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Do you constantly grapple to get control over your time management and goals? Tell me if this sounds familiar: You start your day with a to do list, stay busy all day, and somehow by evening only a portion of it was done. Or you start your year with a list of goals or resolutions only to reevaluate months later and realize you’ve only made minor progress toward any of them.
If so, you probably mentally berate yourself for your lack of organization, laziness, or any number of other shortcomings.
Well, here I’m going to share the secret to managing your time and accomplishing all your goals. You are not lazy or bad at managing your time. If you’re struggling with time management and goals, you are trying to do too much. It’s really that simple. But, since most people will balk at that (myself included, at first), I’ll break it down below.
My Struggles With Time Management and Goals
I’m naturally interested in self-improvement (as you may have guessed about the writer of a self-improvement blog). And I love making goals. I do it every year. For most years of my adult life, I would end up with around 20 total goals for the year. These were pretty diverse: find a new job, learn a language, improve my yoga practice, read more books, lose weight, become a minimalist, travel. And I followed up monthly to check on my progress on these goals. Most months I could point to various things I had done support many of the goals. Maybe I sold some old clothes, studied French a few hours, and went to some yoga classes. And yet at the end of the year, I couldn’t point to any real results of all that activity. I had made progress on each goal but not exactly leaps and bounds.
I reasoned that by taking small steps towards all my goals, I was gradually moving in the direction I wanted to go in life. In a way, that was true. The problem was that I was moving in that direction at an absolutely glacial pace. By “focusing” on 20 different things, I was succeeding at nothing.
Now, I’m the kind of nerd who writes down self-improvement goals. But even if you don’t write down goals or check in on them regularly, you have a mental list of priorities. And there’s a good chance you were doing the same thing I was.
The Game-Changer: Essentialism
Reading Greg McKeown’s Essentialism was enough of a turning point for me that I included “essentialism” in the name of my site. If you haven’t read it, you absolutely should. It argues that we need to focus on the very few things that actually matter. And here’s the hard part: that means abandoning the rest.
“Priority” used to be in the singular only. “It meant the very first or prior thing.” Fairly recently the word “priorities” was created. “Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would not be able to have multiple “first” things.
-Greg McKeown
You probably see the “priorities” language at work if you’re in a corporate environment. I saw it often in my international development career. An agency would issue a grant focused on, say, providing nutritious food to primary school children in a certain region. But when you read the details, you’d see other intended outcomes were professional development for primary teachers, improved literacy test results, and promotion of hygiene practices to combat communicable diseases. In their defense, how can you choose which is more important- nutrition, literacy, or disease control? It’s not that some are unimportant. It’s that the agency needed to decide on one thing they wanted this money to improve. By making everything a priority, they spread resources too thin and confused people about what they were working toward. Ironically, by including too many priorities, they set all the objectives up for, if not failure, at least diminished success.
If you look at my story above, I was doing the same thing in my personal life – my “priorities” were in the double digits. As shown in the image above, all my energy was going out in little spurts in many directions and fizzling out.
Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done.
-Greg McKeown
The secret to accomplishing goals, then, is to have fewer goals. To choose those goals carefully and then fully commit to them.
Four Thousand Weeks: A New Perspective on Time Management
The subtitle of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks is “Time Management for Mortals.” It’s a book about time management tips, but not in the way you’d expect. The title is a reference to the average human lifespan. The point of this morbid reference is to make it clear to the reader that we do not have infinite time. And that means we need to be selective about what we spend our time on.
The book is about much more than that, and it’s beautifully written, so I definitely recommend that you check it out. But for our purposes here, I want to highlight Burkeman’s promotion of a “limit-embracing attitude” toward time:
In practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do – and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default – or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all.
-Oliver Burkeman
Like McKeown does in Essentialism, Burkeman gives us what he calls an “icy blast of reality” – the truth that we have to choose very few things to spend our time on. The reason I jotted down 20 goals every January was that I wanted to believe I could do all of them. The truth that I can’t, once it hit me, should have been harsh. But just like letting go of material things counterintuitively makes you feel better, this truth was actually such a relief. It meant I could relax my efforts on my dozens of “priorities” and instead choose one or two things to make real progress on.
