Most of Your Goals Should Be Small and Immediate

If you brainstormed some goals you’d like to achieve, you might come up with something like this:

• Run every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this fall
• Set up a budgeting system and stick to it
• Launch a podcast
• Learn Japanese Kanji
• Read War and Peace

Your tastes may differ, but notice that the projects that come to mind when you think about “goals” tend to be major, prolonged efforts. They usually require weeks or months of consistent performance, involving new levels of discipline, habit change, and even character change.

Also notice that most goals – yours or anyone’s — never get achieved. They usually start out with a few days of enthusiasm, then hit a snag and sort of drop out of the picture.

If you seldom achieve your goals, you stop expecting to achieve them. Goals begin to feel like those carnival games that are set up against you.

Eventually, a poor track record causes you to lose any sense of excitement or possibility around goals. You might even stop setting them altogether.

How to become someone who actually achieves goals

To regain your confidence and recover from goal-pessimism, you need to get to a place where you are succeeding at your goals more often than not. You want to establish a winning record, otherwise you’ll expect your goals not to work out.

You could try to achieve that winning record by finally “getting serious” about your goals. To do this, you just stand in front of the mirror, grit your teeth, and summon all your will and desire. Say something like:

I REALLY WILL DO IT THIS TIME! I WILL GET UP AT FIVE AM AND DO EVERYTHING WITH PERFECT DISCIPLINE FOR THREE MONTHS STRAIGHT AND I WILL FINALLY BE SAVED FROM MYSELF!

You’ve tried that though, and it works about as well as making up your own magic spells.

Resist this impulse to make every goal a heroic, self-saving effort of the sort you never achieve. Instead, you should make most of your goals small and immediate.

Most of your goals should have a finish line that’s very close to where you are now — even just a few minutes away. The prize should be right there for the grabbing, just one additional lunge beyond where you would ordinarily go.

Hit little home runs all day long

Small, immediate goals can and should be attempted often, without fanfare. You can declare them in the moment, believe in them strongly, and resolve them quickly:

• I will finish reading this page before I get a snack.
• I will refuse to check email until after breakfast today.
• I’ll work on this project for twenty more minutes even though I was going to quit for the day.
• I will clean this entire counter right now, even under the coffeemaker.

These small, immediate goals still require a push, but only a small push. They don’t require you to “turn over a new leaf” or instantly adopt a new habit.

It should feel like you’re setting up a tee-ball, cranking it into the outfield, and marking it on a scorecard.

You can load each day with these small and immediate goals, and quickly discover how much power they give you. All day long, you set a finish line just over there, and barrel through it:

• finish this math exercise completely before closing the book
• do twenty pushups, even if it takes a few sets
• move the end table to vacuum beneath it instead of going around it
• measure out all the spices in this recipe without winging it
• play these four measures of this song patiently
• close my phone laptop now without checking email again

Completing one of these, which might only take a minute, feels like a little home run. Call it, then hit it out of the park.

Bigger goals can certainly be a part of the picture too, if you have a system for doing them. But most of your goals should be small and immediate, to keep your success rate high and to keep goals exciting.

And when you do take on big, distant goals, they should be made of small and immediate goals.

When it comes to this practice, be intentional but not fussy. There are only two important things to remember about small and immediate goals:

1. Make the finish line clear. You have to know when you’ve done it.
2. Push to the finish line no matter what. All goals require pushing, fighting with the impulse to cave or delay.

The push is vital. If there’s no push there’s no growth.

If you’re not achieving goals regularly, just set closer finish lines.

Remember that the point is to make goals into a source of excitement and possibility again. Give yourself the gift of frequent, unqualified success. Become a home run machine, even if the ballpark is small.

***

Help other productivity-challenged people. Share this post.