A Short Guide

to Setting and
Achieving Goals
By Belle B. Cooper
Every December I write about the best parts of the past
twelve months and my goals for the year ahead. Maybe
you do the same. Or maybe you like to spontaneously
choose a New Year’s Resolution while partying on
December 31st.

Or perhaps your goals tend to come from meetings

with your boss, where you work together to plan your
professional development for the next quarter.

Whatever your approach to goals, knowing the best ways

to effectively set and achieve those goals can give you a
leg up.

Unfortunately, most of us tend to set ourselves up

for failure in the way we chase our goals. We choose
unrealistic goals in the first place, fail to change our
environment to support our progress, and misunderstand
how our daily behavior gets us closer to—or further away
from—those goals.

With all this misunderstanding, it’s no wonder New Year’s

Resolutions fail so often.

Once we understand the most common pitfalls of

how we set goals, we can look at more successful
approaches. Setting smaller, more manageable goals
will help us avoid setting ourselves up for failure in the
first place. And regular reviews can help us keep an eye
on our progress and ensure we’re staying on track along
the way.

Since so many of us set goals anyway, why not do it in a

way that gives us the best chance for success?
 Why Goals And
Resolutions Fail And
What To Do About It
Despite the fact that most of us know New Year’s Resolutions fail, we
make them anyway. We’re sucked in by the promise of a fresh, new year
every twelve months, and end up making another vow to get fit, keep
the house clean, make new friends, or play that musical instrument
that’s been gathering dust since we bought it five January firsts ago.

But why do our goals and resolutions so often fail? What is it about
vowing to change our lives at the start of the year (or anytime, really)
that seems so promising, yet brings with it more disappointment than
lasting change?

The reasons for failure vary by goal and by person of course, but there
are a few things goals and resolutions usually have in common that
make them disappointment traps for anyone wanting more out of life.

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We choose unrealistic goals
Have you ever noticed how fitness programs, meal plans, and goal-
setting apps tend to oversell the progress you’ll make if you buy their
product? You never see a fitness program advertising that it’ll help you
lose an inch of body fat if you stick with it for a full year. Or a meal plan
that says six months is all you need to notice that you’re feeling better
and starting to lose weight.

Products designed to help us reach our goals love to sell us on seeing

huge results in a short period of time. And that’s why we buy them.

Unfortunately, this kind of attitude has led to something researchers

Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman call “false-hope syndrome.” The
problem is that we start out with unreasonable goals (often helped
along by whatever coaching program or plan we’ve signed up for), and
when we don’t lose 10 pounds in the first month or we slip up on our
no-smoking resolution after just a week, we get so disappointed that
we give up on trying to change at all.

False hope syndrome: When

we start with an unreasonable
goal, and quickly give up when
we fail to reach it.

Here’s how Polivy and Herman explain it:

“ When unreasonable expectations for self-change

are not met, people are likely to feel frustrated and
despondent, and to give up trying to change… This
phenomenon of beginning self-change attempts
with high hopes and expectations of successful
outcomes is illustrative of a phenomenon we call
the false-hope syndrome.

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Egged on by apps and programs designed to help us reach our goals,
we start off being over-confident about the results we’ll see (and how
quickly we’ll see them), only to be left disappointed and fed up with
goals when our results don’t meet our expectations.

The answer: Do a premortem for each goal

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist, offers
us a solution in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman credits
the idea of doing a premortem (as opposed to a postmortem) to his
colleague, Gary Klein.

The idea is simply to imagine you’ve already tried achieving your goal
and failed, then to examine what went wrong. Here’s Kahneman:

“ Imagine that you are [x amount of time] into

the future. You implemented your plan as it now
exists. The outcome was a disaster. Take five to ten
minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.

Say you’re working on building a new app. Your goal is to launch it

successfully in the next six months. Now imagine you’re six months into
the future, and you’ve launched the app based on your current plan,
but it wasn’t a success at all.

Premortem: Imagine you’ve already

failed to achieve your goal and
complete a post-mortem: examine
what went wrong and how you could
adjust your approach next time.

Working through what made your launch a failure, you might find
that not enough people heard about your launch, so your sales or
download figures were far lower than predicted. So why didn’t people
hear about your new app? Maybe you cold-emailed tech publications

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and journalists and didn’t get a bite. That could be a clue that you’d be
better off building relationships with those people before your launch.

