“You need to have a goal.”
That’s what I hear from ‘experts’ all the time. Without a goal, you’re listless and will not accomplish what you want in life.
Ah, there’s the rub. What do we want in life? If we knew that, perhaps a goal might help — or maybe it would just be self-evident because we knew what we wanted.
Whether it’s planning your career, your finances, or your your weekend, the idea of having a goal or goals is something that seems too seductive to resist taking up, yet it ultimately presents a rather unappealing reality. What is the goal of my life?
I don’t have a goal for my life, my relationships, my career or for most of my days, which has made planning ‘systems’ rather useless, despite my continued attempts to use them. This resistance to goals has manifested in some major challenges in my life. For example, I’ve resisted overtures to do financial planning on the basis that it is entirely goal-driven. I actually have little concept about what life is going to be like when I retire, if I retire. I know I need financing to support life beyond my most productive years, but for what purposes beyond the basics eludes me. This may be something I come to regret, but the absence of a plan hasn’t prevented me from saving or investing, it’s just not given me anything.
Goal attempts
Like many people, I’ve thought about creating some type of support system for goal-development and realization. This idea of a system is closer to what the research says we need to do and James Clear has a great post on this distinction for those who are interested. Recently, I tried the Self Journal system that’s become quite popular. This system (really, a journal with an injection of aspirations into it) is the brainchild of a couple of ‘high achievers’ who sought to create some form of motivational / focus tool that would actually work through their initiative called Best Self.
The system is working OK. What I struggle with is the goals part. Each day it asks me to set out the goal for the day. Too often I either leave it blank or write something I feel half-hearted about. One might suggest that I write a SMART goal, but as I’ve argued elsewhere that’s not really good for complex, dynamic situations and my life is certainly one of those things. What I need is a real system and the Self Journal is partly that, albeit an incomplete system.
What does work nicely is the sections for gratitude in the morning and evening. The pages ask you to list three things you’re grateful for at the start and at the end of the day. Gratitude, however inconsistently defined, has been shown to be related to positive wellbeing (PDF). Is wellbeing connected to goals? To productivity? Is that the right question?
What is my goal for goals?
The bigger question is why I bother to continue on with goals at all. My PhD is on the science of human behaviour change and goals were a part of many of the key theories and models on behaviour change, yet most of the research on behaviour change was done in healthcare settings with goals defined by a problem with a discernible cause: smoking, excess weight, drug or alcohol use, lack of energy etc. These have clear, near dichotomous outcomes: either you [ ] or you don’t. If cigarette use is a direct, clear cause of a problem and you do not wish to continue with using it, then quitting it as a goal is a pretty decent idea.
But if you want to be well? What does that mean? For me, I’ve self-defined my personal wellness when I was single and when in a committed loving relationship, when 20 pounds heavier than I am now and now, when I was in harder times financially and when I was doing well. Yes, there are clear correlations between the extent of certain things and others, but it’s not a straight line.
I don’t have goals for wellness aside from ‘being well’. This doesn’t work with SMART goals at all. It’s non-specific, not measurable, uncertainly achievable, realistic (I guess), and time-bound only in that I want it NOW and not later.
From goals to getting things done
My answer is: give up on goals unless they help you accomplish what you want.
Spend time thinking about what you want and work towards living a life — creating a system — that is designed to amplify more of the things that you like and enjoy and less of the things you don’t. Attend to your thoughts and feelings and record what you do somehow to help reflect on it and codify it into your memory (like through a journal). This learning, coupled with a genuine intent to do something should probably help get you moving in a direction that achieves something you look back on and feel good about having done.
That’s a goal, I think.