Don’t religiously set goals
We’re all always told “Set goals! Make them quantifiable! Verifiable! Challenging! Measurable!” in order to be successful and make our dreams come true. I’ve believed that for a long time, and it surely gave me the results I wanted. Yet, it wasn’t due to the goals themselves that I was setting.
I find that in many cases what really matters is the reminder of having something to do and making that reminder become routine. Once we install in our daily life the habit of doing any specific activity it then comes easier for us to keep on working on it. In my case, I use Google Keep to have a record of all the activities I am doing and to save important events or items that I come across in my daily life such as good books to read, interesting movies, useful websites, a bucket list to do once I graduate, my grocery list… Since I adopted it my life started to get much more organized and I could divide up my time based on the various cards that I would set up.
One of my pinned cards is my list of things To Do (classic, I know). Aside from my todo, I have a list for urgent matters (call mom to ask about vaccines, finish CS 240 assignment, watch Rotten episode 2) and another one for my goals for the current term. As I am a student on co-op I divide up my year in 3 terms and treat each one independently to focus on different things each time. This organization works really well for me as it gives me a hierarchy to which I can look to assess what I should start doing next. The order goes: urgent, todo, term goals.
What I want to focus on is the goals part, as it’s what I do passively, without thinking much about it as I make it part of my routine. I divided my last term into three sections; the first one consisting of activities I would carry on for the whole term, the second regarding things I would contribute to multiple times a week, and the third, and final, dealing with daily exercises. As you can see I don’t have some of the key factors that make a “good goal”, such as being measurable and quantifiable.
The reason why I didn’t choose to add those details is because I consider them to be restrictions. The Winter term was for me a co-op term, hence I wanted to relax and not be so strict (as is more the school term). For that reason I decided to have goals that I could be flexible with, but that would still allow me to internally keep track of my progress. More than finishing something, call it result-oriented, my goals allowed me to do work that would eventually get me to my desired result, work-oriented. This is the most important difference that I find with the goals we’re all told to set, and the goals I’ve been following recently.
Work-oriented goals are better because of several factors. They allow to focus on progressing towards getting something done, rather than thinking about the final result; they don’t leave a sense of failure in case of not finishing the task at hand; they allow to go over a predetermined amount in case there is more time at disposal; they are more flexible and are used as a reminder to engage in an activity.
In my case, this past Winter I worked on all my goals, and I was able to get a lot done with my free time towards accomplishing them. I meditated and read almost every night (some nights I would be at hackathons or with some friends, hence the different context wouldn’t allow me to), making it part of my routine. I did many coding challenges for the first two months, after which I felt ready enough in regards to what I wanted to learn for that term. I improved my piano and guitar skills and, even though I didn’t practice for the whole term, I got to play the instruments and gain very valuable skills. Working on my projects came a bit more as a challenge as they took a lot of time and I wasn’t able to finish them. That given, I put in many hours of my time towards them which taught me quite a bit the frameworks I was using and some of the theory and math behind the algorithms (mainly for the Machine Learning).
Work-oriented goals gave me the right setup to feel good about what I was working towards without feeling the pressure of having to accomplish something. I still knew that I was making progress and that alone was motivation for me to keep going. Measurable goals are still a very effective type of attitude to set towards some specific occasions; in my case they didn’t work so well, so I decided to change things up a little. This is to say that you don’t need to feel bad or disappointed if you don’t get something done, just remove the due date and keep working hard. You will get the results you deserve.
