for an entire 8 hours. Here’s how it works:

Write your own eulogy(ies): This may sound morbid, but spend some time writing your own eulogy from the perspective of the many people you care about: spouse, kids, siblings, friends, colleagues, and the world. What do you want them to remember you for? What do you want them to say about you?
List your Priorities: Based on those eulogies, make a list of your priorities. What really matters most to you? Then, stack rank them. It’s important to be really honest with yourself here. My list was a bit surprising, because “Fitness” ended up on top. At first I felt bad that my top priority wasn’t my kids, but I honestly feel that, “If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything”! Fitness enabled everything else on my list and it ended up at the top.
Take Stock: Think through how you’re doing on those priorities. Chances are, you’re not doing a good job focusing on all of these or, in some cases any of them.
Create an Action Plan: For each priority, write an action plan. Each action plan has the following considerations:
1. A purpose statement
2. An envisioned future
3. An inspiring quote
4. The current reality
5. Specific commitments (see the OKR section above)

Hyatt & Harkavy provide helpful templates on their website. The book is a quick read and fairly essential to the process. They offer a lot of great pointers and suggestions that just won’t fit into a blog post. I highly recommend you grab their book and read it before getting started. It’s a small price to pay for some real clarity.

Up Next in the Simplification Series: Simplify Your Schedule

Once you’ve got your goals set, Blog Post #2 will discuss simplifying your schedule. This is the piece that COVID-19 is really helping with right now and the piece that will be most important to dive into in the next few weeks so we can take advantage of the current downtime. Stay tuned!