The Process
This is part of a series:
Overview
In this series’ preceding posts I covered the strategies I use to drive consistent behaviors in areas that aid my self fulfillment. Identifying the actions that lead to fulfillment is by no means an easy task, yet it is the crucial starting point for performing worthwhile actions. Once your virtues have been identified and you understand the techniques to perform consistent action towards overarching goals, such as sessions, routines, and retrospectives, the process can be applied for discrete application.
The First of the Year
I choose to start my goal setting at the start of the New Year. The annual turning of the calendar offers a natural time to take stock of life and reevaluate direction. At this point I select a few projects and overarching goals to work on throughout the year, using my virtues to guide the selections. As always, start small and select a reasonable number of items to be done. There’re few things that knock one off track with as much efficiency as trying to do too much.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I set goals for 2024 in this fashion. Here’s a subset of my goals set for the year:
- Releasing a new batch of Mottled Moth songs
- Visiting friends out of state
- Developing a website
- Improve my culinary skills
It’s worth noting that perfection and completing every item on the list is not necessarily the goal here. Things come up, and priorities change as new opportunities emerge. For instance one of my goals this year was to take my film photography, something I do off and on for fun, and compile it into a Zine of some sort. When I started slotting this into my life, I realized that I was not prepared to do the work properly to get this done in a satisfying fastion. I find that it’s helpful to know when to drop an idea, so that efforts are not spread past their usefulness.
The First of the Month
Identify a project or two you’d like to progress during the coming month. Come up with a single step, realistically achievable in the next month, to complete. For this example, I’ll use my current Mottled Moth project. In my current state, my next step is to finish writing lyrics for my next batch of 5 songs. I’ll schedule a session for once a week, every Thursday, to work towards completing this stage of the project.
Some goals are more passive, and are developed through smaller habits rather than dedicated session time. For these I establish routine lists for different timeframes. These require some initial setup, but once they exist you can use the same ones every day/week/month. On subsequent months, I’d just take a few minutes to review my routines and make sure they align with how I want to live.
My routines look something like this:
Daily
- Meditate - spirit
- Read 10 pages - lore
- Cook dinner or do the dishes - home
- Take out the trash - home
- Exercise for 45 minutes - fitness
- Don’t smoke a cigarette - fitness
Weekly
- Clean a bathroom - home
- Play 3 chess games - knowledge
- Check-in with a friend - network
- Listen to a new album - lore
- Write a journal entry - spirit
Monthly
- Watch a movie - lore
- Demo a song - creativity
Typically, routines should have some metric observable over time to validate that a routine’s consistency is paying off. For example for any fitness related goals, a successful metrics for me are tracking body weight and miles ridden on my bike. I like to write down the current value of my metrics, and set a target I’d like to meet by the end of the month.
Daily
Daily life is where past intentions meet future accomplishments. The ultimate goal of meticulous planning is to create a well-intentioned to-do list that removes the mental strain of scheduling important activities. Throughout the day, my focus is simply to complete the scheduled tasks and routines. Consistency, once cultivated, builds momentum, making it easier to maintain. The more you rely on the to-do list as a guide for how to spend your time, the more naturally your habits will integrate into your daily rhythms.
In the evening, take some time to review how many daily routines were completed. Do this at the same time every day to establish a ritual. I take a minute to do a short gratitude journal at the end of the day when I do this, and set an intention for the day to come.
Weekly
I take time on Sunday to review how my days went the previous week. If I had any bad days, where my routines and tasks were woefully neglected, I consider what conditions existed on those days that caused me to get off track. This offers a chance to adjust daily conditions to avoid triggers that make progress difficult. I also check the completion rate of my weekly routines, and consider what I can do differently to execute them more faithfully in the week to come. This is a great time to review monthly metrics as well, to know if any are trending in the wrong direction and therefore require some extra attention.
The End of the Month and Year
I do my retrospective of the previous month just before planning the forthcoming one, so essentially this happens at the same time as my process for First of the Month. I take stock of how well I progressed my projects and how far off my metric targets are from reality. If anything is stagnant or missing the mark completely, I consider if I want to continue spending energy on it.
The annual retrospective behaves much the same way, comparing the results of my efforts against what I hoped to accomplish. It takes a serious argument to carry over a project from one year to the next, unless it’s something that is moving with great momentum towards completion I tend to call it a day and start fresh on things in the next year.
Summary
I’ve been doing this for a few years now, and have accomplished much with it. Some highlights:
- Read ~23 books a year
- Dropped 25lbs
- Released 2 projects as Mottled Moth
- Deployed a ton of great code
- Learned to read and write basic Bulgarian
- Rode 1000 miles on my bike
The core idea here is to regularly spend some time planning for the future, reviewing the efforts of the past, and intentionally make time for things that generate self-fulfillment.