In 1979, Harvard did a study on goal-setting. Surveying the graduating MBA students, the researchers determined that 84% had not set goals, 13% had set goals but with no action plans and 3% had set both goals and action plans. Ten years later, the researchers discovered that the 13% who had set goals were making twice as much as the 84% who hadn't and the 3% with both goals and plans were making 10 times more than those who hadn't set goals.
Rather than taking 30 seconds to declare your resolve to commit to joining the gym, meditating, no sweets, etc., I'm inviting you to spend just under four hours clarifying what's most important to you, then putting an actionable plan behind it with accountability structures. Rather than having one resolution with an 80% failure rate, you'll have five goals with an 80% success rate.
If you're willing to invest just under four hours, keep reading, and I'll show you how this process has helped me and hundreds of others I work with define what's most important and achieve it.
Step 1: Set The Stage
Block off at least four hours and go to a place you won't be disturbed (this is important), such as a coffee shop, the library or your home office.
Step 2: Reflect (30-Minute Journaling)
Just as many companies and teams do post mortems or After Action Reviews (AARs) on projects, it's valuable to do the same on your life. If you set goals last year, how did you do? If not, what went well? What enabled those things to go well? What could have been better? Why did they not go as you had hoped? What would you have done differently? What learning can you extract and apply to next year?
Step 3: Where Are You Now? (30-Minute Journaling)
Before jumping into identifying goals, it's important to clarify the questions that are present in your life. These could be questions like, "How do I expand the reach of my voice?" "How do I maintain my earning level while freeing up more time?" "How can I become a better dad?" "What's present in my life that is draining my energy?"
The intention here is to create space for the subconscious to come to the surface. There is wisdom that will only present itself when we make space for it.
Step 4: Build Your Three-Year Vision (90 Minutes)
This life-design activity is intended to help you clarify what your ideal future looks like with enough clarity for you to build a plan behind it. So the first step in building your annual goals is to paint a picture of your life in three years.
To do that, first consider all the realms of your life that are important. Rather than designing your life like you're balancing work on one side of a scale and life on the other, I encourage the portfolio approach, where you recognize there are multiple areas that contribute to happiness.
I like the approach by Stanford professors Dave Evans and Bill Burnett, who came up with the four areas of love (relationships), play (just for fun), work (vocation) and health (physical, spiritual, emotional well-being). Spend 10 minutes in each of the quadrants answering the question, "What are potential three-year goals for this bucket?" A bulleted list of three to five will suffice.
Once you have a list of three to five in each of the buckets, distill your entire list of 12-20 down to three to five in total. Essentially, you're asking yourself, "What are the three to five most important things I want to accomplish over the next three years?" The most common reason people (and companies) fail to hit their goals is because they have too many and they lack focus. Less is more here. As writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is credited with saying, "Murder your darlings."
Step 5: Make Your Goals SMART (10 minutes)
Make each of your three to five goals specific, measurable, attainable (80% likelihood of success), relevant and time-bound. Having clarity on these parameters helps detail what success looks like and, therefore, makes it easier to create a plan to achieve it. For example, rather than having a three-year goal to "launch my career as a writer," it's more effective to say, "sell my first book on Amazon."
Step 6: Build The Strategy (45 minutes)
I call this the 3-12-3 plan. You now have your three-year vision. From that, build your 12-month goals and your three-month strategy, all following the SMART framework.
Start with each of your three-year vision goals and back into the 12-month goal. If "sell my first book on Amazon" is the three-year vision, perhaps "have a completed outline built with a research bibliography" is your 12-month goal, and your three-month action plan is to "build and share my outline with three trusted advisors for feedback." Create your 12- and 3-month goals for each of your three to five three-year goals.
Step 7: Accountability
Now that you have your three-year vision, your 12-month goals and your quarterly action plan built, it's important to build in accountability to gain consistent traction. Ask a friend, spouse, coach or peer group to check in with you on your progress either weekly or monthly. Create SMART goals every quarter to keep you on track to hit your annual goals.
If you follow this process, you'll have an intentional vision and a solid plan to achieve it. It's simple, but it's not easy. It requires consistency and discipline. Keep your head down and come up for air every quarter and set new quarterly action items. This time next year, reflect on how the year went (my guess is it will be your most productive one yet) and repeat the process for 2021.
