The Business of Goal Setting

[00:00:00] You're listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? So, last year I went through a very intense period of burnout during which I pretty much locked myself down and stepped away from the online world as much as I could.

[00:00:29] But before that happened, I had a pretty solid review process that forced me to keep my goals in sight all the time, and I wanna bring back that consistent and explicitly conscious awareness of my daily life. Like we've covered in the past episode, sometimes what you want in the moment is not what you want in the big picture.

[00:00:51] Rather it's informed by the situation you currently find yourself in, which may or may not be in the service of your actual larger goals in life. Having a review process can really help keep what you actually want front and center. My original review process, the data points I tracked and how I tracked them, was very much inspired by the Life Operating System concept from August Bradley, I'll link to his YouTube show in the notes.

[00:01:22] And I had set up my daily, weekly, monthly, and annual check-ins to be very closely aligned to his structure and his values. While this was great and brought a lot of clarity to my life, that was, you know, previously fairly untracked, it was ultimately not for me. After all, he had set it up for himself and we lead very different lives.

[00:01:46] It did, however, teach me a lot about what is valuable to track, how to best track it, and how the accumulation of that data can be pretty damn illuminating, sometimes uncomfortably so, over the long run. This past weekend, I opened up the file where I had written down my goals for this year. Fun fact, the last time I had opened this file was on December 24th, 2022.

[00:02:15] Without even knowing what's in that file, I bet you can make a guess as to how much progress I've made on those goals: zilch, nada, not a one. In fact, when I first wrote those goals down, The Daily 5 didn't even exist. It would be three days later that I came up with the idea and put it into action. So we are approaching the end of February 2023, two months of the year are nearly gone.

[00:02:45] And while I wouldn't say that these two months haven't been productive, I would say that they have not been in service of the goals that were supposedly important to me the last time I checked in with myself. So it's time to step back for a hot second and figure this stuff out again, knowing what I know now.

[00:03:07] If you're listening to this episode on the date it's coming out, it's February 27th, 2023 a Monday. Today, I'm going to spend some time looking over these goals, reevaluating and resetting. So let's talk about that a little bit. When I set goals, I separate them out into five categories. Your categories may differ, but for me, these cover all the different parts of my life that are important to me.

[00:03:33] Personal goals, goals that mostly affect just me, they could be spiritual goals, self-improvement goals, learning some new skills. Interpersonal goals that affect my relationship with other people, my spouse, my family, my community, my world. Health.: very self-explanatory. Professional: fairly self-explanatory.

[00:03:56] Financial: these are goals I usually set with my spouse, also, pretty self-explanatory. So today I wanna look at all those goals and maybe reset them in all of those five categories. Typically, I'll set a few goals that take a full year to accomplish and then some smaller goals for each quarter. Those smaller goals could be connected or sometimes not connected to those larger goals.

[00:04:21] And then tomorrow we'll look at how I can and will structure some regular check-ins to make sure I don't get waylaid, because as we know, systems are your friends, and if you can't make something happen, it's often a system problem, not a motivation problem. So let's see what I come up with, hey?

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.