Or maybe you sent a launch announcement to your mailing list, but it

didn’t turn into sales. Perhaps you didn’t spend enough time building
up a big mailing list before your launch. Or perhaps your mailing list
emails weren’t convincing enough, so you need to work on better
email copy.

Imagining what would make for a disaster and drilling down into each
reason behind the failure can help you uncover gaps in your current
plan, so you can strengthen your plan before you fail.

While optimism and self-confidence are important for achieving our

goals, doing a premortem can help ground us in reality. When we
examine what could stop us from achieving our goals before we even
get started, we can identify and avoid those pitfalls, rather than letting
them surprise us and falling victim to the false-hope syndrome.

Author Brad Stulberg says when you force yourself to realize everything
that could go wrong, “you become more likely to take the necessary
steps to ensure that things go right.”

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We don’t feel connected to our future selves
Unfortunately, achieving goals tends to mean taking a hit right now
(being uncomfortable, denying ourselves our favourite foods, taking
time away from watching TV to exercise, and so on) in order to create
good results for our future selves. The problem with this is that we’re
quite bad at identifying with our future selves and predicting how we’ll
feel in the future.

Even after looking back on how much we’ve changed in the past ten
years, for instance, people tend to predict that they’ll be mostly the
same in the following ten years. Because we can’t predict how much
we’ll change in the future, it’s hard to make decisions now that will
benefit us long-term. Our present selves and short-term desires tend
to clash with our future selves and longer-term wishes.

The answer: think in smaller time units

One method research shows can help us overcome this problem is
to think about time in smaller units—such as days or weeks instead
of months or years. This can make future events seem closer, which
motivates us to act sooner.

For instance, one study asked participants how soon they would start
saving for college if it started in either 18 years or in 6,570 days. Other
participants were asked how soon they’d start saving for retirement
that started in either 40 years or 14,600 days.

The participants who were asked about events starting in a number of

days, rather than years, said they’d start saving four times sooner.

Another study found that events seemed an average of 29.7 days

sooner—almost a whole month—when they were considered in days
instead of months. And events considered in months rather than years
seemed 8.7 months sooner—more than half a year.

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So if you’re struggling to get started on a goal because you can’t
identify with your future self, try considering future events in smaller
units of time. Thinking about how many days or weeks it is until your
next birthday, for instance, might motivate you to start exercising or
eating right sooner than you would have done otherwise. Or thinking
about how many months away your retirement is might help you take
action on asking for a pay rise sooner.

We misunderstand the effects of our behavior

While false-hope syndrome can kill our goals when we don’t reach
our expectations, combined with the progress bias we barely have
a chance. The progress bias, according to Margaret C. Campbell,
professor of marketing at the University of Colorado at Boulder, refers
to a common misunderstanding of how our behaviors affect our
progress towards our goals.

Progress bias: Our tendency to overestimate

the effects of our goal-supportive behaviors
(like exercising) and to underestimate the
effects of behaviors that don’t support our
goals (like skipping a workout).

Essentially, we overestimate the good effects of our behavior in

support of our goals, and we underestimate the bad effects of cheating
on our goals.

Here’s Campbell:

“ … we find that people tend to have a “progress

bias” such that they perceive that goal-consistent
behaviors (such as avoiding eating a piece of cake)
help progress more than the equivalent goal-
inconsistent behaviors (such as eating a piece of
cake) hurt progress.

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The progress bias is so dangerous, in fact, that in a study conducted
by Campbell, participants who started out wanting to expend more
calories than they consumed did the opposite.

The answer: focus on keystone habits instead

If we’re so terrible at measuring the effects of our behaviors, how can
we ever hope to reach our goals? According to writer Mark Manson, the
answer is to focus on small, regular habits.

Keystone habits: Habits that have

compounding effects by making it
easier for us build other healthy habits
or make more healthy choices.

Manson explains that focusing on daily habits is like cultivating an

attitude of investing your money for high returns—a little at a time
that builds up over a longer period. Focusing on goals, however, is like
spending all your money to acquire one-off items.

Goals are one-time decisions, says Manson. You spend x amount of

effort to receive y reward, and then you’re done. Since there’s no
reason to keep spending effort once the goal is accomplished, you
don’t bother—and that’s why we put back on the weight we lose, take
up smoking again, or fall back into bad eating habits after being on a
diet for months.

Habits, however, require spending smaller amounts of effort to achieve

results that compound over time.

