Setting Targets to Maintain Motivation

For years, I’ve struggled to maintain motivation and reach definitive endpoints for my projects and pastimes. One of the most demoralizing factors was that I could never tell whether or not an hour or two of work was getting me any closer to where I wanted to be. I couldn’t tell if I was making progress. 

This year, I’m playing with setting targets at four time scales: daily tasks, weekly milestones, (roughly) bi-monthly projects, and yearly goals. I expect that targets will help me feel like I’m getting somewhere with my work and warn me if I’m off track. 

My daily tasks are simple, small, and concrete. For example, my daily task for writing could be to write a draft of an essay. These tasks will move me one step forward in my projects. Daily tasks help maintain a sense of momentum by giving me something to focus on and a sense of accomplishment for the day. Consistently finishing daily tasks lets me accumulate a series of wins.

Weekly milestones bridge the gap between daily tasks and bi-monthly projects. If I were working on a book, I might set a weekly goal of drafting a chapter: a chapter is small enough to write in a week, and if I finish enough chapters, eventually I have a book. 

I look at my weekly milestones on a daily basis and will either feel satisfied that I am making good progress or notice that I’m not going to get there. If I am at risk of missing my target, I can either decide to dump in more effort or figure out a different path to my milestone. But in either case, the weekly milestone helps me feel like my daily goals are going somewhere.

In addition to daily check-ins, I also do a weekly review of milestones and check alignment with my project. If I keep hitting the weekly milestones, will I complete the project as expected? Or did I learn something that makes me reconsider my path? Reviewing what I did in a week also feeds a larger sense of accomplishment. I’m not just doing a bunch of disconnected tasks; my work is adding up. 

Bi-monthly projects are focused around a specific artifact or skill – I want to work towards something I could show off at a party or in an interview. “Bi-monthly” is a bit of a misnomer – my projects are sized somewhere between 4 and 12 weeks. Bi-monthly projects maintain a sense of momentum by giving you something big enough to be impressive, but small enough that you can see the horizon getting closer every day. Contrast this to yearly goals, where making a good day’s progress barely moves the needle. National Novel Writing Month is a great example of a project where you can feel the deadline rushing up to meet you. 

Yearly goals are a north star. A good year-sized goal should be concrete and easy to visualize – what will be different in your life when you accomplish the goal? Coming up with a concrete yearly goal also makes it possible to check whether the goal will do what you expect it to do: once you have a concrete goal, you can talk to other people who have accomplished the goal and find out whether it changed their lives in the way you expect it will change yours. 

Another good criteria for a year-sized goal is for it to be something that you want right now, but is unrealistic to change immediately. For example, publishing a book is something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid, but no matter how much I want it, I will not be able to do it overnight. Publishing a book will require a lot of writing, reviewing, editing, and rejection, and that takes time.

Year-sized goals help maintain momentum by creating a meaningful context for daily work. Every time I work on my big goals, I know I am investing in my deepest values. I imagine it’s a little like raising kids (having never raised kids myself).

How to set targets is a topic that deserves its own essay, but I’ll briefly cover my favorite method. I like to set targets by working backwards, starting from the largest time scale and working down to the smallest. I will get from a larger time scale to the next smallest one by asking what needs to be done in order to make my larger target a reality. The steps and milestones that I come up with turn into my targets for the smaller time scale. 

The biggest consideration when setting targets is to not have too many. I have one goal this year (find a job that aligns with my values) and a couple themes to inspire projects. When I tried to have more than that, they ended up getting in each other’s way and I didn’t work on anything enough to make progress. I have also found it helpful to have a priority ranking among targets of similar sizes. 

A corollary is that the smaller the target is, the more you can manage. I have projects that don’t support my big year goal and daily and weekly targets that are experimental and exploratory. I love the variety I can get by pursuing different projects each month or two, while still feeling some connection between projects by arranging them into themes.

What surprised me about paring down to one big goal is that I don’t think I need more. If I can significantly improve the most important part of my life, I expect I will be thrilled at the end of the year.

Thanks to Early Readers: Erin Rosenfeld

References:

Bi-monthly project scale pulled from Swarmwise by Rick Ralkvinge, kindle location 1194, “Draw the Timeline for All to See”