If you want to achieve your goals don't focus on them

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2PP3p4_4R8&t=141s


This is Day 2 of the One TED Talk a Day initiative. Today's TED Talk is by Reggie Rivers. The topic of his TED Talk is "If you want to achieve your goals don't focus on them".

• Goals require you to have participation of other people hence they are outside of your control. 
• Behaviors are something that are completely in our control so we should focus on our behaviors to achieve our goals.
• See and plan what you can do today, tomorrow and this week. 

The speaker in this TED talk has a simple message to convey with a very humorous talk to keep the audience engaged and interested. 

He emphasizes that if you want to achieve your goals you should not focus on them. Focusing on the goals makes us focus on everything that is not in our control. The end result or the outcome is not in our control. 

Hence, he suggests that we should rather focus on our actions and our behaviors. Having a short term focus as suggested helps us stay on track without getting overwhelmed.

It's a simple yet effective advice. I would certainly try to inculcate this.

How I tried to create a system to manage my time better?

Consistency. One word which has a lot of meaning and strength. Those who know me would understand that I have an intense need to plan and organize everything. I am not much of an impromptu person. I am not a person who can think on his feet and come up with ideas. I take time to analyze and then conclude. In spite of all this one thing that I have been struggling with has been consistency, sounds very contradictory perhaps, let me explain. 

The fact is that if we do not assign priorities consciously to whatever we have in front of us, our true nature inherently does that for us. And let me tell you, our true nature does not do a good job at assigning priorities because we as humans never want to eat the bitter pills, even if they are for our own benefits.

So, we need to be conscious about the choices that we make everyday. Those tiny breaks of 5 or 7 minutes that we take to watch interesting Youtube videos, convert into hours before we know it. Or those incremental professional commitments may take a toll on your personal commitments (family time or self growth) or vice versa.  

I have already admitted that I myself am guilty of such behavior so I am not in a position to tell you how to fix this, but all I can tell is something that I tried and something that seemed to work a bit for me.

Two important methods that worked for me are as follows

1. Have clear visiblity (at all times) on what all needs to be done.

2. Have clear visibility (at all times) on where your time is going.

I will explain both of these in detail.

Let's begin with the first one. 

Have clear visiblity (at all times) on what all needs to be done.

I have always had a long Planner sheet at the beginning of the year which sort of has the list of areas (and categories) I would want to work on, the list of things I would want to improve, so on and so forth. I was using this like my North Star (not literally pulling task items from it but just picking the directions). 

But what was missing was that in the day to day life I tended to go autopilot every now and then and it used to be months before I looked at my Planner sheet and see that I have lost a ton of time and haven't done anything from the sheet.

To fix this what I have tried now is that I take up only a handful of items from the list that I think I can finish or cater to in say one month. This drastically reduces the items I need to spend my time looking at.

If you are from the Software Product Management  background, think of the Planner sheet as your Backlog and the shorter list as the Stories you pick up for the Sprint that is supposed to last one month. Towards the middle of the month or say third week if you see items you definitely would not be able to work on, just push them out, don't stress about it. If you push yourself very hard, you would not have enough energy to go on and you may end up breaking the system. Telling you by experience, if you break the system once, it is very tough to get back.

Now, I have better visibility on what needs to be done and if I am able to spend some time on it. So, this in a way was the first solution - having clear visibility (at all times) on what needs to be done.

Let's talk about the second one.

Have clear visibility (at all times) on where your time is going.

I have realized that if you have clear visiblity of where your time is going, you tend to spend your time in a better way.

I tried out a few apps and web based solutions and finally settled for aTimeLogger. I started tracking all of my time, not just professional working time but everything such as Sleeping, Reading, Transport, Entertainment, Housework etc.

I know this might sound extreme to a lot of you but trust me, once you get in the habit of using this and can clearly see the Pie Chart of your time spent, slowly and gradually you tend to get better at managing your time.

Here are some of the screens to give you a perspective on how this app looks like. 

You can also decide and create some time based goals for yourself and try to get better at achieving them. As you can see, some of the goals that I have created for myself are

1. Not sleeping more than 7 hours.

2. Reading for minimum 30 minutes everyday.

3. Keeping the Miscellaneous category time under 3 hours.

As and when you get a hang of this you can add more and more activities that you care about and try to patch it up in goals and try to monitor yourself on a monthly basis if you are improving in those areas.

To conclude, like any other system this system also is not a full proof solution but this is certainly something worth exploring. If you try this and it works for you even a little bit do let me know.