Moving Beyond "SMART" Goals

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

— Leonardo da Vinci

(This is based on an excerpt from my book, How to be a Long Term Person in a Short Term World. The book provides more detail re: how to apply the SMARTEST Goal-Creation Method to your life.)

There’s SMART…

A well-known method of turning ambiguous aspirations into actionable goals is the “SMART” method. SMART defines five characteristics that a goal must have to be actionable:

Specifically defined

Measurable (to track progress)

Achievable/Ambitious (given your resources, abilities, etc.)

Reasonable (given your other goals, obligations, etc. Note: this is termed ‘Realistic’ or ‘Relevant’ in most descriptions of the SMART method)

Time-bound (not open-ended — there’s a scheduled or estimated endgame)

…and there’s SMARTEST.

The “SMARTEST” method, as the name implies, improves upon SMART.

The ‘-EST’ is:

Epictetus/“Entirely in your control” (not subject to other people or circumstances)

Synergy (when contemporaneous pursuance of goals has more benefits than pursuance separately)

Tractable (“Movable” guideposts, informed by learning-by-doing, are preferable to hard and fast due dates.)

Epictetus (or Entirely in your control”)

According to the Greek philosopher Epictetus and other Stoics, there are three types of “things” in this world:

• those entirely in our control;
• those outside our control; and
• those we have some control over.

It does us no good to define goals that can only be accomplished if other people and events happen to go our way.

Instead, define your goals based on what you have control over — the first type described above.

For example, consider the aspiration of “winning a poker tournament.” Poker, like life and everything in it, is affected by other people’s actions and general uncertainty.

You may or may not get the cards you need; you have little control over other players’ actions, etc. You could play the best poker of your life and still lose the tournament — it happens to poker professionals all the time.

If, instead, you turn this aspiration into the goal of “play the best poker of my life in the tournament,” then this goal can be accomplished. It is entirely within your control.

Other examples: “Be a professional writer” is an aspiration because it requires other people to buy your book. “Self — publish a book” however, is entirely within your control.

Similarly, “get a promotion” is a fine aspiration, but it depends upon your supervisors, company profits, HR procedures, etc.

“Make 1,000 sales calls” is a goal because it is in your control. It puts you in position to receive a promotion, but the goal is achieved whether you receive the promotion or not.

Define your goals so they are in your control.

Synergy

Synergy — when two or more things (in this case, the pursuance of goals) has an effect greater than the sum of their parts.

Two for the price of one: This might be because pursuing one helps with the other. For example, as I wrote an academic article, I learned about my productivity habits, which informed the writing of my book and this article.

Skills transfer goal-to-goal: Pursuing one goal can also help you develop skills for future goals. If you become organized in your pursuit of a high GPA, you can transfer your organizational skills to the workplace. As a salesperson, you might draw important lessons that help you down the road when you open your own business. Examples are too numerous to list.

Playing favorites: Synergy also occurs when we use one goal to motivate action towards another goal. Many times we have one goal we enjoy pursuing more than another. We are likely to procrastinate on the latter. By alternating sessions of each, we motivate ourselves to push through what we don’t enjoy to get to the actions we do enjoy.

Beware conflicting goals: The reverse of synergy is also possible. For numerous reasons, goals can conflict with each other. Sometimes they draw on the same resources, taxing our productivity system. Other times, one simply precludes the other. If we pursue conflicting goals, we risk spreading ourselves too thin, weakening our chances of achieving favorable outcomes.

Tractable

Goals are clay, not concrete. Setting arbitrary due dates is good insofar as it might motivate us forward, but it waters down the importance of real due dates.

More importantly, if accomplishing a goal takes a few more days than planned, that is infinitely better than not achieving the goal at all.

In addition to goals taking longer to accomplish than we envisioned, the goals themselves can change. You may learn something during the process that changes your intention. Or maybe something unexpected happens, and you decide to change your entire trajectory.

For these reasons, I think “guideposts” are more helpful than the strict boundaries implied by the SMART method. Guideposts are estimated, imaginary markers between where we are and where we want to go.

