This article is the last in a series I’ve been writing about goal setting. You can find the previous articles here, here, here, here, and here.*

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As I write this, it’s been nearly 7 years since I quit my job to begin working for myself.

In the early days, I felt as if my task list was never-ending. There was always one more thing to do.

The norm for me was to finish the day with a sense of dissatisfaction. As I would wrap things up, I felt as if I didn’t really get anything done because there was still so much to do.

The problem was that I was looking toward what was still to be done rather than looking back at what had been accomplished. If you are defining success by what is still left to do, you will never win. Because there is always something more to do.

My approach has changed over the years, and it has given me two huge advantages…

For one, I am clear on each day’s tasks — knowing the few most important things I need or want to get done — and I am able to focus on them.

Secondly, I now end the day feeling accomplished and satisfied. Thanks, primarily, to the fact that I have a clear definition of what a successful day looks like (because I am defining success ahead of time).

Lastly, I have also begun to simply recognize and acknowledge the work I do each day. This has been so great at helping me maintain motivation day to day. Because, sometimes, let’s be honest, the work is work and it’s not fun.

In short, it looks like this:

1. Plan

My productive day actually starts the evening before. At the end of my work day, I take a few minutes to prepare for the next day. This is when I choose ahead of time what my most important tasks will be, and how I will “define success” for the upcoming day.

Some folks do this in the morning, but I prefer to have it done the night before.

This is helpful because you’re making a decision and a plan apart from urgency and emotion. By making the choice ahead of time, you can think clearly. You’re not yet emotionally invested in tomorrow, nor are you feeling the urgency of any of tomorrow’s pressing matters. With a clear head you can make a good choice about tomorrow’s most important tasks as they relate to your goal(s).

2. Act

Planning is actually quite easy. It does require a little bit of effort, so don’t be lazy about it. The hard part is — as always — in the doing.

And that is why the first step of planning is so powerful. It helps you to overcome the paralyzing state of indecisiveness.

One of the most common challenges when it comes to focus is people feeling paralyzed from indecisiveness. They finally make some time to work on something important, but when they sit down there are so many thing they want to work on that they don’t know where to start. They spend all their creative energy deciding what to do that they don’t have any willpower left to actually do the work.

If you are waiting until it’s time to begin work before you make a choice about what to work on, the choice is much harder. Instead, make the choice for yourself ahead of time.

As I mentioned at the start, so often I used to end my day with a feeling that it was a waste. I would get caught up in the many urgent and pressing issues of the day. Things didn’t go as well as I’d hoped they would. I’d try to make progress on a meaningful task but just kept hitting a wall. And then I’d see all the things that still needed to be done.

Some days, that can just be the way life is. I definitely have days where everything seems to be against me. But those are exceptions, not the rule.

When wasted, unproductive days feel like the norm — you need to bust out of that routine.

3. Acknowledge

Recognizing and celebrating your progress is critical. When you accomplish a goal, or make meaningful progress, take a moment to acknowledge it.

For the little things, it can be as simple as checking off a box. Perhaps you can write about your wins in a notebook or journal app.

When you see that you are making progress — even small victories — then it strengthens your emotional and motivated state. You are happier and more motivated at work. And therefore, we are more likely to be productive and creative.

This is one reason why having regular times of review can be so beneficial. It reminds us of the tasks and goals accomplished and the projects we’ve completed. It keeps things in perspective, reminding us that the oftentimes seemingly-mundane and difficult work we do every day is actually adding up to something of value.

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A New Plumb-Line for Meaningful Work

By identifying one task or outcome you’d like to see happen each day then you have a quantifiable way to measure if you’re making progress on your important activities and doing the work that matters to you. This is so much more beneficial than the subjective and arbitrary metrics we are used to holding ourselves to.

And when you do accomplish those tasks, awesome! No matter what else happened, at least you made progress on something that mattered. And if you don’t accomplish that task, don’t freak out — you have a chance to learn and improve so that next time you’ll be able to do better.

Lastly, take a moment to acknowledge what you got done. Pat yourself on the back, at least for a moment, before you move on to the next thing.

