goals

All of us have tasks we want to complete and goals that we want to reach that involve some tough times and hard work to achieve.

Whether you want to get a degree, start a business, make it big in a sport, or learn a new skill; trying to brute force your own will power into training/practicing each day is not easy. And brute forcing certainly isn’t the only, or even the best way to accomplish what you need to.

One thing I have found very effective, as have others I know, is to commit yourself to achieving your goal before you think you are prepared to do it. A concrete example is helpful:

This summer, I decided that I wanted to complete a marathon. For a few months, I did sporadic training runs of 3-5 miles, but never really pushed myself to improve. After all, I could train as long as I needed to. When I was ready, I would sign up for a race. Under this mindset, it was not very troubling to push off a run, or to quit early while on the treadmill. I could just put another day’s effort in.

I realized this was getting me nowhere fast, and changed strategies. While the training required for a marathon is grueling, difficult, and hard to motivate oneself to do, signing up for a race online is comparatively painless. So I did. This did several things:

• Put a finite time limit on my training; I signed up (in late August) for a race in late November. Twelve weeks. This makes every run seem more important, a subconscious (or conscious) clock in the back of my mind.
• I sunk some costs into it. Registration fees for the race cost me $92.00. This is money I would lose if I decided to quit.
• It made my goal public. I now was telling people that I would be running the Northern Central Trail Marathon in Maryland on November 28th. People know exactly when I’m supposed to run that race, and will expect me to finish.

I know that many personal development websites and gurus out there champion the belief that intrinsic motivation is much more important than extrinsic motivation, I find this incomplete.

If you don’t have intrinsic motivation for a goal, it will take a large amount of extrinsic motivation to get you to reach it. However, intrinsic motivation itself is not always (ever) enough either. Using, even constructing (as I did here) extrinsic motivation can be vital to getting through difficulties in reaching your goals.

I know my training has significantly improved since the clock started ticking (up to a half-marathon now). Since I’ve just told all of you about it, I’ve got even more motivation to finish!

This post, and this whole new exciting side to 3stylelife has been a year and a half in the making.

In May 2008, I opened my first website (fashionablemathematician). The point was to start talking online about two things; fashion and mathematics. Looking back, I was deluding myself; diluting my ambitions by tacking mathematics on to that. I was afraid of what people would think if I started a fashion website; if a legitimate goal of mine was to design and sell clothes. So I hedged my bets.

In August 2008, I opened this site, with a slightly greater focus on fashion (the site has since gone essentially all personal thoughts and fashion since then, as evidenced by the two categories of posts). And yet again; designing and selling clothes wasn’t an appropriate goal for me. I was too academic for that. Thus, I spun my wheels some more; doing interesting, but not dreamworthy, work looking at fashion philosophy and science (stuff that won’t drop from my repertoire). Once again, I shaped my dreams to what I thought other people would find acceptable. I shaped my dreams to what was appropriate. This is doomed to failure.

Thus, after many false starts, many lies to myself, and much procrastination; it’s quite a glorious thing to be here; on the cusp of releasing my first shirt.

Finally, I dropped the shields and decided to just start walking.

People underestimate just how hard it is to take that first step towards your aspirations, dreams, or goals. In my case; it took almost 2 years. School, life, work, strangers, even family and friends may seem to stand in your way. Even when you recognize that it’s happening, it can debilitate you. (Note that the linked post was written 11 months ago).

I don’t know exactly what got me over the wall, what got me started. Perhaps it was some dissatisfaction with my current existence, perhaps it was an internal clock beginning to tick. All I know is that it feels right.

To everyone reading; if you haven’t really, truly, begun to pursue your most basic dreams: start walking. If you have begun: keep walking.

My first shirt design (available here!) was born from this message. I hope that it will help someone out there take that first step. Future designs probably won’t be as dramatic, but it felt important to start with this.

Finally, I know with certainty that having a friend in the same position has helped immensely. If it helps; tell me what your first steps are going to be. Tell me what your dream is. We can all get where we want to go, if we help each other take the first step.

-Barry

The productivity blog world is chock full of methods and ideas designed to increase one’s efficiency and one’s ability to “get things done.” I’d like to give my personal account of the topic, detailing the process I use, and what goals it’s built to achieve.

My main question in determining a work/goal system was: what level of planning is the most effective for success? Overplanning, underplanning, and ineffective planning can lead to a number of bad habits that we want to avoid:

1. We want to avoid missed opportunities caused by an overly rigid schedule.
2. We don’t want to encourage procrastination or produce deadline pressure.
3. We don’t want to set expectations too low and pass up achievable goals.
4. We don’t want to allot too much time for tasks; Parkinson’s Law states that the tasks will fill up the time given to them.

My Method

My system for planning goals and activities essentially has three levels, for high level tasks, low level tasks, and daily activities.

On my desktop I keep a text file called “weekly domination” (the name is for motivation only). Each week, I draft a list of my goals for the week. This list is meant to be extremely ambitious, approaching the limit of what I could reasonably achieve during the week (I’ve found that pushing oneself in this way is the best way to increase one’s natural productivity). These tasks are high level goals; for example, “write and edit three commissioned articles” or “complete chapter 3 of thesis.” Planning tasks in more detail is often a lost cause when projecting up to 7 days in advance.

To deal with lower level tasks, such as completing a particular math proof, or researching a fashion topic, I have a whiteboard on which I write things I must do over the next day, or two days. By batching tasks (again aggressively) that are related, I maintain maximal mental focus and effectiveness. I also use this whiteboard to capture any administrative tasks (needing to do laundry, go to the bank, etc.) and complete them before the end of the batching period. This makes sure I’m taking time to complete such tasks at a consistent rate.

Finally, beyond this, I make no explicit plans day-to-day, or hour to hour. Leaving flexibility in the schedule allows me to take advantage of unexpected opportunities. Further, we have an ability to read our bodies and minds; we know when we’re unmotivated to perform certain activities, but hyperplanners often ignore these feelings, leading to sad times. By remaining flexible, we can let ourselves recharge appropriately when necessary.

Takeaway

My system certainly is not for everyone. Each of us has different tendencies and preferences, but I think most of us have similar goals with respect to productivity, outlined above. The task is then to calibrate and experiment with our working habits to construct a system which best achieves these goals. Keep modifying the system to determine if things can be made even more effective. I’ve found quantum leaps in productivity from simple ideas found on other blogs or from serendipitous moments of thought. They’re worth the effort.