Easily transform big yearly goals into powerful sub-goals and worthwhile tasks
Most people are able to set goals. There’s something they’d like to get done within a certain amount of time:
Write a book.
Run a marathon.
Start their own business.
Lose weight.
Where it breaks down is turning those big, inspiring goals into sub-goals and tasks. Without sub-goals, your time frame is too long, and looks impossible.
Write an entire book? Lose 50 pounds? Too hard, and too overwhelming. Where would you even start? You’ll give up long before you reach your goal.
But write a chapter? Lose 5 pounds? You could probably do that.
Tasks are the things you do to move forward toward your sub-goals. If your goal is to lose 5 pounds, you might cut out all junk food. You might stop eating after 6pm until breakfast the next morning. You might add more vegetables to your diet, drink more water, or take daily walks around the block.
These are all possible tasks.
So how do you reliably convert big goals into sub-goals? And then create doable tasks to reach those sub-goals?
Use the following four goal setting hacks to work with the way your brain handles goals.
Hack #1: Focus on one aspect at a time
A huge, life-altering goal is too much for our minds to handle all at once. There are too many moving pieces. Instead, do like the blind men describing an elephant — focus on just one piece at a time.
For those of you unfamiliar with the story, five blind men encountered an elephant. They had never encountered an elephant before, and tried to describe what it was like.
One felt it’s side, and said an elephant was like a wall.
Another felt it’s leg, and said an elephant was like a tree.
The third blind man felt the trunk, and compared an elephant to a snake.
The fourth felt the ear, and thought an elephant was like a fan.
The final man put his hand on the elephant’s tail, and thought an elephant was like a rope.
The point of the story is that no one man had an accurate description of an elephant. But between all five, they pretty much covered all the things that comprised an elephant.
So approach your goal as if it is an elephant, and you are a blind man. Just reach out and grab the first thing you come to, and try to describe it.
Describe your elephant
Suppose you want to start your own business. The first part of the elephant you come upon might be “decide what business to start”. Or it might be “do competitive analysis of similar businesses”. It might even be “create a rocking name and marketing plan”.
The first part of the elephant is your first sub-goal. Keep describing parts of the elephant until you’ve described the entire elephant.
After you have all your sub-goals, you can structure and order them.
For example, it makes no sense to create a marketing plan until after you’ve decided on the kind of business. So you’d order “decide on business” before “create marketing”.
And maybe you’ll want to do a bunch of competitive analyses, as part of choosing your business. So you’d combine those two sub-goals. Call it “analyze possible businesses and choose best one”.
Why it works
There’s a psychological effect called the Zeigarnik Effect. You can think of it like Newton’s First Law of Motion: A body at rest remains at rest and a body in motion remains in motion.
What this means for psychology is that once you take any action on a task, your mind wants you to continue. It will keep reminding you that there’s this unfinished task.
At some level, we all know this. And when we look at an entire elephant of a goal, we think, “I’m never going to get all that. It’s too big. I’d better not start.”
If, instead, we can look at a tiny piece of the elephant — a leg or a tail — we can wrap our minds around it. We think, “Yeah, I could do that.”
In fact, just the act of breaking the goal into sub-goals — identifying the parts of the elephant — is enough to start. The Zeigarnik Effect will take over, and prompt you to continue.
Hack #2: Make friends with measurements
How do you convert sub-goals into tasks? By measuring them.
Look at each of your sub-goals. How will you know when you have completed it?
A completed sub-goal will have one of two different aspects. Either there is a number associated with it, or there is a binary event associated with it.
If there’s a number, that involves counting something. Each thing you count becomes a task.
If there is a binary event, the occurrence of that event is a task.
Then you look at those tasks. Can you do that thing right now? If not, what is preventing you from doing it? Those are also tasks.
Weight loss by the numbers
Let’s look at the example from the introduction again.
You’ve broken the yearly goal of losing 50 pounds into 10 monthly goals of losing 5 pounds. November and December, your goal will be not gaining back any of the weight you lost.
The monthly goal of losing 5 pounds is a number. You will count each pound that you lose.
Since most months have 4 weeks, you can break the monthly goal into weekly goals of losing 1.25 pounds.
So, this week, you need to lose 1.25 pounds. Can you do that right now?
Back when I was in Weight Watchers, if I knew I wasn’t going to show progress on a particular weigh in, I had a secret trick. I’d go out at lunch and get my hair cut. So yes, you can immediately lose 1.25 pounds. Once.
For your second week, you can’t pull the same trick. So what’s preventing you from immediately losing 1.25 pounds?
You need to spend about 500 calories more per day than you take in to lose a pound of weight in a week. (Keep in mind that this is a grossly oversimplified example. Your circumstances may vary.)
So to lose that pound and a half, you have two choices. You can find a way to burn an extra 500–750 calories each day. Or you can find a way to cut that many calories from your diet.
Whichever method you choose, those numbers become your new tasks.
You can’t immediately burn 750 calories, because you’re at your desk. (You’re planning your schedule, remember?) So what’s stopping you is it’s not practical. If you were in workout clothes at the gym, though, you could burn 750 calories. So you need to plan a time to go to the gym.
Once you’re at the gym, could you burn 750 calories? Maybe what’s stopping you is that you don’t know how to effectively work out to burn calories. So first you need to hire a personal trainer.
Eventually, you get to tasks that you can do without needing any prerequisites. Then you just need to do them.