Pre-S: Plan Your Year is now available. Check it out here.

Pre-S #2: This article is the next in a series I’ve been writing about goal setting. You can find the past articles here, here, here, and here.

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Here we are. It’s 2018.

Suppose this year you’d like to eat more apples and less potato chips.

Regardless of what your goal is, there is an awesome little trick that can help you with these small micro-habits that you do every day.

When it comes to the apples and potato chips, it’s as simple as buying some apples and setting them on your kitchen counter. And then — you guessed it — don’t buy any potato chips. Boom.

By making apples easily available, you have lowered the energy required to eat an apple. It’s right there. Sitting on your counter, ready to go. And those pesky potato chips are nowhere to be found. They’re at least a trip to the store away.

This trick goes for anything…

• Lower the activation energy required for writing by having your writing topic ready to go ahead of time.
• Lower the activation energy for going to the gym by setting out your workout clothes ahead of time.
• Lower the activation energy for reading book by keeping one on your coffee table (or use the Kindle app on your phone).

And the converse (for things you want to do less of)…

• Raise the activation energy for checking social media by deleting the apps off your phone.
• Raise the activation energy for watching TV by keeping the remotes in a bedroom on the opposite side of your house.
• Raise the activation energy for checking your phone while you drive by turning on Do Not Disturb While Driving

If your books are hiding next to the lamp on your bedroom nightstand, no wonder it’s easier to just pull out your phone and check Facebook when you have a few minutes of down time.

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This stuff applies to more than just healthy micro habits, by the way.

If you want to get advanced, think of ways to lower the activation energy for doing the next step on your current project.

In his book, Getting Things Done, David Allen says that you cannot do a project, you can only do the next step. There is a lot of wisdom and maturity required to take a bigger project or outcome and boil it down to one step at a time.

And by picking that one action ahead of time, you’ve already lowered the activation energy required to doing it. When you put a desired behavior onto a path of less resistance, it will take less energy to accomplish it.

Take it one step further by getting into the habit of doing something now that will make your next step easier to begin. And then repeat in perpetuity.

Shawn Achor writes in his book, The Happiness Advantage, that “the more we can lower or eliminate the activation energy for our desired actions, the more we enhance our ability to jump-start positive change.”

As always, thanks for reading. Next week we’ll talk about how to define meaningful progress (and recognize that progress) so you stay motivated as you work toward your goals.

It’s the New Year and it’s exciting. Something my wife and I were talking about over the weekend was the desire to focus on just a few things that truly matter.

I’m 36, and over the years my tendency has usually been to bite off way more than I can chew. I want to do all the things!

Lists certainly help me to focus. So I write it all down. Everything that seems important or exciting or necessary goes onto the page.

Once its out of my head and onto some paper, it’s quite a bit easier to edit and focus and make choices about what I actually have time and energy for.

I think it was David Allen who said you can do anything you want, but you can’t do everything you want. It’s ironic how an attempt to do everything will actually keep you from doing anything.

Instead of focusing on everything, focus on one or two things that matter most. It’s amazing how liberating that can be to your own quality of life as well as your ability to get things done.

As I mentioned last week, I’m going to be taking the next few Fridays to talk about how to make progress on your goals.

And, next Thursday, December 28, I have a new, Plan Your Year workbook coming out.

That said, let’s dive in…

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When it comes to goals, there are two camps:

Camp #1: You MUST have a goal.

These folks say that if you don’t have a goal, it’s like having a bullet with no gunpowder — you’re shooting blanks and so you’ll never hit your target.

These goal-setting aficionados are very intense about having very specific, detailed goals and keeping short accounts. You practically need an abacus to live over here because they expect such a huge level of detail and organization.

Camp #2: Goals are for losers who don’t “get it”.

These folks are very non-goal centric. They say that it’s best to live in the moment — to live each day the best you can.

To these folks, progress is found in your commitment to excellence: You should be 100% present in the moment, rather than focusing on the future, because who knows what the future may hold.