“ With goals, every day you go back to the gym feels

harder. With habits, after a while it feels harder to
not go to the gym than it does to go.

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There are some habits, says Manson, that offer a better return for
your investment of effort than others. Researchers call these keystone
habits, since they tend to lead to other healthy habits naturally.

A common example is exercise. In The Power of Habit Charles Duhigg

points out that research shows building a regular exercise habit often
leads people to also tidy their house more regularly, make healthier
eating decisions, and procrastinate less.

Here’s Manson:

“ I like to think of keystone habits as “compounding

habits” because, much like compounding returns
on an investment, over a long enough period of
time, they can increase the richness of your life
exponentially.

So if you struggle to reach your goals, try focusing on building a small,

daily habit instead. If your goal this year is to lose weight, for instance,
rather than trying to achieve that all at once try aiming for a habit of
30 minutes of exercise daily. It’s a lot easier to succeed at something
small every day than it is to build up all the right behaviors and stick
with them over a long period of time until you reach a big goal.

Contexts keep us doing the same old bad habits

So what if you’re having just as much trouble with building small habits
as you had with goals? That may just come down to context, according
to Rebekah Boynton and Anne Swinbourne from James Cook University.

It’s hard to break out of old behavior patterns, they say, because
“habitual behaviour is automatic, easy and rewarding.”

Our existing behaviors are triggered by contextual cues, say Boynton

and Swinbourne, such as time of day, location, or objects you see
around you. It’s these things, therefore, that we need to change if we’re

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going to change our behaviors.

But we also need to pay attention to what happens after a particular

behavior. If we feel rewarded after eating a donut, for instance,
we’re probably going to want to do it again. But if we feel good right
after exercising, we’ll want to do that again. It works the same way
regardless of what the behavior itself is.

“Quite simply,” say Boynton and Swinbourne, “if a pleasant outcome

follows a new behavior, you’re more likely to repeat it.”

So there’s a two-pronged approach here: the contexts around us that

trigger our behaviors and the way we feel after a behavior. Feeling
bored, for instance, might lead us to eat a donut. And after eating the
donut we feel good, so we’ll want to do it again. Our existing behaviors
are resistant to change because they’re held in place at both ends.

The answer: Change your context to make new

behaviors easier
The answer in this case is fairly obvious (though not necessarily easy):
we need to adjust the cues that encourage us to do our old behaviors,
and the rewards we get from those behaviors, while also adding cues
and rewards related to the new habits we want to develop.

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“To form a new habit,” according to Boynton and Swinbourne, “you
need to maximize the triggers and cues that lead to the desired
behaviour and avoid triggers to the less desirable behaviour.”

Essentially this comes down to a very simple process: make it harder

(and less rewarding) to do behaviors you want to stop, and easier (and
more rewarding) to do habits you want to build.

Activation energy: The amount

of effort required to start doing
your goal behavior.

Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage uses the term

“activation energy” to refer to the amount of effort it takes to go from
doing nothing to doing your goal behavior. He suggests focusing on
minimising activation energy for habits you want to do often, to make it
easier to get started.

For Achor, learning guitar was a habit he wanted to build but was
struggling with. Improving his contexts helped him overcome the
hurdle of getting started:

“ I had kept my guitar tucked away in the closet, out

of sight and out of reach. It wasn’t far out of the
way… but just those 20 seconds of extra effort it
took to walk to the closet and pull out the guitar
had proved to be a major deterrent…

I took the guitar out of the closet, bought a $2

guitar stand, and set it up in the middle of my
living room… three weeks later, I looked up at a
habit grid with 21 proud check marks.

Remember how Boynton and Swinbourne said the objects around you

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and your location are examples of context for behaviors? Achor moved
his guitar so it would be visible when he was in the living room—a place
he was likely to go to when he had spare time and wanted to relax.
Seeing the guitar at a time when he was available to play it was a big
enough change in context that he played it every day for three weeks.

In a similar fashion, putting junk food in containers that aren’t see-

through and keeping it out of reach makes it harder to eat than if you
kept snacks on the kitchen counter in an open bowl. Making it harder
to do bad habits and easier to do good habits means your environment
will work with you to reach your goals.

Whether you’re trying to give up a bad habit or build a new, healthy

one, think about the contexts that affect your behavior, and the
rewards you get when you do certain things. Adjusting the before and
after of a habit can make it stick more or less than it would otherwise.

