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It's the end of the year, a time when we reflect and set goals for next year. This is an unfinished thought around how to evaluate whether a goal is good or not.
A daily 5 minute podcast looking inwards. Topics are usually around productivity, tech, entrepreneurship, motivation, work/life balance, etc.
[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 this episode is going live on my birthday, and my birthday falls on December 31st. So naturally, you know, it's a day of reflection. It's a day, it's the last day of the Gregorian calendar or the year for most of us, and
[00:00:44] I find myself reflecting in the same way that I think many software developers reflect daily in their work. Very scrum.
[00:00:59] What did I [00:01:00] do? What am I going to do and what are the problems I'm facing? What are the blockers? This could also be what went well or what didn't go so well. What do you want to do next and what's stopping? So there's a few different ways that you can approach this reflection that I think is valuable for everyone to do.
[00:01:33] The problem is when we reflect and we look at how much we maybe didn't accomplish this year, and how much we're totally going to accomplish next year, when we get over zealous with our predictions and desires and hopes for the next year. By no means am I saying that one should aim lower or anything like [00:02:00] that in order to not feel or at least to actually hit your targets.
[00:02:07] There is something to be said for setting stretch goals, but if you have a stretch goal, then you should also have a non-stretch. and I've been thinking about how one can decide, how I can decide how many goals or what kind of goals are appropriate and sustainable. And the one thing that I've realized for me is that it is far more effective to set goals about things that are under my direct control.
[00:02:45] So to take sort of a social media example, setting the goal of a thousand more followers on, I don't know, Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram. This [00:03:00] is not a goal that you can control. You cannot directly control how many followers you have, however, you can directly control what you publish. What you post, when you post it, how often you post it.
[00:03:17] These are all things that are directly in your control and you know, doing those things correctly or well will lead to getting more followers. That is a side effect. It is not the direct thing that you did. So I think that when we are setting goals, it's really important to think about what can we do ourselves?
[00:03:44] What's a metric that we have direct control over, whether that's posting schedule or saying, Hey, I'm gonna work out three times a week and I'm going to have this much protein every single day. [00:04:00] If you wanna be healthy, for example, or I'm going to walk for 30 minutes every single day and here's my contingency plan for when the weather is bad, which is also like a whole other thing with goal setting.
[00:04:15] So yeah, I encourage you to think about what you wanna do next year and how you can achieve things that are in your own control that may lead to side benefits that you might enjoy. Do what you can control. I think aim for what you can control. I think that's the right way to go.
[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.