Setting Goals to Guide Your Year & Create Impact

Happy New Year!

Our brains like opportunities for new beginnings. The feeling of a fresh start can help us get one step closer to being our best selves. In Daniel Pink’s book, When, he talks about how we can start over at any time – every Monday, our birthdays, or the first day of a new season. Once we imbue a day with meaning, we are positioned to begin again feeling invigorated and re-energized.

Nowhere is this more powerful than the start of a new year.

I’ll get this out of the way up front: we’re not talking about New Year’s resolutions here. For me, those have become a marketed and manufactured way of quickly changing things that we may not have liked about ourselves for a long time. That is not how change works. Real change takes time, mental preparation, adopting new behaviors, failing, and then getting back on the wagon.

One impactful strategy to create changes that stick is setting intentional goals to guide your year, that help you move forward in the ways that are important to you.

Setting Annual Goals

Our goals for the year ideally set us up for success both professionally and personally. How do we approach this? By starting with the fundamental question: “What do I want”?

This question is deceivingly simple. First of all, there are many different aspects of our lives to consider. And second, what we want changes over time. Our circumstances change, we have new opportunities, new challenges, our relationships evolve, and WE change. So to feel a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, we need to continually revisit this question: “What do I want?”

The process I use to set goals helps us to answer that question.

Every year, I set goals across four key areas of my life: career, personal, key relationships, and parenting.

Like the Wheel of Life activity that I talked about last month, which you can use as a year-end reflection exercise to take stock of your life right now (and really, it’s a great tool to take stock of your life at any time when you want to do that), these four areas can be adjusted so they feel right for you.

So for example, if you’re not a parent, you could omit that category altogether, or that category might be more aptly called “care work” if you’re helping with aging parents or other family members.

You also have choices around how to define “personal” goals. Many people set health goals here, but you may also want to set goals around learning, travel, finances, or special experiences you’d like to have.

A great way to start this process of annual goal setting is to ask yourself, “How do I want to feel on December 31, 2024?”

Where do you want to be in your life? What would you like to have happened in your career? For yourself personally? In your key relationships?

This will help guide you to think about what you want to make happen in your life this year.

Achieving Different Types of Goals

The type of goal we set determines how we approach pursuing it.

When setting annual goals, there are two key approaches: backwards planning for 12-week spurts, and habit formation.

Different goals require different strategies.

Say for example, that one of your personal goals is to “get more fit”. How do you intend to do that? Take a weights class? Or run a 5K?

Taking a weights class is more about habit formation. Running a 5K requires backwards planning. I’ll explain…but first- let’s talk about the importance of WHEN and routines.

Living the Process

When we think about a goal, such as “getting more fit”, we’re talking about an outcome. And we should start there. The result is what we’re after. The result also helps us measure whether we’ve achieved the goal.

How we work towards our goal, however, is actually about changing our lifestyle. It’s about how we spend our time, and WHEN we are doing the things we need to do to achieve our goal.

So if we want to get fit, this means we are spending a portion of our days exercising. That’s the lifestyle we’re choosing. We’re exercising often. To do that consistently, we need to know WHEN we are exercising. Without that time earmarked, we will fail.

So are you exercising in the morning at 7:00am 3 times a week? In the evening at 5:30 four times a week? Without this specificity around timing, you cannot “live your goal”.

Living the process also means focusing on the silver lining when we’re doing something that we don’t want to do or find difficult.

The more we can embrace the process, and find ways to enjoy it, the more likely we are to achieve success.

So getting more fit actually ends up meaning “Finding a way to enjoy exercising Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7:00am”. There it is.

Other goals are similar. Leading your team towards more effective communication means setting aside the time to do that regularly. So it could look like “weekly team meetings” and “one on one meetings with my direct reports” and “two retreats as a whole team per year”.

You do not just “have effective communication”. You spend part of your days actually communicating with others and helping them to learn how to communicate more effectively as well.

You get the idea.

Ok, so let’s talk about our 2 key strategies: Backwards planning and Habit formation.

Backwards Planning

Again, let’s take this goal of “getting more fit”. We’re all familiar with SMART goals. What are the specific action steps you’ll take to achieve this goal? And how will you measure whether you’re achieving it?

Let’s say your approach to getting more fit is to run a 5K. That goal is specific, and it’s measurable. It’s also attainable, and if you decide to run the 5K in June, and you sign up for it, now it’s timebound. Check. Check. Check. It’s a SMART goal.

There’s a lot written about approaching goals in 12-week chunks, or quarters, or seasons. (While some goals take longer than 12 weeks to achieve, we can still approach our goals this way and reinvest in a second quarter when we need to.) When we backwards plan, we’re figuring out when – which quarter or month – we want to achieve the smaller objectives that help us to reach our overall goal.

