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Setting the right goals is incredibly important. One of the things that we know about the most productive people and the most productive companies is that they do a really good job at choosing the right goals. Because if you’re running towards the wrong finish line, it does not matter how hard your arms are pumping. You’re still moving in a bad direction.
Think big and small
So how do we choose the right goals? How do the most productive people and companies decide what to focus on, what they want to chase after? Well, there’s no universal principle that these are good goals and these are bad goals. It differs from person to person and setting to setting. But what we do know is that the right process for setting goals relies on tapping into our biggest ambitions and then pairing it with a plan that’s realistic.
Within psychology, they refer to this as the need to have both stretch goals and SMART goals. So a stretch goal is our big ambition. It’s this kind of impossible thing that we want to do. It’s the goal lines that we’re moving towards. And it’s important to know what you want to do. What’s most important and what’s going to change your world or change the world? But the problem with taking a big goal like that and writing it at the top of your To-Do list, for instance, is that it’s just too overwhelming. If you write down, “I want to increase revenues by 20 percent,” or “lose 30 pounds,” or “run a marathon,” that doesn’t tell you what to do the next day.
In fact, studies show that if you have a big goal like that and you write it at the top of your To-Do list on its own, it can actually demotivate you. It can make it seem like it’s too impossible. So what psychologists say is that if you’re writing a To-Do list, you should put this big goal, this stretch goal, at the top of your page and the top of your To-Do list, and then underneath you need to write SMART goals.
A SMART goal takes a big idea and breaks it into something that’s an actual plan. The reason it’s called a SMART goal is because it needs to fulfill these five categories. It needs to be specific, that’s the S. And it has to be measurable: Something that we can actually put something against so that we know when we’ve actually accomplished the goal. It has to be achievable. Which means that I’ve sat down and I’ve thought through, “What do I need to make this goal become real?” And then it needs to be R, realistic. Which means that I’ve gone in and I’ve found the resources or I’ve cleared my schedule well enough that I can actually act on this plan. And then T, timeline [time-bound]. I have to know how long this should take.
Now there’s numerous ways to create structured goals. But the reason I like SMART goals is because it’s just easy to remember, right? S – M – A – R – T. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and a timeline. If you define those five things about what you want to do tomorrow morning it only takes about 45 seconds to do. But it turns out you know exactly how to start when you get to your desk.
I actually do this every morning and it takes me probably two or three minutes to write out my To-Do list, to come up with a big stretch goal and my SMART goals for the day. And as a result, I know exactly what to do when I get to my desk. I know exactly how to start. I know how much time it should take. I know that I need to turn off my email for an hour and a half because what I’ve set aside, according to my timeline, is an hour and a half to get through all of my emails and to be well on my way to writing my next chapter.
Some structured goal-setting system like SMART goals allows us to create a plan. And although I have a big ambition, this stretch goal, this thing that is most meaningful to me that keeps me focused in the right direction, the SMART goals – this structured plan – that tells me what to do, how to start. And once I get started it’s so much easier to keep going.
Don’t use your To-Do list for “mood repair”
Before I started working on this book, I wrote To-Do lists the same way that most people write To-Do lists. And it turns out this is exactly the wrong way to write a To-Do list, according to psychologists and neurologists. I would sit down in the morning and I would just jot down all the tasks I wanted to do that day. And I would put a couple of things at the top of my page that were pretty easy to do because it felt so good to cross those off early in the day and feel a sense of accomplishment. And I’d put my big tasks at the bottom of the page. Sometimes at the top of the page, I would even write things that I had already done because it just made me so happy to sit at my desk and be able to cross something off right away.
Psychologists call this using a To-Do list for mood repair rather than for productivity. And it turns out this is exactly the wrong way to write a To-Do list. The right way to write a To-Do list, the way that genuinely productive people at companies write To-Do lists, is that at the top of the page, they write their big ambition – their stretch goal. They write something that seems almost impossible to achieve because that reminds you all day long what you actually want to get done. And then underneath they write out a plan. They write a SMART goal. They break that big ambition into small components.
Now that gives me a way to start in the morning. But what’s important is that when I get something accomplished, when I’m able to cross something off my To-Do list, I don’t experience that sense of relief that allows me to go spend half an hour or 90 minutes on Facebook, right? I don’t feel like I can take a break and I can go waste time wandering around. I’m ready to start on the next task because at the top of my page I’m constantly being reminded that, although I’m making incremental progress, this is in service to a bigger goal. There’s something bigger and more meaningful that I want to accomplish this day. And as long as I’m being reminded of that but I still have a plan, study after study shows I’m much more likely to get more things done and to focus on the right things each day.