Whether it’s our own psychology or a well-marketed fitness program,

we’re often lulled into traps when setting goals. We have unrealistic
expectations, we misunderstand the effects of our behavior, and we’re
stuck in contexts that stop us making lasting changes.

Thankfully, psychologists have done the hard work for us to figure out
how to overcome these barriers. They’re not going to the gym for us or
cheering us on when we’re struggling to say no to another snack, but
by helping us set better goals in the first place they’ve got us one step
closer to success.

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 Why you should be
setting smaller goals
Big goals are exciting. At the start of each year I love setting a few big,
audacious goals to aim for over the following 12 months.

But big goals have downsides, too. They can set us up for failure if we
set goals that are too big to achieve, or if we don’t break them down
and work towards them systematically.

Sonia Thompson, founder of TRY Business School, says big goals and
high standards are a recipe for failure:

“
Setting the bar too high can serve to de-motivate
and discourage you from ever getting started.

Lots of us set exciting goals, says Thompson, but struggle to reach

them because they’re too big to be achievable. She says the way
people set goals is the problem:

“ They set their standards too high. And when they

have trouble keeping up with the level of activity
required to meet their standard, their confidence
takes a hit.

So let’s look at an alternative: small goals.

Small goals, more often

Small goals tend to be easier to achieve than big goals. Saving for a
new computer, for instance, is easier than saving for a house deposit.
Giving talks at 3 conferences is easier than earning half your income

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from speaking engagements.

Because small goals are easier to achieve, we can also set them
more often.

Author and professional speaker Dorie Clark says setting smaller goals
for shorter time periods makes you more flexible and quicker to adapt
to new information or changing circumstances. Setting a year-long
goal, for instance, can leave you doing something that doesn’t make
sense six months later, after your circumstances or priorities have
changed. Or you might give up on your year-long goal when it stops
making sense, but be left goal-less until the new year rolls around.

■ QUICK TIP: Set your goals for shorter time

periods such as one month, or one quarter, rather
than annually.

Clark, for example, set a goal to get fit by playing racquetball with
a friend, but soon found the early-morning games left her sleep-
deprived and unproductive. If that was a year-long goal, Clark might
have been left without any fitness plan for the rest of her year when
she gave up the morning racquetball games.

Clark’s current approach is to set goals every six months, rather than
annually, and to limit herself to just two goals. “The point of goals,” she

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says, “isn’t to successfully complete tasks we blindly set ourselves to
years ago.”

“ … what counts is our ability to master the right

kind of big goals—the ones that can change your
life… You can only accomplish those kinds of goals
when you’re willing to question assumptions
regularly and re-evaluate as necessary.

Small wins beget confidence

Researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer have found that “of
all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions
during a workday, the single most important is making progress in
meaningful work.”

The great thing about this research is that it shows regular small
wins can boost our motivation and happiness at work. So we don’t
necessarily need to set and achieve big goals to enjoy our work.

Consultant and author John Brubaker says this comes back to self-
efficacy, or our confidence in our own abilities. Our confidence
increases or decreases, says Brubaker, based on our ability to make
progress.

So each small win gives us a feeling of progress, which makes us more

confident in our own abilities, and thus more happy and motivated.

So how can you achieve lots of small wins? Small goals, of course!

Or, as Brubaker puts it, “baby steps”:

“
The one primary motivation that leads us to
persevere is baby steps.

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Lots of small goals that lead to overall progress will keep us motivated
and happy along the way. They also play into something called “goal
gradient,” which essentially means that the closer you get to achieving
something, the harder you’re willing to work to make it happen.

■ QUICK TIP: Set small goals that act as stepping

stones toward bigger goals to keep yourself
motivated along the way.

With small goals, you get close to your aim more often, so you’re more
likely to work hard to achieve those goals. Big goals take longer, and
you won’t feel that goal gradient as often.

Goal gradient: The closer you are to a

goal, the harder you’ll work to achieve it.

A great example of how the goal gradient works with baby steps was
borne out in a study using coffee reward cards. Participants were given
cards that entitled them to one free coffee after they bought 10. When
participants got closer to earning the free coffee, researchers noticed
they bought coffees more often to get to their goal faster.

Another group of participants was given a card that offered one free
coffee after they bought 12. These participants were given cards that
already had two coffee purchases counted, so they had 10 to buy
before earning a free coffee—the same as participants with the “buy
10, get 1 free” cards. But the group with 12-coffee cards actually filled
up their cards faster, because a card with two coffees already counted
gave them a feeling of progress that brought the goal gradient into
play. Even though they needed to buy the same number of coffees as
the first group, this group felt they had already made progress and
their goal was close, so they bought coffees faster in order to achieve
their goal.

