Goals

May 11, 2021

Aaron Swartz inspired me to track my reads. After his tragic death in 2013, the Internet Hall of Fame wrote: “Aaron Swartz was a computer programming prodigy and activist who played an instrumental role in the campaign for a free and open Internet and used technology to fight social, corporate, and political injustices.”

He was so big on so many fronts—yet something else he’d been doing caught my attention better. I adored how much he read and how he published the books he finished every year. I started a web page to track my reads in 2012, which still lives under the name of WholeReads today—a personal Goodreads clone, as you may say. Swartz not only caused me to create a page to track the books I read, but he also motivated me to become a better reader.

Then came Phil Sturgeon, one of the maintainers of the web framework called CodeIgniter, which I was using back in the days. Just like Swartz, Sturgeon was publishing “year in review” posts but in a generic way that’s not limited to books. He mentioned the books he read, the half-marathon he finished, and what he’s programmed. I immediately fell in love with how he summed up his year. He was listing down everything he’s done in the past year and listing new goals for the following year. I still remember the moment I saw that goals section in his blog. 2013 was ending—it was the perfect time to list down what I wanted to accomplish in 2014 and then crush them one by one.

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The structure of the first goals I published was a copy of Sturgeon’s end-of-year review. I came up with more than 20 goals across different categories: personal, daily, romance, fitness, programming, career, academic, and volunteer work. It was an excellent exercise to see what I wanted to focus on in the coming year. It also helped me refresh my memory and motivation whenever I check the list during 2014. I was using a weighted algorithm to calculate the success rate, and that algorithm told me that I finished 48% of my goals. It was not bad, but there was no real direction as the goals were more like wishes, and I did not do anything for maybe most of my list. In the years that follow, I continued creating somehow yearly goals—every time with a bit of an improvement on the structure. The success rate was never above 50%, but I knew that I was getting towards enlightenment—albeit slowly. In 2021, I hit the sweet spot. Four-and-a-half months in, and I’ve already accomplished half of my goals for the whole year.

Artist: Gülfemin Buğu Tekcan — cosmodotart

One apparent reason why I got better at accomplishing my goals was to set up fewer of them. While my list contained 20+ items in 2014, I started following Warren Buffett’s 2-list strategy in the later years. The strategy is simple: You write down everything you want to do. You pick five items that will be your top goals and then avoid spending time on the others at all costs. Minimizing the number of goals helped me gather greater focus on the ones that mattered the most. The benefit of having fewer goals is also demonstrated by research on consumers’ saving behavior. The authors of the study showed that “presenting a single savings goal leads to greater savings intention and actual savings than presenting multiple savings goals.”

The research also states that the more goals you have, greater the chances you’ll have competing ambitions—which was often the case when I planned to do many things within a single year. Time was the leading blocker for me as it wasn’t plentiful to finish everything.

While setting up a minimal amount of goals for myself every year, I also began minimizing the extent of the goals. Targeting to read 52 books in 52 weeks may seem like a good idea, but if you haven’t read one book per week on a roll for an extended period, you would probably be falling for the planning fallacy. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described this prediction phenomenon in 1979, “wherein people underestimate the time it will take to complete a future task, despite knowledge that previous tasks have generally taken longer than planned.”

That’s why I decided to target the bare minimum with a laid-out plan. When this year began, I had a goal to publish fifty articles. The number comes from my plan to achieve writing weekly for the Sustainable Productivity series. I also write in other mediums, but this newsletter is the bare essential for my 2021 goals. I already surpassed fifty articles overall, but even if I could not publish my blog posts or tech articles that contributed to the overall number, I would still achieve my goal. Because the number fifty is tightly coupled to what I wanted to accomplish this year: Publishing the Sustainable Productivity series.

A crucial change between my goals in 2014 and 2021 is the type of items. Back then, I mainly was writing down the things I’d like to do. Examples include reading a book in French, living as a vegetarian for a month, and doing a bungee jump. They sound exciting, but they’re not really goals. The 2021 version is entirely different. Two of them are directly related to my life in Germany: Getting a driver’s license and learning A1 level German. Although they seem like two different goals, they help my everyday life in Germany. The other two contribute to my passion for learning: Reading books and publishing articles. I like both activities, and I’m intrinsically motivated to read and write. However, still, they benefit my ultimate goal of publishing a book. The author Angela Duckworth says that “the top-level goal is a compass that gives direction and meaning to all the goals below it” in her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

My low-level goals, in this case, become tracking points towards my ultimate concern.

Checking my goals within a year by keeping my ultimate goal in mind also paved the way for an exciting outcome. I’m currently reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. One striking suggestion the author made was to forget about setting goals. He argues that “goals are good for planning your progress,” however, what you should aim for is to build a system to “make progress.”

While ditching goals sounds counter-productive, what I came to do after eight years of trial and error is to plan the progress by goals and then have the system in place to achieve them. Publishing this newsletter, for example, is my system to make progress towards writing fifty articles.

The last point I want to address is something I kept doing since I started chasing my goals: Writing down. There are two significant benefits of listing down the goals. The first one is that it makes you think critically. You might think you have an attainable goal in your mind. But once you start writing it down, you also start analyzing and making it real. The second benefit is the motivation that comes with it. When you come up with goals and write them down, you get exposed to the generation effect. It “refers to the finding that subjects who generate information (e.g., produce synonyms) remember the information better than they do material that they simply read.”

You retain the goals you have, thus presenting a better chance to achieve them.

Do you write down your goals? Have they ever become more than new year resolutions? What do you do to come up with goals? How do you achieve them? Let me know in the comments.