Help me set my top level goals
Posted April 10th, 2008 by rockem
I made a list of all the things that are important to me
I took the things that are important on a regular level
and also my goals for the next year and a half
the goals are:
- finish my degree
- enrich my self
- improve my finance state
- find love
- keep my health
- keep in shape
- eat well and healthy
- relax
- have fun
- keep and improve relationships with friend & family
- be the man I wanna be
- record an album
- do at least 2 major projects (software projects)
thats it.
Please, help me to set up my top level goals inside LB
thanx
Eli
Comments
Re: Help me set my top level goals
I spent a couple of years working this out for myself and came up with 6 top level goals:
*Fun
*Growth
*Health
*Love
*Money
*Order
A few months ago I added Learning to the list, because Growth was getting quite unclear. The combination of those 7 top level goals is my path to happiness.
Your goals could then be organised thus:
*Fun
- have fun
*Growth
- be the man I wanna be
*Health
- keep my health
- keep in shape
- eat well and healthy
- relax
*Learning
- finish my degree
- enrich my self (if you mean your mind)
*Love
- find love
- keep and improve relationships with friend & family
*Money
- improve my finance state
- enrich my self (if you mean your bank account)
*Order
I'm not entirely clear on where these two should go:
- record an album (fun, growth, money?)
- do at least 2 major projects (software projects) (learning, money, fun?)
Also, I've noticed there are no goals that would fall into Order, so perhaps I should be a little more verbose about my ideas:
Fun: Fill my life with Fun. Spend time on hobbies, games, music, travel, sex, funny stuff on the internet.
Growth: Become a better person. Enhance my discipline, kindness, chivalry, patience, serenity.
Health: Achieve and maintain perfect health. Cover 4 aspects: Exercise, nutrition, correction of medical problems, prevention of same.
Learning: Continously learn new things. Languages, skills, formal education, trades, enology, project management, public speaking, etc.
Love: Fill my life with Love. Make sure my relationship with family friends is actively addressed.
Money: Amass and maintain the level of monetary wealth that I've determined I need to be happy. See Neal Stephenson's concept of "fuck-you money" : )
Order: Live my life with Order. Home and car maintenance, proper record-keeping, having official documents up to date, paying taxes on time. Also, all my GTD activities are filed under this goal.
As you've probably noticed, a lot of things in your life can work -or give you credit- for more than one of those things. Going to your best friend's birthday bash, for example, can be for Fun and for Love, and perhaps even Money because you'll do some strategic networking there, but deep down, the main reason is Love. Having to sort out those nebulous things has been a great challenge and a great aid for my own clarity.
In the same vein, if you think of yourself as Body, Mind and Soul, each of those goals will naturally align with the one they most fulfill, like Health -> Body and Learning -> Mind, but some goals -like Fun- are a bit harder to pin down, so they force to really look at your choices and mativation and what you really want out of life.
>
>thanx
>Eli
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Hell, no! Thank YOU. I've been wanting to share this with someone for years. It was such hard work, after so much trial and error and navel-gazing and soul-searching that I'm delighted to actually put it up for criticism. I would really appreciate your thoughts and the thoughts of everyone else on the forum.
Cheers,
Morel
thanx
thank you for the reply
it was very enlightening
where would you put dreams ?
I mean, recording an album is a dream of mine
its not really for fun and not really for money
its a bit about growth (learning methods of recording producing .. etc)
but its much more than this
also complete at least 2 project it is really a step at becoming a freelancer
but also its a dream of mine (put out my software to the world)
thanx again :)
Eli
Dreams!
Wow, you're good. It took you minutes to spot something that I've been struggling with for some time.
It all began with my adding reference information to the project "Dream Home". It currently lives inside Order, but I've never felt comfortable with it there, because it feels -as you so rightly say- much more than this. Every time I would add something I found on Lifehacker, CoolTools or CribCandy I would cringe a little inside.
I then began trying to crack this little problem, and I could see two possible solutions:
1. Create a top level goal named Dreams and reclassify stuff.
2. Accept that dreaming is such an integral part of everything I do that dreams would just have to be classified like everything else.
Right now, I've opted for the second option.
I added Learning less than a year ago, after a lot of internal resistance to modifying the original 6. Even though I'm happy I did it, I'm very leery of doing it again, and I love the fact that there's 7 goals. There's something that I really like about that number. I want to stay there.