How to Stop Struggling With Time Management and Goals
To sum up what these books taught me about time management and goals: When you approach setting goals, you need to figure out what would actually move the needle when it comes to life satisfaction. Having two dozen goals for the year is only going to distract you. What are one or two things that would really change your life? Make those your goals.
For example, if your job is making you miserable, goals like learning a language or reading a certain number of books may give you a feeling of accomplishment. But you won’t actually be solving the major problem in your life. In fact, you may be distracting yourself from it and preventing yourself from making a change that would matter.
Or let’s say you’re in a relationship slump and you’re in constant conflict with your partner. Taking up jogging every morning will improve your cardiovascular health for sure, but you’re still going to be in an unhappy marriage. Improving the marriage would be a goal in and of itself, and it would take an investment of time and energy. Time and energy that you maybe shouldn’t funnel into jogging just now.
How to Put All This into Action
So, how do we put those lessons into action when it comes to time management and goals? There are two ways to go about it:
Method #1 – Start from Scratch
First, write down what you think is decreasing your life satisfaction. Are you tired all the time? In a bad relationship? Are you single and you think you’d be happier in a relationship? Or lonely and don’t feel that you have a community? Do you need more money to eliminate financial stress?
Narrow it down to around 3 things that would truly change your life if you found solutions. Then, think about solutions. What goals could you set to turn things around in those areas specifically?
Choose one goal to target first. It may seem that you could easily eat healthier foods at the same time as you start joining groups and finding people who share your hobbies, but the truth is both take energy. Changing your habits is incredibly hard. Don’t spread yourself thin and fail at both.
This has been the absolute hardest lesson for me to incorporate, as much as I understand it intellectually. One thing that helped was going back to my goals for the year and measuring the progress and realizing, although there was some, it didn’t create lasting change. Getting objective about how much I didn’t accomplish made me feel a little bad, but it also helped me understand that I needed to do things differently.
Method #2 – Narrow Down Existing Goals
If you’re starting from a list of goals you already have, a good method to evaluate them and decide the very few to keep is to read each one out and then ask yourself, “If I achieve this goal, how will my life change?”
An example that many people can probably relate to is a goal to lose a certain amount of weight. You can ask yourself, “Assume that I do successfully lose 15 pounds. How will my life be different?” The answer is very likely to be, “Not at all.” And that gives you all the information you need about whether or not you should be pursuing that goal.
When I did this, I realized that very few of my goals would have a real impact on my life if I achieved them, and that the ones that would were buried among the “junk” goals. For example, I liked doing yoga and was interested in learning more advanced poses. Now, how would my life change once I perfected scorpion pose? Well…it wouldn’t. I had no aspirations to be a yoga instructor, and going from a low intermediate skill level to an advanced one would not make any difference at all to my quality of life. By contrast, I really hated my job, on which I spent the majority of my waking hours. Figuring out another job or income source should have been my top priority all along – way above learning scorpion pose.
Even if you’ve never written down your goals explicitly, try it as an exercise. What are the things you spend your time on? You may be surprised to see that it’s quite a few. Narrow those down in order to make real progress on just a few.
An Exercise to Get You Started
That was a lot of explanation, but both Essentialism and Four Thousand Weeks present viewpoints that really require us to flip our perspectives.
If these authors – and myself- convinced you that the key to achieving goals and managing your time is to have fewer goals, here’s an exercise to get you started:
- Step 1: Write down everything you consider to be a life goal you’re working on
- Step 2: For each goal, ask yourself how achieving the goal would change your life
- Step 3: Narrow the list to only those three goals that would make the biggest impact on your life
- Step 4: Choose one to focus on for a certain timeframe (say, the next 3-6 months)
- Step 5: Map out what steps you can take to support that goal.
- Step 6: Think about what other activities you’ll need to sacrifice to make time for the steps you just outlined. Cut them out as necessary.
What Do You Think?
How do you usually approach time management and goals? How many goals do you typically try to tackle at the same time? If you tried this exercise, what did you decide to focus on and what did you decide to sacrifice?
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