I’M AS AMBITIOUS in setting goals as anyone I know—I often have several goals I’d like to achieve at work, along with self-improvement goals that can range from learning a new language to running a marathon. And while I’ve always been enthusiastic about setting and starting new goals, my list of things I want to achieve seems to grow faster than I progress on any of those goals.
It’s easy to set goals, but extremely difficult to achieve them if they’re goals worth achieving.
Tackling a goal takes energy and focus and motivation, three things that are in limited supply in any person, no matter how driven. Taking on many goals at once spreads out your available energy and focus and motivation, so that you often run out of steam after the initial couple weeks of enthusiasm. Then the goals sit there on your list, gathering dust, while you feel guilty about not achieving any of them.
The Power of Less is perfect for achieving goals: Limit yourself to fewer goals, and you’ll achieve more.
At the same time, we’ll look at ways to narrow your focus on your projects, so that you can complete them more effectively and move forward on your goals. We’ll apply limitations to our projects to increase our effectiveness.
THE ONE GOAL SYSTEM
The One Goal System is simple—you focus on one goal at a time to increase your effectiveness with that goal. To break the goal into concrete steps, you will focus on one sub-goal at a time.
1. Choose a goal. Make a list of things you’d like to accomplish over the next few years. This list might have ten things on it, or maybe twenty. Now, you could try to tackle all those goals at once, or take on as many as possible. But that will dilute your effectiveness. Instead, choose just one, and focus completely on that goal until you can check it off the list.
I’d recommend that you choose a goal that you really want to accomplish—the stronger your desire, the more likely you are to actually stick with that goal until you’re finished. It’s not enough to say, “It would be nice to achieve this goal.” You need to want it so deeply that you’ll make it your top priority for months to come.
I also recommend that you choose a goal that will take about six months to a year to complete. Any longer than a year, and you will have problems maintaining your focus, and might become overwhelmed. If it’s much shorter than six months, it might not be something worthy of your efforts.
What if you really want to achieve it, but it’ll take two years or more? Break it down into sub-goals, so that your first sub-goal will take about a year. For example, if you want to become a lawyer, you have to get in to law school, and then complete three years of school, and then pass the bar exam. Make your first goal simply to be accepted into a decent law school—that’ll take six months to a year.
2. Break it down to a sub-goal. Once you’ve decided on your One Goal, the next step is to focus on a smaller sub-goal that you can accomplish in the next month or two. In the law school example above, you might decide that your sub-goal will be to do research into some of the top law schools in the areas you prefer, to choose five schools, and to gather the essential information about each school. To shorten that, you might call this sub-goal something like, “Complete research on Top 5 schools.”
The reason for a sub-goal is to create shorter steps that are more immediately achievable than a larger, yearlong goal might be. If you don’t break a goal into smaller steps, you can become overwhelmed by such a large and vague goal. You can’t sit down today, for example, and get accepted into a law school. It’s not something that’s doable. So you have to break it into more doable steps.
3. Weekly goal. Each week, create a weekly goal that will move you closer to your sub-goal. So this week, using the example above, you might just want to find all the decent law schools in the areas you prefer, find their Web sites, and start reading about them. That would be your weekly goal.
4. Daily action. Then each day, choose one action that will move you closer to your weekly goal. Make this action your most important task for the day. Do it first, before you do anything else. This will help keep you focused on your One Goal, instead of pushing it back when other, more pressing things come up.
This might sound complicated, but in action, it’s fairly simple. You set a One Goal for the year (it can be set at any time—you don’t have to wait for January). You set a sub-goal that will take a month or two to complete. Each week you set a weekly goal. Each day you choose a task that will move you to that weekly goal, and make that your most important task of the day.
This One Goal system will keep you focused on achieving your goal, moving closer to it each day. It will keep you from spreading yourself too thin, and will allow you to focus all your energy on completing this goal.
THE SIMPLE PROJECTS LIST
If you don’t already have a projects list, I suggest you make a quick-and-dirty one right now. List all the projects you have going on in your life, including all your work projects, any personal and home projects, projects with civic organizations, and so on. Anything that would take a day or more to complete, to use a rough guideline. If you can do it in an hour or two, you can still list it if you like—a project is usually something that takes several tasks to complete.
How many items are on this list? If you’re like most people, you probably have ten to twenty projects on this list. If you’re an overachiever or extremely busy, you might even have more. This isn’t a good thing. Too many projects leads to ineffectiveness.
Now I’m going to ask you to do something that might be a bit difficult for some of you: Choose just the top three projects on your list. Don’t choose three from each area of your life—just choose three altogether.
This list of three projects is your Simple Projects List. Everything else goes on a second list, which we’ll call the “On Deck List.” You’ll probably still get to these projects on your On Deck List, but you won’t be working on them right now. They’re on hold until you complete the three projects on your Simple Projects List.
Let me make this point clear: In this system I’m recommending, you don’t move a project from the On Deck List to the Simple Projects List until you finish all three projects on your Simple Projects List. Not just one, but all three. Why? Because this will ensure that you don’t leave one of the top three projects sitting uncompleted while you keep moving new projects onto your active list. It will ensure that you focus on completion of all of your top three projects, not just one or two.