When you begin working towards a goal, create guideposts at monthly and weekly intervals, then review your progress periodically. The difference between intentions and outcomes will be telling.

Of course, if guideposts become too loosey-goosey, we risk losing the benefit of SMARTEST goals, but if we are mindful of that possibility, the risk is worth it.

Takeaway

The better-defined a goal is, the better the chances of its achievement. Taking just a few more minutes up-front will pay dividends in the long term.

And long term should be the goal.

(This was primarily sourced from How to be a Long Term Person in a Short Term World, available on Amazon.)

You are the One Who Knocks

Interruptions come from within

Instant notifications. People who equate texting and calling. People thinking it is strange that you put your phone on Do Not Disturb, weird that you purposely leave your phone in a different room. The trend towards open offices. The acceptability of knocking and asking questions that can be Googled. The expectation that an e-mail will not only be answered, but acted upon, in mere hours if not minutes.

We live in a short term world. There’s no doubt about it.

The truth, however, is that more often than not, what seems to be an external interruption (the knock at the door, the text, the early-morning e-mail) is actually internal.The true enemy of our productivity isn’t the short term world and the obnoxious people in it… the true enemy is ourselves.

This is because, after the knock, ping, or beep, there is a moment in which you make a decision. The easy way out is to throw up your arms — you’ve been interrupted, the important project will remain on pause until later! (And, honestly, don’t we all like a good external interruption once in awhile?)

The harder but better way is to be ready, to anticipate and prepare for interruptions when you can, and to be nimble when you cannot. This allows us to make progress in spite of them.

In this moment, a person is truly tested; will you be an object in the short term world, or the subject of your own long term world?

This is adapted from How to be a Long Term Person in a Short Term World.

Journaling: Easily the Best Bang-For-Your-Productivity Buck

The greatest impediment to our productivity: mental models.

The greatest accelerator of our productivity: emotional intelligence.

Journaling helps mitigate the former and boost the latter.

Equally important: it’s easy.

You literally just move your hand around a page or type into your computer. It almost doesn’t even matter what you write or type — it’s just the act that matters.

Let’s dig a bit deeper.

Mental Models

Mental models are subconscious thoughts and beliefs that inform how we view the world and how we choose to act within it. They may or may not be based on reality, but even when they are, our models choose which aspects of reality to focus on. Without examining ourselves on a deep level, we’re completely unaware of these models. They’re like invisible, silent angels and devils on our shoulders.

Or, perhaps more apt, puppet masters — and we’re the puppets.

Because we’re unaware of them, we never question their accuracy. It’s sort of scary, isn’t it? Worse, our egos try to hide them from us.

You can see the effect of mental models everywhere.

In business: Remember when Blockbuster thought they could still operate hundreds of rental outlets for several more years despite Netflix’s emergence?

In our personal lives: In all likelihood, you possess a trait that others plainly see in you, but you don’t see it yourself. This means one of two things. Either other people have a false mental model of you (this often happens when you had, but lost, a particular trait), or you have a false mental model of yourself.

Here is a famous illustration of mental models, the Duncker Experiment:

Participants were given a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a book of matches. Their instructions were to:

Affix the candle to a corkboard on a wall;

Light the candle; and

Ensure no wax drips onto the table.

In the first experiment, most participants could not do it.

They ran the experiment a second time, but with the thumbtacks outside of the box. This time, every participant figured out they could use thumbtacks to pin the candle to the corkboard, and use the box to collect the wax.

All it took was placing the thumbtacks outside of the box for them to see that they were, in fact, different items and have different functions. (This is perhaps why MacGyver was so successful — he could see that bubble gum could not only be chewed, it could also prevent a nuclear explosion.)

Of course, we need working theories about reality to go about our lives. It’s impossible to analyze every little thing we believe, think, or do, but we can examine our mental models. In so doing, we learn a great deal about ourselves and how we perceive our world. This makes us more effective across the line.

Our perceptions are among our greatest tools; doesn’t it make sense to better understand them?

Of course, to examine them, we must first find them. But such self-awareness is rarely, if ever, a natural trait. It’s something that must be cultivated.