Camp 3: Just Right

I have lived in both of the above camps — for years in each actually — and there is wisdom in both sides.

Which is why I prefer to live in the middle, with aspects of both coming together. When you bring them together then you get both the quantitative and the qualitative aspects of life.

Meaning…

• You have the advantages of a target to aim for and a direction to head.
• And you also get the advantages of taking joy in the journey and finding contentment in your day-to-day habits and systems.

And thus, when you combine these two, the result is a goal to move toward and a daily system to actually get you there.

A goal without a system is just a dream. Something you’d love to see happen but which you’re not taking any meaningful action toward.

And a system without a goal is just a rote discipline that’s not taking you anywhere in particular.

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Why goals Are Valuable

Goals give you a direction and help you make decisions.

When you can get clear about your goals, you can get clear about the action you need to take.

A little bit of decisiveness goes a long way. By making a decision, you will get a spark of motivation to begin moving. That motivation becomes action. And that action will bring about clarity (thus allowing you to make more informed decisions as you go).

As you begin to make decisions about your year — the goals, events, projects, etc — then it will bring with it a spark of motivation.

From there, the motivation will lead you to take action. And, as you start taking action, then you will get an increase in clarity.

This is why it’s always best to quickly make the best decision you can with the information that’s available to you, and then to move on. Knowing that once you start going down a path, you will get additional clarity.

Why Systems Are Valuable

Because goals don’t complete themselves. We all have ideas, dreams, hopes, and desired outcomes. But in order to make them a reality, you’ve got to do something about them.

Having a system — or a habit — is one of the most powerful ways to ensure your daily progress (and even your daily happiness).

While goals give you a direction to head toward, it is through your systems that you will actually make progress.

By focusing on your system, you’re able to focus on incremental improvement. And slowly, over time, your habits and disciplines become a source of joy and delight.

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Next Friday I’ll share a simple (and obvious-in-hindsight) approach for attaining your goals.

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I️ came across the above diagrams when reading Jinny S. Ditzler’s book, Your Best Year Yet.

I️ love the visuals they give — and not to mention the irony that, if you feel as though you’re on the hampsterwheel, then maybe you actually need to stop shortcutting the productivity cycle by skipping one or more of the segments.

In her book, Ditzler writes about how this fourth step of recognizing and celebrating progress is what contributes to our overall motivated state:

By far, the most important lesson of the Cycle of Productivity comes in segment four. Too many of us simply go straight from the end of the third segment back to the starting line without taking a pause for acknowledgment, pats on the back, thinking about what happened, or learning from it. Our eye is always on what’s next or what isn’t yet completed, and before long we feel as if we’re running on fumes — below the empty mark! We don’t feel like we’re getting anywhere and we experience little satisfaction.

This model reminds us to take time to appreciate what we’ve accomplished…

This is exactly what Teresa Amabile teaches in her book, The Progress Principle.

When we want to be super productive, we often think that speed and efficiency are what matter most. But when we shortcut ourselves, it actually slows us down in the long run. We are less productive when we don’t take time to rest and recharge and when we don’t acknowledge and celebrate our wins.

A few days ago I️ wrote about how 2017 has been a very successful year for me personally and for my work and business. As I️ said in that article, having a successful year is most certainly the result of many moving parts and lessons learned over the years.

But if I had to boil it down to what one thing had the most impact, it was, without a doubt, our 8-week work cycles.

Here’s what they look like:

The emphasis of this 8-week work cycle is usually on the 6 weeks of focused work time. We pick one or two projects that we believe will have the most impact and that can be completed within 6 weeks.

But something else that has proven to be so beneficial is that every single work cycle we take time to review what we did, recognize the progress we made, and celebrate it. It has taken me almost this entire year to embrace our buffer week and sabbatical week — I️ usually want to get right to the next thing and not take time to pause and reflect. But skipping those last two weeks of the cycle are akin to working within an incomplete productivity model.

This past Sunday, my wife and I hosted an end-of-year dinner for 6 of our closest friends. It began just last year and is now officially a new tradition for the 8 of us.