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You probably don’t want to trick yourself into buying more coffee, but
you can use the benefits of the goal gradient on yourself by setting
smaller goals more often. Make your goals faster and easier to achieve
and you’ll be able to chain a lot of small wins together to make more
progress overall.

Start tiny. Really tiny

If you’re not sure how small your small goals should be, Sonia
Thompson has a useful suggestion: try setting tiny goals.
Embarrassingly tiny, in fact.

Thompson says tiny goals help us build the momentum we need to

chase slightly bigger goals later. An embarrassingly small goal is so
small it feels silly not to do it. But even a goal that small can still feel
good when you achieve it. You’ll still feel like you’re making progress.

■ QUICK TIP: Start with embarrassingly tiny,

five-minute goals to give yourself a sense of
accomplishment and progress.

Embarrassingly small goals give you a solid way to start making

progress and achieving small wins immediately. They’re not six-month
or even quarterly goals. They’re tiny, five-minute, one-hour, one-day
goals. And they’ll give you the momentum and confidence to work up to
quarterly or bi-annual goals, says Thompson.

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 “
It may sound counterintuitive, but the key to
getting extraordinary results is to go small rather
than big. Take the pressure off of yourself to
accomplish heroic feats each day.

Whether you already like to set big, annual goals and struggle to
reach them, or you don’t yet have a regular goal-setting approach,
try starting small. Set one embarrassingly tiny goal and start working
towards it. Take notice of how your motivation increases as you get
closer to your goal.

Then, use that momentum to set a slightly bigger goal. Each goal you
achieve will reinforce your self-efficacy, so your belief in your ability
to reach your goals will increase as the size of your goals does. Just
remember not to go too big—small goals more often and lots of small
wins along the way are key.

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 Why you should keep
your goals secret

You might have heard the idea that sharing your goals publicly can
help you stay on track. Public commitment means public failure if you
don’t achieve what you set out to do. And it means your friends, family,
and colleagues can support you along the way.

But for a particular type of goal, sharing it publicly can actually

backfire, making you less likely to achieve your goal.

Think about a goal you have. Is it a goal to do something, or to be

something? Goals that focus on changing your identity are, not
surprisingly, known as identity-based goals, and it’s these that can
cause problems when shared publicly.

It’s specifically the fact that identity-based goals are tied to how we

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see ourselves that makes them so tricky. These are goals like being a
better parent, being a successful doctor, or being a wealthy investor.

They’re different to goals based purely around taking action, such as

running a marathon, renovating your bathroom, or learning to play
guitar. Though the overlap can be tricky, as running a marathon isn’t
necessarily tied to your identity, but if you connect it to the idea of
being someone who runs marathons or being someone who exercises a
lot, then it can become an identity-based goal.

■ QUICK TIP: When setting a goal, think about

whether it’s related to being different or doing
something different. A goal that’s focused on
being a different person is an identity-based goal.

Why identity-based goals should be kept secret

For goals that tap into a change in how we identify ourselves, making a
public commitment can make us less likely to achieve those goals.

This is because telling someone about our commitment to an identity-

changing goal feels similar to actually making progress on that goal.
When we share with someone that we want to be a better friend, or a
more active person, or a successful writer, we get the feeling that we
already are those things, just by talking about them.

This was shown in a series of studies by New York University

psychologist Peter Gollwitzer and colleagues. In one of the
experiments, law students were asked to rate their agreement with
statements about their commitment to studying law. After completing
this questionnaire, some students had their answers acknowledged by
researchers, while others had their answers ignored—thus, some of the
students had shared their responses and some had kept theirs private.

Afterwards the students were given a task involving hard legal analysis
work, and told they could quit whenever they wanted to. The students

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who had kept their responses to the questionnaire private worked
longer on the task than those who’d shared their answers.

To explore the effects of sharing goals publicly on our sense of

identity, another experiment led by Gollwitzer asked law students to
write down three specific things they would do to help them become
successful attorneys. Again, some of these papers were discussed with
researchers and some were kept private.

The students were then asked to choose a photo of a Supreme Court

Justice that showed how much they currently identified as a jurist
themselves. The photos were of various sizes, with previous research
showing the bigger the image chosen, the more the subject identifies
with the photo.

