Goals, For All Areas Of Life

SMART goals are what was constantly what I was taught at school of how goal setting should be done, however it didn’t really work for me - or anyone for that matter.

A meta-analysis published by the Psychological Bulletin in the '70s by Locke E.A., et al. stated that, in 90% of cases, specific and challenging goals lead to higher performance. The specificity of a goal is to make it attainable and precise to the task at hand, this I agree with. However, lofty yearly goals don’t really accomplish much day to day.

I’ve found that daily goals with a list of the most important tasks to least important, weekly goals, and then monthly and even yearly goals is much nicer and lot more feasible.

These can even broken down further.

Goals should be divided into relationships, profession/academics (depending on whether you’re at university or in a full-time job), health and hobbies. Three categories as described by Jodie Cook are: profession (your work, job, and career), decompression (your downtime doing very little), and obsession (something that you obsess over and that you can get very good at in your own time).

Profession is quite self-explanatory. You should set goals that you can accomplish in your academic or work career. Grades that you want to achieve in a semester, which can be broken down into how many hours of studying you wish to complete for the week, and then into each day, targeted to which lectures are most important to complete or which assignment has the nearest due date or will take the most time. Projects that you need to finish within a job, or emails that you need to send.

For me, the professional area is the easiest to come up with goals. As a university student, my next assignments are pretty self-explanatory. For someone in a full-time job, it might be different, and differs between a musician to a banker to a sportsman, but it should be obvious as to what goals day to day need to be completed.

Goals targeting your relationships are one of the most important areas to prioritize.

They can be challenging.

Connections with an intimate partner or a friend or a dog and yourself are their own categories, but developing goals is important in these areas too. I want to improve at being a better friend, and as I write this, a few of my friends are going through more challenging times in life.

Being there for someone isn’t just about bringing chocolates or texting them; it's much more than that. Having close friends is vital to our overall health and well-being. As aside from nutrition and physical health, social connections is a factor Harvard researchers state are important to predict healthy aging. Being a better friend, to me, is keeping track of everything my friends are achieving and logging what they are up to so the next time I see them or want to contact them I can ask about their exam or how their concert was that they went to the other day.

Even doing this with anyone I interact with makes me a better person as I can track anything I have learnt from the conversation.

Within a romantic relationship, it's the same, trust, communication, being present, and loving the other person are the areas that everyone knows are important.

However, having goals on how to improve your connection with someone can be very helpful. Today's goal might be to cook them a nice meal, and a month's goal that can be ongoing is to make sure you check in within the relationship and ensure that you’re both on the same page.

Health and exercise are an important part of life so we can live longer, happier lives. Everyone knows this.

But the goal of wanting to have a six-pack might not work for everyone.

Being a little more specific with monthly and daily goals to stay active is a better approach and in my opinion, a much better strategy than being super specific. When I tell myself I need to go the gym I, along with many other people, will jot down on my phone a specific workout plan that I’m going to follow every day and get up at 6 am to go to the gym, which of course does not work.

Listening to your body and discussing with yourself whether your 30 minutes of exercise - or more - is a gym session, a run, or a yoga class is more important.

When I was going from playing a lot of basketball and rowing to not much at all, I needed a way to stay active, and I found my interest in the gym. I had to start small, and if my body was sore from yesterday’s session, I would be okay with not going to the gym and be happy with a walk and a yoga session.

My favorite area is obsession and/or hobbies, of which there is a difference.

I’m a profound generalist, I have so many interests in a range of different areas and find joy in a lot of things. These ‘things’ I call hobbies, including cooking/baking, learning languages, fashion, and reading.

However, my obsession is writing - mainly poetry. Turning what I’ve learned into my own words where I can really think about what I want to say, and can play with consonants and alliteration and imagery, is fascinating to me and is the thing I love.

Wanting to be the best at something outside your main realm is drastically important, and isn’t the one thing you tell people you are when you first meet.

However, this is where the lines can get a bit blurry.

If we all follow the notion of having a job that we love, then shouldn’t the job be the obsession?

Well, not really.

An obsession in an ideal world is the next best thing, of which there is no monetary interest, i.e. you love it regardless if there was no one else on earth and no money to come of it.

It’s the thing you want to be the best at.

Setting goals for this area is where growth can happen; it's outside anyone else’s worry and doesn’t matter what happens within it. There are no relationships involved, no work needed to be done, and not vital to your health - unless of course, your obsession is trying the whole menu at restaurants. You can happily fail at it, and it doesn’t matter.

But make sure that time is divided into this area of your life too. University for me has become consuming this semester, and I have lost my habit of writing all the time. Daily, monthly, and yearly goals should not only apply to work and relationships, as this is where you invest in yourself and taking time for the things that you love to do is equally as important.

These four domains are like baskets, you have have 24 chips, tokens, coins, whatever you want to call them, each day and each of them should be divided accordingly. A 9-5 obviously takes 8 of those tokens, sleep takes another 8, so you really only have 8 tokens a day left to spend in what you want to do. But having this daily mindset can be really useful to achieve your weekly, monthly and yearly goals.