"Why am I not sticking to my goals?"

I've asked myself this question often over the last few years, especially as I became serious about tracking both my overall and weekly progress. Some weeks it was just because I was traveling for work, or I got sick, or I had to drop everything and handle a genuine emergency. But more often than not, I found myself just... deflated? Unmotivated? Tired? I didn't want to do the tasks I'd assigned myself, or I'd fallen out of love with an idea, and—

Suddenly it was next week.

The Problem with Metrics

This phenomenon hit me last year, as the way I was living during the pandemic had to change, return-to-office reared its ugly head, we moved into our first house, and an additional 8 hour/week commitment popped up at work. At the time, I kept thinking of the problem in terms of me — my energy, my discipline, my priorities — that I blinded myself to every other possibility.

I was setting extremely detailed, metric-driven goals to achieve by the end of the year, with no room for the unexpected or a slip in the process. Write 750,000 words, finish these 10 games, paint 50 models, walk 7,000 steps a day. But that means 6,999 steps is a failure. There is no difference between 48 and 49 — it has to be 50, and has to be by the end of the year, and that means I need to do ~1/week or fail.

I'd essentially recreated the Waterfall model, designing everything up front and throwing down a deadline that I would never be able to meet. Recently, I started reevaluating my process, pushing for an Agile-like approach instead. I'm about 10 weeks in, and I'm liking it. I've had to travel for work one week, I got sick another, but I don't feel like I'm failing to achieve my goals.

Shifting Away from Deadlines

I think the three biggest changes to my process are:

  1. Tasks I failed to complete in a previous week don't stay with that week — there is no longer a concept of "going back" to a task, it just returns to the backlog.
  2. I've made a distinction between repeatable tasks — the only thing that used to be on my board — and one-off tasks that I need to do but take up my time.
  3. If I assign myself N tasks in a week and I complete N-1, the following week I'm only allowed to take on N-1 tasks.

I also changed the flow of my spreadsheet, cutting about 60% of the content in favor of a simple flow.

Don't let the goal status on the far right confuse you — I'm not expecting to read 5 textbooks in 2023, the bars just help me visualize what I've gotten done so that I don't have to continuously parse the task stream. My priority in this new setup is flow. I've found I can comfortably get about 10 tasks done each week, and so my focus is to keep that number more or less consistent (i.e. N=10). This has been helpful in terms of keeping my motivation up, because each week I'm able to predict what I'll get done, plan for it, and get the dopamine hit of checking all those boxes.

Since I started including one-off tasks in my backlog, I've also stopped underestimating my work as much, and even when that does happen, the work from a previous week no longer spills into the next. It's a subtle difference, but psychologically it's a major shift — instead of feeling like I'm constantly playing catch-up, each Saturday I can focus on the next week with a clean slate.

Wrapping Up

Now that my little experiment is done, and I'm pretty comfortable with the new process, I'm finally ready to commit to my 2023 goals. And from there... We'll have to see how it goes! As long as I keep focusing on flow over the numbers, and avoid hard deadlines that don't stand up to the entropy of life, I think it's going to be just fine. But only time will tell — until then, I hope all is well with you and yours, and I'll see you in the next one.