In this case, students who’d shared the steps they planned to take
towards a successful legal career were more likely to choose larger
images, showing they currently identified themselves more strongly as
jurists than those who’d kept their plans secret.

I’ve noticed this effect in myself, too. Whenever I start a new exercise
plan, before I’ve even done a single workout, I find myself identifying
more as a “fit person” than I did previously. It’s a strange quirk of our
brains that just making a plan for changing our identities can often be
enough to make us think of ourselves differently—making it harder to
actually take action on that plan.

■ QUICK TIP: If you’re working on an identity-

based goal, keep it to yourself.

As Art Markman, cognitive scientist at the University of Texas explains,

Gollwitzer’s research shows that “wanting to have a particular identity
is an important motivator in carrying out the activities one needs
to perform to succeed.” If our goals are kept secret, acting on those
goals—i.e. working hard towards achieving them—is the only way we

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can achieve that identity in the eyes of others. Becoming a successful
lawyer, for instance, is something we have to work towards achieving if
we want others to see us that way without ever telling them that’s what
we’re aiming for.

Markman says this is why sharing our goals can reduce our efforts to
achieve those goals:

“
When those activities are the only marker that
you and others have that you have taken on a
particular identity, then your motivation to work
hard will be strong. When there are other ways
to communicate your identity to others, your
motivation to work hard will not be as strong.

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 Weekly, monthly, and
annual reviews: why
they matter and how
to do them
There’s something quite special that happens when we reflect on what
we’ve done.

Well, two things, actually. One is that we gain a better understanding

of what we’ve done or learned. The other is that our self-efficacy
improves—that is, our belief in our own abilities.

Self-efficacy: Your belief in your

own ability to do something.

Self-efficacy is a powerful thing because the more we believe we have

the ability to perform well, the more we do perform well.
Researchers have found that the practice of reflection makes what
we’ve learned stick in our minds better, as well as improving our
performance. In fact, there comes a point in our work or training when
we’ve learned enough that reflecting on our experience can boost our
performance more than further practice.

A study of customer service representatives found that those who

regularly reflected on their training performed 25% better on the final
test than other trainees. They also improved their chance of receiving
the highest rating for their service by 20%.
The funny thing about this research, though, is that when given the
choice, most people choose more practice over reflection. It seems we
prefer doing to thinking.

But reflecting is good for us—whether it’s tracking our progress on

goals or taking note of what we’ve learned, reflecting regularly helps us
refocus and better understand ourselves.

In this section I’ll look at three forms of regular reflection and how to
implement them: weekly, monthly, and annual reviews.

Weekly reviews: keeping you organized

The weekly review is a chance to tie up loose ends, prepare for the
week ahead, and reflect on short-term goals.

Writer Alan Henry finds the benefits of conducting a weekly review

make it worth finding the time on a regular basis:

“ You’ll be more organized, you’ll never wonder if

there’s something you forgot to do or something
you should be working on, and you’ll never be
afraid you forgot about something important.

If you find it difficult to sit down every week and reflect on your
progress, you’re not alone. For writer Chris Bowler, his weekly review
was something to dread, because initially it just consisted of trawling
through his task manager. As Bowler points out, to-do lists aren’t much
fun to review because they tend to include lots of tasks we should do
but don’t want to, and things we want to do but can’t right now.

Because Bowler’s to-do list was frustrating, his weekly review ended up
that way, too, making it harder to do:

“ If [your] review is just another chance to get

frustrated, you’ll let it slide more often.

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Bowler was able to improve his weekly review by focusing less on his
task list and more on his achievements from the past week and goals
for the week ahead:

“ Previously, I would get frustrated with my weekly

reviews as they would feel mostly useless. Now, I
enjoy the process and look forward to the exercise.

■ QUICK TIP: Spend your weekly review covering

your achievements and highlights from the
week, rather than focusing on tasks you
completed (or didn’t).

Since completing weekly reviews consistently, Bowler has been able to

shake bad organization habits such as setting arbitrary due dates for
all his tasks so they wouldn’t be forgotten.

“
Since I’m bad at reviewing my projects regularly,
I’ve developed this habit of setting a due date to
bring a task back to my attention.

Now Bowler’s reviews include time to go over his projects and plan his
tasks for the week ahead, replacing this bad habit and keeping him
more organized.

