One Thing At A Time: How To Properly Set Goals

I usually link to interesting articles on my weekend roundups. However, I happened to find one article that I thought deserved a bit more discussion. It’s from the New York Times and discusses the limitations of human willpower.

Specifically, the article makes the point that our will power is limited. If we try to use it on something like fitness, we might have less of it for things like finances. Here’s the exact quote from the article:

The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others.

Multitasking Often Leads To Failures

It’s an interesting assertion and one that has a lot of applicability to fitness and health. I know that I can’t focus on more than project at a time. When I try to do too many things at once, I end up overextended and usually fail at all of them. For example, I recently decided to try and expand my interests. So I picked up some language tapes and tried to learn conversational Chinese. I also started music lessons, something I’ve always wanted to do.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t devote enough attention to either of these pursuits and so I ended up doing badly on both. I never had enough time to practice the new words or notes that I learned and my progress was slow from lesson to lesson. Then I decided to focus on just one thing, the Chinese lessons, and delayed the music lessons until next year. All of a sudden, I was making much better progress.

The Big Bang Theory of Fitness Rarely Works

A similar thing happened when I first started working on my fitness. I wanted to accomplish everything the first week. I had an exercise plan, an eating plan, a plan to cut down on sodas, a plan to jog more and a plan to come up with more plans. It was crazy. I split my will power and focus among so many things that there was no chance of me being successful at any of them.

It Takes a Month To Form a Habit

A few miserable weeks later, I started with a new approach. I made gradual changes, one or two at a time. No big bang theories for me. No more trying to do everything at once. Instead I picked one or two things and worked on them until they no longer seemed like work. Remember, it takes at least a month for something to become a habit and you need something to become a habit before you move on to the next thing. I waited until a change had become ingrained into my life before moving on to the next change I wanted to make.

Prioritize Your Goals

There are probably a few things you want to do. Some of them may be health related and some may not. They all require focus and attention, which means you can’t do all of them at once. What you need to do is be selective. Make a list of the goals you want to accomplish and the things you want to do. For example, here is my list:

1. Save money by eating at home more
2. Get rid of excess furniture and clutter in home
3. Get my graduate degree
4. Eat more vegetables
5. Learn another language
6. Learn a musical instrument
7. Start a hiking blog
8. Start a movie blog
9. Get a promotion at work
10. Weigh 200lbs
11. Run marathon

These aren’t in order of priority and I don’t think I could easily prioritize them since they’re all so different in terms of time requirements. However, I can already see a few that I simply don’t have time for. For example, #3, 7 and 8 are all long term goals that require quite a bit of work. I just don’t have the time right now to work on an extra two blogs since a lot of my time for the next two years is going to be devoted to school. #5 and #6 are similar in that they’re learning a new skill. I doubt I can do both at the same time so one of them will have to go.

So after looking at all of these things, I can cut down my goal list to the following:

1. Save money by eating at home more
2. Get rid of excess furniture and clutter in home
3. Get my graduate degree
4. Eat more vegetables
5. Learn another language
6. Get a promotion at work
7. Weigh 200lbs
8. Run marathon

Now if I do #4 and #8, that probably means my weight will go down. So let’s remove #7 since I’ll be working on it through other goals. #1 and #4 are related, so why don’t I just combine them into one goal that will be easier to follow.

1. Prepare at least two vegetable base meals at home per week
2. Get rid of excess furniture and clutter in home
3. Get my graduate degree
4. Learn another language
5. Get a promotion at work
6. Run marathon

So now I have 6 goals. It’s still a lot but, since each of these is different, I can probably manage these as is. When school starts, I might want to cut back my language lessons but we’ll see.

Try It Yourself

This isn’t a hard exercise. Just write down a list of very specific goals. They can’t be too general like “I want to be healthy.” Instead, they need to be as specific as possible. Then take a look at your list. Is there a lot of overlap? Are there goals that can be combined? If you have too many similar goals, you’ll never accomplish them all. Make sure you pick a few that you can work on at the same time. That means you shouldn’t pick two goals that have the same time requirements. For example, if you pick two goals, both of which require you to go to some kind of weekend lesson, you probably should eliminate one of them.

What you end up with should be a short list of goals or things to do. Each of them should be unique and there shouldn’t be much overlap in terms of requirements from you. Now you can start detailing each of these goals with specific steps you need to take.

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It’s easy to write down a bunch of things you want to do. Unfortunately, trying to do them all at the same time is a sure way to set yourself up for failure. Pick your battles and your goals. Do a few things, do them well and make them into a habit before you move on to something new.

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