Also, there a so many things that are dreams in my life that I'm afraid a Dreams goal would take over the LB Outline. Dreams would decimate Fun & Learning, for instance. So, I'm staying this way for now. It's a lot more difficult to classify those, but I feel they are just harder challenges to overcome.
As a strange coincidence, yesterday I received an email from an old friend, and he still has that corny email signature he had back in 2005, that I've always liked despite my natural disdain of such things, and that sums up my thoughts very well:
"A goal is just a dream with a deadline".
Cheers!
One Other thing
I'm a bit concern about putting all the learning inside one TLI
I today I have TLI "finish my degree"
and when I'm on vacation I can adjust the pie to focus on other things
but with everything under "learning" I wont have this seperation
thanx again
Eli
Learning
Hi! Sorry I've been away. My son was born on Saturday and it's been a busy week, to say the least.
Regarding putting all things related to Learning underneath a single TLI, I think I approach it differently.
My 7 pie slices are always set to equal parts (14%, I've just checked) to reflect the fact that these 7 "strategies" are the way I will reach my "goal", which is to be happy.
Seeing or not seeing certain Tasks at any given time depend on Places and GTD concepts. So, the whole structure might look like this:
Overall Objective: Be Happy.
Strategy/TLI: Learning.
Tactic/Project: Finish my Degree.
Task: Go to college.edu and enroll in $Next Class101
This task is the next physical action, and has these characteristics, for example:
Importance: Essential
Place: At computer
Happens: Once
If you're on vacation, your Places should reflect that, so you never see Tasks you can't perform then and there.
I'm oversimplifying a bit, but this is the general idea behind how I'm doing things. I don't think moving pie slices is the way to do it , that just skews your overall balance. I'm sure I'm not being as clear as I could, but I'm too tired to make more sense.
Jon makes some interesting points in his post, but I don't want to muddle threads. Care to address his comments?
Cheers,
Morel
After a lot of
After a lot of experimenting, my outline has settled into a structure that's very similar to what Morel described, but I have a couple of thoughts to offer.
Rather than one-word TLIs, I try to use phrases that more clearly express specific goals, needs or priorities, i.e. instead of 'Order' I might use 'Keep my world running smoothly.' I used to use those one- or two-word TLIs, but I found myself treating them as categories for filing tasks that other people wanted me to do, without any regard for whether doing them was actually important to me. I find that there's no shortage of tasks and dreams and ideas out there in the world, clamoring for my time and attention, and a primary job of my outline is to reject the vast majority of them. When I stumble onto a new task or project idea (or one is shoved at me by someone else), those TLIs are the first line of defense against projects and tasks that won't get me where I want to go. For example, I might see a commercial and decide that buying a pallet of Pepsi seems like a good idea. The task 'Buy 1000 cans of Pepsi' slides easily and dangerously into a vaguely defined TLI like 'Food and Drink,' but has a much harder time finding a home in a more carefully worded TLI such as 'Eat a Healthy Diet.'
The other thing that comes to mind is that you might be better off if you distinguish which of the items on your list are really goals, which are general priorities and perhaps which are simply principles to live by. For the ones that can truly be called goals, tighten them up and make them clear enough that you can actually start working on them. A beginner's business seminar I attended a few years ago suggested the acronym SMART (corny, I know) as a reminder of the qualities of a well-defined goal:
SPECIFIC - What will you do, why and how?
MEASUREABLE - It must be possible to track your progress towards the goal.
ATTAINABLE - Don't set the bar impossibly high
REALISTIC - You have the skills and abilities to do this thing (some overlap with Attainable but, hey, it's just an acronym)
TIMEBOUND - Establish a clear target, lest there be no urgency to it.
I don't stick rigidly to those guidelines, but I try to pin down as much of that information as I can whenever I set up particularly beefy, challenging projects in LB. Often I'll enumerate such details in the note field of the project's parent task, rather than trying to express them through a complex web of subtasks, time-tab settings and the like.
'Finish my degree' is a good start, but it might help to enumerate the steps along the way, and to set a deadline such as 'Finish my degree by the summer of 2010.'
'Record an album' has potential, but might you want to clarify what kind of album? How many tracks? How does one develop a new track? What's the first step?
Lastly, "Be the man I wanna be" isn't a part of your life, it's the whole shebang.