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What to include in your weekly review
If you’re just getting started with your own weekly review you’ll
probably need to do some trial-and-error to figure out what works
best for you. But to get you going, here’s a step-by-step example from
author Michael Hyatt. Hyatt’s review consists of 8 steps designed to
stop important tasks or appointments from being forgotten and help
him stay on top of his workload.

Step 1: Sort through all loose papers. Some will need filing, others
may need to be actioned, and some might simply need to be recycled.

Step 2: Sort through notes from the past week. All notes taken
during the week are reviewed for action items, anything needing
following up, and any information that needs to be transferred
elsewhere for more permanent storage.

Step 3: Review last week’s calendar. Check for any follow-up

needed for past events.

Step 4: Review annual goals. This is where you start looking ahead
to the coming week. Review annual goals and ensure the next step for
each goal is planned and scheduled on your to-do list or calendar.

Step 5: Review upcoming week’s calendar. Check if any coming

events require preparation and schedule time to get this done.

Step 6: Review in-progress projects. Make sure the next step of

each project is planned and scheduled.

Step 7: Review delegated tasks. Check anything that you’ve

delegated or tasks where you’re waiting for someone else’s input and
follow up if necessary.

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Step 8: Review your someday/maybe list. Go through your list of
projects, ideas, and tasks you’d like to do someday when you have
time. This is your chance to choose something from that list and
schedule it into your week.

This process might sound complicated, but with a checklist and some
patience you could get through a list like this every week. Hyatt’s
review not only helps him prepare for the week ahead, it also ensures
nothing from the past week gets forgotten or overlooked.

■ QUICK TIP: Create a checklist you can re-use to

streamline your weekly review process.

Alan Henry says his weekly review helps him re-evaluate the work he
does and how he plans for the week ahead:

“ I learned that when you take time to step back

and reconnect with the things you have to do and
why you have to do them, you begin to understand
what’s really important, what you really have
time for, what you need help with, and how much
bandwidth you actually have.

Monthly reviews: tracking progress on goals

We all love to set big goals at the start of a new year, but they’re very
likely to fail. Monthly goals, on the other hand, are easier to manage.

A monthly review gives you a chance to reflect on a longer period

without being so vast it’s hard to grasp.

According to author and zen habits founder Leo Babauta, the monthly
review “helps me feel like I’ve accomplished something in just a month,
and it lets me take a big-picture look at my life.”

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A monthly review is a good chance to set new goals, assess your
behavior from the past month, and celebrate your achievements.

I’ve been writing and sharing my own monthly reviews for a couple of
years and I’ve found the added transparency of sharing my reviews has
helped to keep me accountable to the goals I set each month.

What to include in your monthly review

Buster Benson, creator of 750 Words, keeps his monthly reviews simple.
The main sections he includes are:

• Highlights from the past month

• His current weight and any change compared to the previous
month
• The outcome of last month’s goal
• Goals (usually just one) for the month ahead
• Any changes to his codex—a list of his values and personal beliefs
revisited monthly
• Books, movies, articles, podcasts, or albums enjoyed in the past
month

Benson publishes his monthly reviews on Medium, so you can explore

real-life examples of his template in action.

For an even simpler template, Rosetta Thurman from Happy Black

Woman has you covered. Her monthly review consists of just four steps:

1. List everything significant that happened last month. This doesn’t

have to be just your achievements—any significant life changes or
events you attended also belong here.
2. Reflect on these three things from the past month:
• Your biggest personal milestone
• Your biggest professional accomplishment
• Your most valuable lesson learned

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3. Choose a theme or emotion that sums up the past month for you.
4. Set goals for the month ahead.

Of course, the best monthly review template will be the one that works
for you. For more inspiration, my newsletter The Monthly Review sends
out various personal reviews every month. If you’ve already started
your own monthly review, you can even submit it for inclusion in the
newsletter.

Annual reviews: a chance to reflect and reset

There’s nothing quite like a brand new year for reflecting and setting
new goals. Annual reviews tend to be longer than monthly or weekly
reviews, simply because there’s a lot more to reflect on and a bigger
time period to plan ahead for.

But that doesn’t have to make your annual review overwhelming.

Whether you take a week off in December to complete it like
entrepreneur and author Chris Guillebeau, or wrap it up in an afternoon,
your annual review only needs to cover what’s important to you.

Maybe you want to reflect on your business or career achievements

of the past year. Or maybe you like to set lots of goals each year, then
reflect on your progress towards them.

