Setting goals can be a great way to improve over time. Whether it’s goals for your business, fitness, relationships, or something else, having a goal is a great way to focus your attention.
Generally, though, you can’t just attack the goal; it needs to be broken into pieces. For example, if your goal is “lose 20 pounds in the next six months”, you can’t just go do that — you need to set times to go to the gym, purchase healthier food to have around the house, etc.
I love a quote from E.L. Doctorow about this, who says that life plans and goals:
are like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Even if you can’t see the entire picture at once, if you know where you’re going and keep pressing forward, you’ll get there.
For me, that comes down to habits. My daily routine is getting a bit longer lately, but includes goals from a variety of places of life. It includes:
- Publishing this blog every day
- Daily exercise (still with Supernatural)
- Daily devotionals / scripture reading
- Various daily work goals, including touching our task system, Pipedrive, and Nat at least once a day.
- Some degree of reading. Ideally a chunk of a book, but at least something from Blinkist.
I’m playing with adding a few more items to the list (such as Duolingo), but it’s a tricky balance. I want to work a lot of items in there, but if I overload it then it’ll fall apart.
At the end of the day, it comes down to the goals that I set for myself, and which items are efficient headlights to help me keep seeing the way forward.
Goals are all about progress over perfection. Small steps.