I was in charge of the main course, and so we had prime rib roasted to perfection.

Here it is, just about to go into the oven…

During dinner, we all went around the table and shared our highlights and lowlights from the year.

For me, I had two big highlights to share, one of which was all things work-related.

In 2017, I took an unprecedented 8 weeks of vacation (including the 2 weeks at the end-of-the year that start tomorrow).

Moreover, Blanc Media generated more revenue than last year and we retained more of our earnings than last year; we created a brand new product; and I traveled more than I have in the past decade and was able to build many new relationships. Plus, I can’t recall a single night or weekend where I needed to work (though I’m sure there were at least a few).

My point is that, work-wise, this was a very successful year (and I’m not really talking about the financial side).

It was successful in the areas that matter most to me: time with family, a life outside of work, time to rest well, doing meaning work, and still being profitable without being stressed out.

The big question is: How? What contributed to this?

Obviously having a successful year is the result of many moving parts and lessons learned over the years. But…

If I had to boil it down, the single most impactful thing this year was our new work cycles.

In short, this new schedule was our attempt to simultaneously increase focus and productivity at the office while also increasing time away from our desks.

• These 8-week work cycles forced us to focus on only the essential.

• They helped us realize and define our boundaries.

• They kept us free from work debt.

• They forced us to take time off, rather than to just keep on working and working and working… until… 

 For years, I used tell myself that I only needed to work through just one more difficult week / project to get to an important milestone. But I did that over and over for years. There was always just one more thing.

 This year, for the first time ever, I prioritized stopping points, rest, and breaks within our work cycles. Not allowing work to infringe on my personal life.

What’s crazy is that so much of this approach to work overlaps with something I’ve been doing with my family and in my personal life for the past 6 years…

Every January, my wife and I take an evening or two and we map out our upcoming year. And year after year, this time of planning is always a highlight.

Through it, Anna and I are able to define what matters most to us for the year and see what obstacles we may encounter. It helps us maintain margin in our family life and it helps us to focus on what is most important so we can say no to everything else.

(It’s a very similar mindset and approach to what I began doing this year with work.)

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For the next few weeks I’m going to take Friday to talk about how to make progress on your goals.

We won’t be talking about how to hustle harder. Rather, we’ll be talking about how to move at a sustainable pace so you can enjoy life in the process.

Here are the topics:

• The difference between goals and systems and why they are both important (you can’t have one without the other).
• A simple-yet-powerful structure for attaining your goals that is free from any particular productivity system, app, or methodology.
• Lowering the barrier of entry to your goals so you can finally get started on them.
• How to define meaningful progress (and recognize that progress) so you stay motivated.
• The ebbs and flows of life, and allowing yourself to zig and zag in different seasons of life.

Next week, we’ll get into the two big “goal setting” camps…

Some folks say that need to know your goals inside and out or else you’ll never accomplish them. Others say you should not set goals, because who knows if you’ll even accomplish them or not, instead you should live in the moment.

Which is the right approach? We’ll dive into that next week.

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Side note: This January, I’d love for you to be able to go through the same year-planning process that Anna and I go through. Which is why I finally put something together for you. It’s brand new, it’s very simple, and it will be available on December 27th.

A bunch of folks went through it this past week and their feedback has been super positive. More info on that later. For now, just wanted to give you the heads up.

Jocko Willink’s chapter on Focus from his new book, Discipline Equals Freedom, is so awesome and so intense.

Sometimes, in day-to-day life, you can lose track of the long term-goal. It fades from your vision. It slips from your mind. WRONG.

I want that long-term goal to be so embedded in my mind, that I never lose sight of it. EVER. […]

Embed that long-term goal in your mind. Burn it into your soul. Think about it, write about it, talk about it. Hang it up on your wall. […] Every day: Do something that moves you toward that goal — that keeps that goal alive and in sight and in focus.

Also, check out Jocko’s special episode on the Tim Ferris Show where he shares topics from his book such as success mindsets, overcoming laziness and procrastination, behaviors that lead to failure, and more. I love his advice for how to stop procrastinating.