So for running a 5K in May, we would plot our progress milestones as looking something like:

Q1: Jan: Sign up for the race; build training plan; join the gym; find an accountability partner

Q1: Feb: Begin training plan of 3 days cardio/ 2 days strength/ 2 days rest

Q1: Mar: Continue training plan; increase run/ walk progression times

Q2: Apr: Continue training plan and increase run/ walk progression; check out course map

Q2 May: Run 5K

We’d use the same approach if our goal was to “Launch a new initiative by September”.

Our milestones might look something like:

Q1: Assemble team and assign roles; build out processes and timeline for successful launch; begin building out service offerings

Q2: Finish building out service offerings; get feedback from users; make updates to services

Q3: Soft launch in July; course correct in August; launch in September

But let’s say our goal of “getting more fit” is to engage in weightlifting for health. Backwards planning may not make as much sense here. To achieve this type of goal, we need to think about habit formation.

Habit Formation

When we want to create a new habit, just like with any new behavior, we need to know when we’re going to engage in our habit.

The habit needs to be set up similar to a SMART goal – it needs to be specific and measurable, and we need to know how often we’re engaging in the behavior.

So again, let’s take our example of lifting weights. Stated as a SMART goal, it could look like “Lift weights for 45 minutes 3 times a week.” This goal is ongoing. Unlike with backwards planning, we won’t be changing our behaviors too much each quarter. We might work out different body parts when we lift, or we may lift heavier weights. But unlike with our 5K, there is no end date to our behavior. So the “T” for the Timeline aspect, or by when, does not apply. We will lift weights every week. Period.

What is crucial with habits is knowing exactly when we will do the behavior each day or each week.

Knowing WHEN is essential. If you ask someone who has a well ingrained habit going when they do the behavior, they will be able to answer without much thought:

When do you meditate? “Right after I wake up.”

How do you eat enough vegetables? “I have a salad every day for lunch”

When do you work on your job search? “Every Saturday afternoon, and I set up two networking coffees each week.”

How do you create effective communication with your team? “We meet as a team every Monday from 11:00-12:00, as well as sporadically throughout the week, and I have weekly 1:1 meetings with each of my direct reports.”

For our weightlifting goal, what makes this behavior a habit is when we know that we go three times a week “Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at 5:30pm”. 

A Note on a Realistic Approach to Goals

We cannot do everything we’d like to do. And it’s not possible to add to our plate, and keep adding, without removing something. Many times it’s enough to maintain what we’re already doing.

So setting annual goals is not about constantly doing more. No one can do that. It’s not realistic, nor is it sustainable. But goals provide us with direction, and help us decide how to spend our limited energy.

I have set annual goals for the past two years. I’ve achieved many of my goals, but not all of them. Some of them have been abandoned for other pursuits and some took me well over a year to even start.

James Clear, in one of his many fantastic blogs about goals, uses an analogy of being in a boat. He says goals are like the rudder – they point you in the direction you want to go in. The oars are all of the effort you put in, and the system you set up in your life to take effective action (such as using backwards planning to build your running schedule, or creating a habit of lifting weights three times a week).

Goals are meant to guide us, so that we are moving in a direction that is aligned with what’s important to us.

I have some goals that I stick to religiously: 2 cups of spinach at breakfast; deep work in the morning and meetings in the afternoon; yoga on Sunday morning. And I have others that I don’t hit all of the time, like “spend 15 minutes of quality time with my daughter each day.”

My daughter doesn’t want to chat about her day after school, when I am full of energy. Right before she goes to bed, when I am DONE, with no energy left, she wants to tell me all about her day.

There have been so many times when I’ve wanted to kiss her goodnight and say, “Let’s talk in the morning sweetie.” But then I think of my goal, and know that if I don’t listen in that moment a new opportunity to hear about this day likely will not appear. There are some days where I do simply kiss her goodnight, because I have no energy left. But many times I think of my goal, and remind myself to stay powered on for just 15 more minutes, and how important this small amount of time is for our relationship. Having the goal itself helps keep me anchored in what’s important to me. I don’t get it right every time, but I am consistently guided in a direction that’s important to me.

So if you try out this approach, of setting goals across your career, personally, in your key relationships, and in your care work, you will be guided to create a year that feels meaningful and important to you across all of the domains of your life.

We’ll knock some of our goals out of the park, defer some in favor of other important things that come up, and fail on some of them. But you’ll be moving forward and creating a life that is in line with what you value and what you want most. Happy goal setting.