When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.
—CONFUCIUS
ONE DAY LAST YEAR, I was driving to the movies with my son and a small car pulled in front of us. On the back bumper was a sticker with a quote from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books: “Not all who wander are lost.” My son read it, considered it, and then said, “You can tell that was written a long time ago because people don’t wander anymore. We have GPS now.”
I thought he was being facetious at the time, but looking back, I realize he was simply speaking the literal truth: We rarely go anywhere now without finding the fastest, most efficient way to reach our destination. It has become easier than ever to be specific about our goals and to reach them quickly. In many ways, we have become a goal-oriented culture. Wandering, or even getting lost, are old-fashioned activities.
I don’t long for the days when I had to stare at a street atlas looking for the tiny side street where a friend lived and then figure out how to get there, but I do wonder if we’ve become as addicted to the process of setting goals as we are to our smartphones. Perhaps we are due for a reconsideration of how we choose our goals and how we choose to reach them.
The truth is, productivity is a by-product of a functional system, not a goal in and of itself. The question is not whether you are productive but what you are producing.
I suspect our hunger for increased productivity and efficiency is good. We are never done improving. That’s the upside. It’s telling that in the Declaration of Independence, we are guaranteed not happiness but the “pursuit of happiness.” We are always chasing it. We never stop tweaking and twisting our lives in search of more free time, more money, more satisfaction.
In some cases, though, we are indiscriminate about our methods. We make decisions in the moment without considering where that decision might ultimately take us. We deny ourselves desserts and long vacations because we believe that these small decisions will bring us closer, even incrementally, to a nebulous goal. If I just spend thirty minutes answering email tonight, that means it will be easier tomorrow, right? (You know the answer to that.)
Answering emails in the evening is the means to a goal. It is an activity you can choose to engage in, but it’s not a real objective. No one’s goal in life, as far as I know, is to answer every email within twenty minutes. So before you pick up your phone or tablet at nine p.m. and check your inbox, ask yourself what your true intention is. If you choose not to work during evenings and weekends, what might happen?
The truth is, going without dessert is a means goal, as is making your bed every day, getting up at five a.m., or answering email before bed. All of these activities are means to an end. They are meant to be stepping-stones toward a more significant aim, like achieving life satisfaction or improving the world.
Means goals are specific objectives, like a certain income or job title, that lead to a bigger, greater goal. They are tools used to reach a more fulfilling intention.
Perhaps you think a bigger salary will help you achieve stability, and that will bring happiness. Maybe you think a promotion will bring you more power in the office, allowing you to create better products and feel useful to society. In those cases, your end goals are happiness and being of use to the wider world, not more money and more power.
It’s important to ensure your choices are really helping you progress as you want them to. Will your promotion bring you the power you need or not? Before you invest a lot of hours in pursuing that new position, make sure it’s worth it.
Many of us become obsessed with means goals and completely lose sight of the more important end goal that should motivate all our efforts: living a good life. Why sacrifice your mental and physical health for something that may not help you and, in fact, takes you further from your ultimate ambition?
End goals are non-negotiable. We don’t compromise on end goals, because we are unwilling to accept something less than a happy family or living an honorable life. Means goals are flexible. If your family can’t be happy in Texas, you’ll live in California. The location of your home is a means to an end.
Let’s say your end goal is to experience the beauty of nature and therefore enrich your life. So you have a means goal to visit the Grand Canyon this year. There’s a contest to win a free trip and you enter twenty times, but you ultimately lose the contest. That doesn’t matter, though, because you can still get to Arizona. And if you can’t, you can probably still visit a place that is beautiful and spiritually enriching. Winning the contest is a means goal, but people often confuse means and ends and get overly attached to the means. They lose the contest and think, Oh well, I guess I wasn’t meant to visit the Canyon.
End goals often provide a direction—going west—instead of a specific destination. You may need to travel south a bit to get gas or food, but then you return to your westward path. If you want to lose weight, your target weight is a means goal. Reaching a certain number on the scale isn’t your ultimate goal, or probably shouldn’t be.
The real aim may not even be to look better if what you really want is to be healthier or more physically capable. If the means goal is to train until you can run a marathon, perhaps the end goal is to live longer and be more able-bodied.
In an effort to make us all more efficient at reaching goals, some experts have offered systems for setting them. For example, many recommend the SMART system, which suggests that good goals are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound.
That system is useful but has limits, for goal-setting is a multilayered exercise. I set a goal of writing no fewer than 750 words per day while working on this book, for example. That was the means by which I reached my goal of finishing the manuscript. Finishing it was the means by which I reached the goal of relaying to people a message that I think can be helpful. And that was a means by which I hope to reach one of my end goals: making the world a better place.
