Goals

📅 23 Jan 2021

I used to be very good at not only setting goals but achieving them. After I finished my undergrad (now nearly 7 years ago), I slowly started drifting away from the habit. As a result, I probably haven’t accomplished as much in the last 7 years as I would have liked to.

For me, the pandemic has highlighted a lot of areas that I want to improve and also has given me a lot of time to think about some deep life questions.

I have never really set New Year’s resolutions and that’s not really what this post is about. However, I do highly recommend you checking out this thoughtful post by Tim Ferriss.

I don’t follow very much of what Tim says, but I have found this exercise helpful, and not just around New Years.

But back to goals. A strategy I have found a lot of success with over the pandemic has been to pick one thing (yes, just one) I want to accomplish each day and get it done.

On its face, this sounds incredibly lazy. Just one thing?!

However, I have found this type of super-focused goal setting to be very powerful. I’m sure everyone is different, but for me, once I accomplish that one thing, it naturally snowballs into several other tasks and I end up finishing the day feeling very accomplished.

Here is an example day:

Goal: Buy materials I need for courses

And here is what I ended up doing:

Grocery run
Laundry (including bedding)
Blog post
Email to profs about missing class
2 hours of personal coding time

Note that this doesn’t happen every day. But more often than not, once I finish what is often a very small initial task, I end up getting at least 2-3 more things done. Normally, these are things I didn’t even have on my mind.

As far as long term goals, I’m still working on those. I know some general things I want to accomplish:

Lose 20 pounds
Find a job
Run a competitive 5K

But I have yet to take more than initial action on those (other than the job search - I’ve applied to a ton of jobs). I hope to get some time in the next few weeks to sit down and really hash out a good strategy for accomplishing each of those.

💬 Looking for comments?