A lot of goal setting systems are very binary in their results, and rather unforgiving in their mindset. They don’t allow for things to change mid-stream, uncertainty during the initial goal selection process, or unexpected things causing set-backs. After trying lots of these systems, I started thinking about goal setting more like a party going on an adventure.
Big Concepts
The Adventure and Expeditions
The Adventure is the course of our entire lives. It takes a long while, is full of unexpected encounters, and requires a balance of effort and rest if we’re going to make it to the end. At times, it seems like we know exactly where we’re headed, and at others it feels like we’re lost in the wilderness. Everyone starts out in different terrain, and that can make it much harder for some people than others. In the end, though, we each make our own journey and have to do the best we can with what we find along the way.
An Expedition is the “effort” part of the Adventure which comes between the rests. It’s when we marshall our resources together, and head off down the road trying to make some progress toward those things we want.
Peaks & Horizons
Some goals are definite things you want to accomplish. You can see it way off in the distance, and even if the terrain between here and there is hard to make out, you definitely know when you arrive. These are Peaks.
A Peak might be something like obtaining a degree, getting married, or building a greenhouse. They are things where there’s an obvious point at which there’s nothing left to do, and you’re done.
At other times, a goal is much less definite. It’s more of a desire to head into the unknowable distance without a specific destination in mind (“Go west, young man!”). You can check your compass to see whether you’re heading the right way, but there’s no particular point at which you’ve arrived. These are Horizons.
A Horizon might be something like: improve my mental health, learn to cook, or improve my skill at the clarinet. These are things which can’t be “checked off” in any meaningful way. They’re just things we want to keep striving toward: sometimes with more or less vigor.
When setting goals, we usually have both.
Campsites, Paths, and Milestones
We start and end an Expedition at a Campsite. When we’re at a Campsite, we’re not making progress toward a Peak or Horizon, but rather reflecting on the past, recovering our strength, and planning the next stage of our journey.
In real life, a Campsite is the process of sitting down and thinking. Maybe you’re sitting in a coffeeshop with a pad of paper, or maybe you’re in your office tapping away at your computer. Either way, you’re looking back on how your plans for the last month, quarter, year, etc. turned out, and trying to figure out where to go next. Do you even want to keep pursuing the same set of Peaks and Horizons that got you to this Campsite?
There are many Paths leaving each Campsite. Some of these are well traveled by others who have come before us, and others are only a faint track through the weeds. Some are steep and dangerous—but direct—while others are easier but meandering. Ideally, you’re able to follow a Path to the next Campsite having gotten a little closer to your goal. On the other hand, there are also false paths that simply die out in the woods, forcing you to retrace your steps back your starting Campsite for another try.
In practice, a Path is a course of action which seems to lead toward a Peak or Horizon. If the Peak is to get married, one Path might be to sign up for a ballroom dance class on the hope you will find some suitable partners. Another path might be to join an online dating app. Yet another might be to make plans to go out to a nightclub once a week. It’s up to you to judge what strategy seems most achievable, most enjoyable, and most likely to succeed.
As we travel down a Path, once in a while we might find a Milestone. These are markers that tell us how far we’ve come. From that, we might experience a boost of confidence in being able to mark our progress, and maybe even infer how far it is to the next Campsite. Not all paths have many (or any) milestones. Even when they do, it’s not always easy to infer anything about how far it is to the next Campsite from that information, but they’re certainly nice to have when we can find them!
In practice, a Milestone is a measure of the progress you’ve already made with a given strategy. Taking our example above, perhaps you signed up with a dating app. Each date you go on is a milestone. Maybe you also decided to stick with it until you’d gone on ten dates and then reevaluate. That’s the next Campsite along that particular Path.
The Band of Adventurers
Of course, on a real hike, we could only follow a single Path at a time. However, unlike a hike, we’re often capable of pushing forward many different projects at once. So, imagine that we each have a little Band of Adventurers at our command, and each one of them can pursue a different path for us. Of course, we’re not talking about an army here, so we do have a limited number of paths we can explore at one time. Plus, our little adventurers constantly need our advice and attention. So if one of them is exploring an especially complex, dangerous, or ambiguous Path, we have less time and attention we have to look after the others. We might choose to severely limit the number of Adventurers on a particular Expedition so we better assist one particular Adventurer on a difficult Path.
The Band of Adventures is a proxy for the amount of productive time we have in a day. If we try to do too many things, then some of them will wind up getting ignored or get done badly. For example, if we have a lot going on at work, tending to that Adventurer takes up most of our time. Maybe so much so that we can only really help along one or two others. At other times, things are more-or-less on auto-pilot, and we can guide a lot of little Adventurers. As we stop at each Campsite, we get a chance to check in with ourselves and decide how many of them we can send out exploring on the next Expedition.
Planning an Expedition
How does one actually implement this system?
First, we need to start out in a Campsite. That is, we need a calm, quiet place which allows us to reflect on our journey and make plans. This probably means turning off the phone, closing the door, or grabbing a study room in the library so that no one can disturb us.
Second, we need to decide on our Peaks and Horizons for the upcoming Expedition. These are the really big things as far out as we can see right now, so this is the place to be bold and courageous. Brainstorm as many as possible; we’ll filter out less interesting ones later. If we’ve just finished an Expedition, then we have the Peaks and Horizons from before as a starting point. Just don’t take it for granted that those are the only Peaks and Horizons to choose from, or that it’s even worth heading for those particular ones anymore.
Third, we need to pick a set of Paths. For each Peak or Horizon we selected, we need to have at least one Path toward it. If we want to hedge our bets, we might pick multiple paths toward a certain objective, but that leaves us with fewer Adventurers on other Paths. There’s a lot of uncertainty involved in this step, and it may be necessary to decide not to progress toward a certain Peak or Horizon after all. In the end, we want to wind up with a number of Paths that matches the number of Adventurers we can support along the way, so when you think you’ve picked your Paths, take a moment to reflect on whether it’s too much to handle.
Finally, we want to give some thought to the Campsite where the Expedition is going to end, and what kind of Milestones we should expect to see along the way. To keep things simple, we might decide that all our Adventurers reach the next Campsite at the end of the current quarter: no matter what. For other Paths, a other metrics may make sense (e.g., the dating app example). Whichever it is, you’ll want to know when you’ve gotten to a point on each Path to stop and reflect. Then, we can let our Adventurers regroup, swap stories over the campfire, and get ready to do it all again.
I haven’t actually used this system yet myself, but I’m planning to try it out for my quarterly goal setting exercise this time around. I’m hopeful that it will provide enough structure to help me set priorities, select projects, and stay on target for the upcoming quarter without creating the kind of stress and sense of frustration and failure that other systems have produced. I’ll definitely follow up on how things turned out!
Bits & Bytes 