Why it works
Translating goals into tasks that have measurements attached works on two levels.
First, you know when you’ve completed the task. That gives you a little boost of brain chemicals. And that little boost helps you to do another task, and so on.
Second, you can measure your progress. You can look at where you started, and see how much you have already done toward your goal.
Especially for long-term goals, you may not seem any closer than you were for quite a while. Being able to measure your progress helps reassure you that you are moving toward your goal. This helps you to stay motivated.
Hack #3: Track your time
You don’t need to account for every five-minute block in the day. That way lies madness. But have some method of figuring out where your time goes.
Don’t do this at the end of the day, either. Choose some method for tracking your activities while you do them. Either choose a free time tracking app, or keep notes in a paper planner.
Then, compare this data to your estimates of how long it will take you to complete various tasks.
What should you track?
Track all the time you spend working on specific tasks that relate to your goals and sub-goals.
But also track how much time you spend on other portions of your day. How much time do you spend eating meals or taking breaks? How long does it take to answer your emails each day?
This isn’t designed to make you feel guilty. (Although, it might encourage you to adjust your priorities.)
The goal of tracking your time is so that you can realistically plan how much you can get done.
For example, I know that I shouldn’t schedule more than 5 1/2 hours of goal-driven activities per day. I need the rest of my time for the daily routines like email, or taking breaks.
I know this because I track how closely my final time to complete a task matches my initial estimate.
Why it works
People are notoriously bad at planning how long they will take to do something.
When we estimate how long we’ll take, we use the most optimistic estimate.
If you once managed to get to a destination across town in 30 minutes, that’s how long you’ll expect to take. Even if every other time you drove it, you took between 45 minutes and an hour and a half.
On the flip side, we err in the other direction for how long we expect other people to take.
It doesn’t matter if 9 times out of 10 our favorite restaurant delivery service got our food to us in 20 minutes. If that tenth time they took 40 minutes, we’ll plan for all future deliveries to take 40 minutes.
That’s because these outliers stick in our brains. We feel great when we triumph over traffic, so we remember that. We forget all the other times that driving didn’t make us feel good.
The late food delivery made us feel bad. It doesn’t matter if it was because we got so hungry waiting for it, or we didn’t have time to eat it when it arrived. We felt bad, and don’t want to feel that way again.
If you have the hard data of how much time something took, you don’t rely on your memory. You can clearly see that most often, when you drove across town, it took 45–55 minutes.
You may still hope you can make it in 30. After all, you’re an amazing driver! But you’ll schedule at least 45 minutes.
Hack #4: Block off time for routine tasks and fun
As I mentioned above, the amount of time you spend on routine tasks and breaks may surprise you. But don’t think that to be productive you need to trim away all those tasks!
No, our brains work best when we can take a break from our main tasks.
Do something that occupies your hands and a little bit of your mind. But leave your subconscious churning over the problem you’re trying to solve.
When you return to your main task, you’ll often have an insight that helps to move your progress along.
This is why we so often get brilliant ideas while we’re taking a shower or washing dishes.
Personally, if I’m struggling with something, I’ll take a break to fold laundry. Something about creating order from chaos helps me to organize my thoughts. (Obviously, this is only an option for people who work from home.)
You also want to block off time to learn new things.
As the saying goes, you can’t do what you’ve never done with what you know now. You might read in your field, watch TED talks, or listen to motivational podcasts.
Whatever your choice, block off time to learn when you can relax and enjoy it. Stress inhibits learning.
Leave room for spontaneity
According to a joke, a high-powered professional couple were having marital problems. Their marriage counselor suggested that they be more spontaneous with each other. The couple immediately whipped out their DayTimers. After comparing their schedules, they decided to be spontaneous next Tuesday from 3–3:20pm.
That’s not what I’m talking about when I say block off time for fun.
Block off time to recover your mental and physical energy.
It could be a daily activity, such as quiet time to write in a journal. It could be time you block off on the weekends to spend with friends or family.
One member of my mastermind group goes skiing every other weekend. He returns refreshed and revitalized.
Another spends his Friday afternoons at poolside, relaxing and dreaming up new ideas. Still another starts his days with an hour and a half of meditation.
They all make sure these activities are put on their calendars before anything else.
Why it works
Why should you intersperse routine and fun activities with your tasks?
First, you can only remain intently focused for a limited period of time. Depending on the person and activity, that’s generally from 20–60 minutes. After that, your ability to perform the task drops off dramatically.
By interspersing focus time with breaks, you allow yourself to work at your most focused. This is the whole premise behind the Pomodoro method.
Second, taking time to do something you enjoy puts you in a flow state. When you’re in flow, your brain hums along at an elevated state. It’s easier to make connections between things or come up with new ideas.
Finally, you need to vary productive time with receptive time. Otherwise, you will exhaust your reserves of energy and creativity.
Conclusion
To reach your goals, you need to break those big goals into sub-goals. Then you need to create lists of tasks to reach those sub-goals.
These four goal-setting hacks will help you create task lists to reach your big goals:
- Focus on one aspect at a time
- Make friends with measurements
- Track your time
- Schedule routine and fun tasks
Using these goal-setting hacks will help you to make big progress toward your goals.
Ready to have a better tomorrow?
I’ve created a cheat sheet to help you increase your confidence and get control of your life. If you follow this daily, you will level up your life very quickly!