Actually Achieving Your Goals

If you're trying to achieve goals, you need a purpose more than a system. Without a clear reason for doing any activity, you'll constantly be distracted – and hate yourself. Now that we’re a couple of months into the year, let’s look at how we’re doing regarding those goals. Remember them? The ones you set up in early January amid a fever of planning and swearing to “do better” this year.

By Tony Wanless / February 22, 2012

If you’re trying to achieve goals, you need a purpose more than a system. Without a clear reason for doing any activity, you’ll constantly be distracted – and hate yourself.

Now that we’re a couple of months into the year, let’s look at how we’re doing regarding those goals. Remember them? The ones you set up in early January amid a fever of planning and swearing to “do better” this year.

For most of us, some of those goals have probably fallen by the wayside. Unless we’re superhuman, we all ignore some goals – often because we haven’t prioritized them, or we set too many and couldn’t possibly pursue them all.

There are remedies out there for this problem – systems that will help you keep your nose to the grindstone and achieve.

Vancouver’s own Backpocket COO, Cameron Herold, has one he describes in a recent post about time management. Herold suggests that time management is really goal management, and so prioritizing your goals is the way to achieving them and managing your time as well.

As Herold points out, it’s hard to stick to a plan; we’re all human and so have a tendency to avoid important stuff in favour of easier, low-priority activities.

But as a reader of Herold’s plan pointed out, this system appears to oppose another system put forward by Leo Babauta, a speaker and popular blogger at zenhabits.net. Babauta’s solution to the goal-keeping problem is to have no goals at all.

Admitting to once being a rabid goal-setter and prioritizer, Babauta learned something that most of us have divined but shook off: it’s almost impossible to achieve all goals easily because they often involve action steps that you don’t like, and so ignore. Then you beat yourself up for lacking discipline and start the whole process over again. Result: self-loathing and a very halting procedure to achieving your goals.

Instead, he says, having no goals is much more liberating and, despite the common thinking, doesn’t mean you stop achieving things. It simply means you stop letting yourself be limited by goals.

I know, it sounds pretty touchy-feely and odd. But I think he is on to something, as was Cameron Herold in a way.

I think both of them speak to “purpose.” Without a purpose (your own, not someone else’s), trying to achieve a goal is going through the motions – usually reluctantly.

So maybe the solution isn’t to create elaborate goal systems, or their opposing goal-free systems, but to establish a reason for doing things instead.

When you think about it, we often do things because we think we’re supposed to do them, and for no other reason.

But if there is a clearly written purpose for what you’re doing and you’re always aware of it, you may be much more inclined to cling to the path instead of being distracted by baubles and various other bright, shiny objects.