The top three projects on your Simple Projects List will be your entire focus until you finish all three, and then the next three projects you move onto this active list will be your focus. This ensures that you aren’t spreading your focus too thin, and that you’re completing your projects.
I recommend that, at all times, you have at least one of your top three projects be related to your One Goal so that you are always moving that goal forward. Of the other two projects on your active list, you can choose another work-related goal and a personal goal (if you like). Whatever works best for your situation.
Why not have just one project? If limiting yourself to three projects makes you more effective, why not limit yourself to one project to make yourself even more effective? You’d think this would be logical, especially as I recommended having just One Goal. However, the reality is that almost every project is held up as you wait for information, for other people to get back to you, for others to complete tasks, for vendors or clients to do something. It’s rare that you can start a project and work on it until it’s finished, without any waiting. If this is possible, I suggest you do exactly that: Start a project and don’t work on anything else until the project is completed.
Unfortunately, that’s often not the case: We must wait for tasks or information or other things to be completed before we can move on to the next step. And so we multitask, but not on the task level—we multitask only on the project level. While one project is on hold for an hour or a day or a few days, we can be working on another. I’ve found that three projects works best for this type of project-level multitasking—any more than three, and you begin to lose effectiveness.
For this system to work, a project should take no more than a month to complete, and preferably only a week or two. If a project takes a year to complete (for example), then you will not be able to work on any other projects for a year. That’s too long to put the rest of your life on hold. Instead, break long-term projects into smaller projects that can be completed in a month or less. If you want to launch a magazine, for example, focus first on the project of coming up with a design, then on putting together a team, then on finding financial backing, and so on.
FOCUS ON COMPLETION
Many of us lose focus of what’s important when it comes to project management. We might get caught up in organizing the project, in laying out a task list and timeline, and assigning tasks to different team members. We might get caught up in meetings about our projects, in sending e-mails, and in instant-messaging people about the project. We might get caught up in the technology of it.
But the real focus of any project should be in getting it done. Completion. Each day, put your focus on moving your project forward to completion. Put aside distractions, and put all of your energy into one project at a time—you can switch to another of your three active projects when necessary, but at any given moment, just focus on one project. And move it closer to completion, until you’re done.
Here are a few more tips to help you get to completion:
WHAT IF I DON’T CONTROL MY PROJECTS LIST?
If you’re lucky, you have complete control over your projects list—you choose what projects to work on and the number of projects you’re working on at any given time. Unfortunately, we’re not all that lucky. I know the frustrations of working under a boss, where your boss dictates (sometimes to a microscopic level) what you’re supposed to be working on. Sometimes bosses can be real control freaks, which might help them complete projects but isn’t ideal for you.
And while you might want to limit your projects to just your top three projects in order to increase effectiveness, that’s not always up to you. You might choose three projects, and then your boss might pile a few more of them on your plate and demand that they get done right away.
Fortunately, there are a few strategies you can use to limit the number of projects you’re working on, even if you don’t have complete control over your projects list. Not all of these strategies will work for you, but choose the one that you think will work best and give it a try:
1. Make your own projects list. Sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. That means just do what you think is right, and let your boss know about it later, after you’ve made it a success. This strategy works best if your boss isn’t a super control freak, and doesn’t demand constant progress updates. If you can work on your own for at least a few days, and preferably a week, this strategy might work. Just choose your top three projects and focus on them completely. When you’ve knocked them out and completed them, you can show your boss your system and point to it as your reason for success. Or don’t even mention it, but keep doing it. Your boss might not care how you’re completing the projects, but will probably just be happy that they’re getting done.
2. Delay. If your boss insists that you work on more than three projects at once, and is constantly asking for progress updates, you might be successful with delay tactics. That means that you still focus on your top three projects, and try to complete them as quickly as possible—but for any others that he insists you still work on at the same time, you just delay until you can complete your top three projects. Ask for extensions, put certain tasks in other people’s laps so that the project is delayed for a day or two, or just say (truthfully) that you didn’t get to the project today because you were working on your other projects. I’m not suggesting dishonesty, but just honest delays.
3. Talk to your boss about your system. This is actually the best strategy on this list, in my opinion, and if you can pull it off, I highly recommend it. How it works: Sit down with your boss and tell him (or her) about your system—the Simple Projects List. Tell him that it will make you more effective, and that you will be better at completing projects because of this system of limitations. Be sure that you follow through with this promise, however—your boss won’t be happy if you limit yourself to three projects and then sit on them. If necessary, show your boss this book and let him read it. If that’s not enough, show him my Web site (zenhabits.net) and give him my e-mail address (it’s on the About page of my site). I’ll talk to him.
4. Ask your boss to choose. If none of the above strategies work, and your boss insists on adding projects to your list and insists that you work on all of them, all the time, then you need to be honest and up-front with your boss—you only have a limited amount of time, and you can’t do everything at once. Talk to your boss about this, and tell him that if he doesn’t want you to choose what projects to work on, then let him choose for you. Show him the projects he’s given to you, and all the items on your projects list and to-do list, and tell him you only have time to work on three projects at the moment. Let him choose which projects those will be, and tell him you will put all of your focus on completing those three projects, and that when you’re done, you’ll let him choose the next three, and so on. If your boss doesn’t acknowledge that you have limited time, and that you can only work on so many projects at once, then you might consider looking into other job options—your boss is demanding more than is humanly possible from you.