I know of few other ways to cultivate the self-awareness necessary than through journaling and “qualitative review” of one’s life. There are other methods, I am sure, but statistics is not one of them.

Mental models are all about nuance and context, dynamics that numbers cannot reveal.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotions strongly influence our actions. In fact, our intentions travel through the emotional area of the brain before we act. Your ability to recognize emotion, and its effects, in yourself and others, and your ability to use this information wisely, is our “emotional intelligence” (EI).

With high EI, we can more successfully control our actions and interactions, ultimately making us more effective humans. High EI is difficult to achieve because we’re hard-wired to be emotionally dumb.

Our brain’s inputs travel through our limbic systems where they are immediately colored by our emotions (this is where mental models begin to form too.) Only then do they enter our rational cores. If we can’t recognize traces of emotional coloring, we are less in control of our decision-making than we would otherwise be.

High EI requires high levels of self- and social awareness. Strong self-awareness — how well we recognize patterns in our thoughts and actions, and self-knowledge of our strengths, weaknesses, and motivations — can only be achieved through introspection over a long period of time.

Similarly, social awareness — how well we understand the emotions underpinning the thoughts and actions of those with whom we interact — can only be achieved through insights gleaned through observation and recollection of many experiences.

Even with strong self- and social awareness, high EI is not guaranteed. We must actualize what we become aware of.

Self-management is the ability to use our knowledge of self and others to positively affect our actions.

Although our brains are hard-wired to make us emotional decision-makers, our brains also have a remarkable ability to overcome this tendency.

Every time we recognize an emotion in ourselves or others, and use that knowledge to positively affect our behavior, our cells become accustomed. The cells involved in these thoughts and actions create connections with each other, making the next time easier, and the time after that, etc., etc. In this way, our self-management can increase exponentially.

This is where journaling can come in.

By recording events and thoughts, we can learn how to improve both self- and social awareness, and we can assess how to better self-manage, ultimately increasing our EI and self-efficacy.

How I Journal

My journal has a few guidelines but no hard-and-fast rules. I skip lines between entries, date- and time-stamp them, and try to write for more than a page. Sometimes I go over, sometimes I manage only a few lines.

Sometimes, I write ideas for future entries on a page’s header. And I do have themes for each day of the week, described below, although they are loose at best.

Most entries begin with a recitation of something that happened or something that’s coming up. Sometimes it’s something that is heavy on my mind, other times it’s “I just woke up. The coffee is good.”

More often than I’d like to admit, those are the most intelligible sentences I write.

But I know that far more important than intelligibility, is keeping the habit, even if I just write “Today was good” or “I’m writing this to keep the habit” (which I wrote on June 10, 2016, because I was both busy and uninspired.)

For me, journaling is most effective, and most likely to be done, when I do it first thing in the morning paired with a cup of coffee. You might find the same. The important thing is to create a routine that works for you.

As stated, I am flexible with my journaling — I wouldn’t do it otherwise. I have themes based on the day of the week, but they primarily serve as a back-up if I can’t think of anything to write day-of:

Monday: I look ahead to the week — important events, must-dos, the little things like groceries.

Tuesday: I usually write about the week’s tasks and guideposts, and try to identify what anxieties I have related to them. By identifying them early in the week, I can deal with them before they end up ruining my week’s productivity.

Wednesday: I like to “dig deep” and write something a little more personal. Sometimes it has something to do with difficult emotions, other times it is something random I want to explore like why I like x, why I did y, how I feel about z. Other times I continue my writing from Tuesday — perhaps because my task anxiety is related to a larger issue.

Thursday: Assuming I made some mental progress on Wednesday, I continue down the path. If not, I choose a different path.

Friday: I like to review how the week is going, what my successes were, what my failures were. This is a good time to reflect upon the week before they fade away during the weekend.

Weekend: I like to write something random and spontaneous, and unrelated to anything I’ve written recently (or ever.) These have included random diatribes about the sounds of birds, a history of my posture, and my thesis regarding the origins of the ‘fist bump.’

Structured Creativity

Journaling should not give you anxiety. If you feel anxiety when you think about it, or as you do it, then switch it up somehow. Make it new again. Be creative.