Perhaps you notice that “making the world a better place” is not specific, measurable, or time-bound. It is an end goal and will therefore not fit into the SMART system. Many end goals don’t, but means goals do. Steve Pavlina, author of Personal Development for Smart People, says, “End goals work as ideals to move towards, and one of the reasons they must transcend the limits of a system like S.M.A.R.T. is that they must be expansive enough that you can pursue them for a lifetime.” As I said, end goals are often directions instead of destinations. They are not usually items you can include in a checklist or bullet journal.
Focusing on ends rather than means is helpful because it leads us to find creative solutions to problems (if not this way, then another way). It also can reduce stress, because it embraces failure and welcomes flexibility.
If you fail to meet a means goal, there are usually dozens of other methods to reach your overriding objective. Failing is itself a productive method to reach your broader aim through a process of elimination. Thomas Edison famously said that he never failed but “found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
So your challenge is to articulate your end goals, knowing that they may change as time passes. Why are you going to college? To earn a degree, but why do you want a degree? In order to get a good job, and why do you want that? You can use a version of Sakichi Toyota’s “Five Whys.” Keep asking yourself why until you ultimately arrive at your fundamental objective.
If you don’t articulate your end goals, it can be easy to waste your time doing things that you think are good and productive but that don’t actually help you progress. A lot of the advice we get these days tells us to aim for arbitrary measures, like 100,000 followers or spending an hour at the gym every day. We live by our checklists and notifications telling us to drink more water.
We’ve been told for decades to focus on specific, achievable targets. I’m not telling you to throw those targets away but to make sure those targets lead you to bigger and better things. This will save you time and money and prevent you from doing things that feel productive but achieve nothing in the long run.
In truth, we sometimes set means goals too quickly. We read an article on how to be more productive that tells us that all successful CEOs wake up early, so we vow to get up at five a.m. every day. Then we feel like a failure when we sleep until seven o’clock. Perhaps a coworker recommends a paleo diet and we start following it with a vague idea that it will make us healthier, until we break down and eat some pizza. This knee-jerk approach can cause us to try a lot of different strategies without thorough consideration or analysis.
Choosing means goals in haste can waste a vast amount of time. You solve this problem by starting on the other end of the spectrum. Articulate your end goals and then choose smaller, specific goals that you are reasonably sure will bring you closer to the bigger objective. Check in frequently to make sure your habits truly are helping you make progress. If they’re not, don’t waste any more time on them. Dump them and try something else.
Realize that everything you do is likely just a means to a larger goal. These tasks are not commandments but suggestions. They are fluid and flexible. They are negotiable and can be seen as lines in sand, not stone. If you fail to reach a means goal, there’s no need to get stressed or anxious. Just find another way to reach your ultimate aim.
So here is the complete list of solutions, all designed to break your addiction to efficiency without purpose and productivity with production.
Increase time perception.
Create your ideal schedule.
Stop comparing at a distance.
Work fewer hours.
Schedule leisure.
Schedule social time.
Work in teams.
Commit small, selfless acts.
Focus on ends, not means.
This list may represent small tweaks to your current habits, or it could be that following these guidelines will require a massive overhaul. Regardless, learn from my experience and start with one at a time. Most things are good for you only up to the point where they become oppressive and overwhelming. I certainly don’t recommend that you turn this list into another productivity hack that causes further stress.
All of these actions are backed by science and by my own personal experience and research. They will probably work for you. But if they don’t, or if it’s not possible to carry out one of them, that’s perfectly fine. The point of all this is to simplify your life and increase well-being, not create another source of anxiety.
In one sense, every one of these suggestions is really about time management, but not in pursuit of more efficiency. The overriding message is this: Stop trading time for money. The simple act of placing a value on an hour has made us loath to waste even a minute, and the more money you have, the more expensive your time is and the more you feel you don’t have enough time to spare. Our perception of time is now horribly warped.
Leisure becomes stressful when you subconsciously believe you are wasting money by not being productive. However, if one of your end goals is to be happy, then pursuing a bigger income is not necessarily going to get you where you want to go. Allow yourself to consider other options.
It’s time to stop viewing your off-hours as potential money-making time. It’s not worth it. You can’t put a monetary value on your free time, because you’re paying for it in mental and physical health.
Do not let corporate values determine how you spend your days and what your priorities are. You are a big-brained, social animal who’s currently constrained by unrealistic demands and expectations. Your vision has been narrowly focused for too long on your work and your marketability, but your intrinsic value as a human is more related to your position in your community than to your earning power as a laborer.
Stop trying to prove something to others. Reclaim your time and reclaim your humanity.