Or perhaps you just enjoy making a list of your favorite books,

movies, and TV shows from the past year, as I do.

Like any other review, a personal annual review is for you and should
include whatever you find most useful. Even if that changes from year
to year.

What to include in your annual review

Celes Chua from the blog Personal Excellence provides a 6-step

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template for creating your own annual review:

1. Reflect on your biggest accomplishments from the past year.

2. Reflect on your biggest lessons learned in the past year.
3. Give yourself a score for how well the past year went. You can give
yourself a grade from F to A+ or a score from 1-10.
4. Plan your goals for the next year by asking yourself what it would
take to look back on this year as your best year ever, or to rate it 10/10.
5. Plan any new habits you can build to help you achieve the goals
you set in the previous step.
6. Plan your immediate next steps to achieve each of the goals you set.

If you prefer more in-depth reflection on the past year, Leo Babauta
has some handy suggestions for finding details of everything you did:

• Check your TripIt account, or anywhere else you record details of

your travels throughout the year to remember the trips you took.
• Browse all files on your computer created in the past year to see
what you spent time working on.
• Look through your Amazon order history and credit card statement
to see what you spent money on.
• Read through your notes and journal entries from the past year.

You can also set your RescueTime dashboard to show all your time
logged and your productivity pulse for the full year:

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Or, if you like having all your data in one place, you could use a service
like Gyroscope or Exist*. Both of these services offer annual reports of
your data that give you a simple way to reflect on your activities from
the past year.

You may not want to dedicate a whole week of your life to your annual
review as Chris Guillebeau does, but even spending an afternoon
reflecting on what you achieved in the past year and where you want to
be in 12 months’ time can bring clarity to your daily plans.

Guillebeau credits his annual review with much of his success as a

writer and entrepreneur:

“ When someone asks how I can do “so much,” I

always mention this week-long planning process.
There is no hidden secret to working towards a lot
of big goals at the same time, but taking the time
to clearly define specific objectives each year has
helped me more than anything else.

If you read this section thinking reviews sound like a good idea but too
much hassle, you might want to try writer Laura Vanderkam’s approach
of writing your review ahead of time. Writing your annual review at the
start of the year tells you what to work on, she says.

“
I think the best approach is to plan for great
things, but be open to even more wonderful things
happening that you didn’t know to plan for.

Vanderkam suggests imagining it’s the end of the year right now, and
the year went well. Now write down the 3-5 things that made it such a
great year.

This tells you ahead of time what to work on. All you have to do is work

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towards making that review a reality.

“ … articulating what you find interesting and

meaningful can help answer the question of “I
have time, what should I do with it?”

■ QUICK TIP: Imagine the year is already over, and

it was your best year ever. Write down what made
it a great year, then use that review as a list of
goals to work towards.

If you’re ready to try your own reviews, grab one of the templates
above and adjust as you go. You’ll find your own needs change over
time and dictate what kind of reflection is most useful.

*Full disclosure: I’m a co-founder of Exist.

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Whether you set small goals or big ones, monthly goals
or New Year’s Resolutions, you’re at risk of failing if you
misunderstand how goals work. Many of us set goals with
good intentions but fail to achieve them anyway.

Understanding the less obvious—and perhaps more

counterintuitive—aspects of goal setting can help us make
plans that are more likely to succeed. We can stop setting
unrealistic goals, change our environments to improve our
chances of success, and focus on smaller time periods.

Perhaps most importantly, knowing why big goals so often

fail, we can set smaller goals that help us achieve quick
wins and act as stepping stones toward bigger life changes.
And with regular reviews, it’s easier to recognize and
acknowledge these small wins and keep ourselves on track
as we work toward bigger goals.

Before you set new goals, check that you’re not falling
prey to any of the common pitfalls we’ve explored. Though
they’re not obvious, the strategies we’ve covered can be
the difference between disheartening failures and actually
achieving your goals.

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 Further Reading
• The End of Year Review: Set Yourself up for a Productive New Year
by Reflecting on the Past

• How to conduct your own annual review

• The Monthly Review

• Forget Big Goals. Take Baby Steps for Small, Daily Wins.

• Don’t Set Too Many Goals for Yourself

• Systematically Turning Time and Effort Into Results

• To Keep Your New Year’s Resolution, Use Your Own Laziness to Your
Advantage

• Keystone Habits: Improve All Areas of Your Life with One Small
Habit

• Your goals are overrated

• How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story
of My Life

• The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

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