NY Times Article on Setting Life Goals

Alex Williams wrote a NY Times article titled Ten things to Do Before This Article Is Finished (Aug 26, 2007). It's a fascinating description of the growing phenomena of people writing down their life goals - a list of things they want to accomplish before they die. This is apparently becoming quite popular with a number of web sites devoted to collecting a summary of the most popular goals sent in by people (ex: www.43things.com )

People are often drawn to create a list of life goals because they feel unmotivated, lack a sense of accomplishment or direction, or just need more focus in their lives. Working through the list of goals gives more meaning to their lives, creates a greater sense of accomplishment, introduces them to new activities, and helps them take steps towards self-improvement.

One women described a fascinating exercise she undertook to make good on her vow to "develop persistence". She trained herself to pause at work every 15 minutes to record the activities she had just finished. The point, she said, is to eliminate distractions and time wasting activities. She says she has doubled her daily productive hours. I'm tempted to try that.

The article also observed the growing phenomena that "baby boomers are at a point in our life that this is the moment to stop and take stock". All this is really great as far as I'm concerned. But there seemed to be one important element missing - a discussion of how you chose what goals to set. Among the life goals given as examples in the article were: attain the perfect golf swing, see a dinosaur fossil,get a tattoo, and learn to surf. Those are all fun (except maybe for the tattoo one) and can add a sense of adventure to your life. But can't help but think that life should be more than just a series of personal adventures undertaken for the fun of it. Such adventures should be a part of life, but the main goals? That seems a little shallow to me.

Seek Meaning

In his book "The 100 Simple Secrets of the Best Half of Life" David Niven expresses the following thought.

"You want to live in a nice home and enjoy certain luxuries. You want to have a certain position of respect in your community. But no accomplishment will be of value to you unless there is meaning in your life. Unless you know what you are living for, the style in which you are living will not matter one bit. Seek the meaning in your life and in what you do, and you will feel satisfaction in the process, regardless of the outcome."

I'd be hard pressed to say it any better.

"The meaning in life takes on a special significance when people reach their fifties"

I have been reading a little book titled "The 100 Simple Secrets of the Best Half of Life" by David Niven. I want to paraphrase a wonderful little discussion found on pages 161-2.

"...the question of meaning in life takes on a special significance when people reach their fifties. Before age fifty... most people have almost an automatic identity either through their work or through their family or both. There is little need or time for big questions of meaning...

But then you reach a stage in life when you enter a new phase. You may be winding down a career, you may be retiring, your children may be off raising children of their own. And for the first time, you are confronted with a combination of big questions and big openings. Because now you can go in a new direction. You can redefine yourself, because the responsibilities you have carried are no longer there...

...the greatest gift people can give themselves is the opportunity to think through what they really believe and value"

It was wonderful to read a confirmation that it is common to take some time in this period of your life (I just turned 50) to look for meaning and set new goals. In my case though, it was not a result of a transition leaving me with much more free time and flexibility (such as retirement). If anything, my responsibilities and work are more time consuming now than they has ever been. Instead, I just used turning 50 as a significant milestone that gave me the incentive to step back and reexamine my goals and efforts. It's somewhat arbitrary compared to using a major life transition to do this reexamination, but it seems to be incentive enough to work for me.

I guess also that the busy nature of my life forced me to accept that I can't do everything that I wanted to, and time is starting to run a little shorter to get major things accomplished, so I better decide just what it is that I want to accomplish from here on.

First Week of Progress on my MITs

One of the more interesting habits I'm trying to foster is writing down my "Most Important Tasks (MITs)" for the day each morning. There should typically be about three of them, with at least one dealing with long term goals. They should be viewed as the most important tasks, things which get done ahead of all the other little daily activities on my to-do list.

So how did this work after my first week? I've concluded that this really is a good way to set priorities and decide what is important to accomplish each day. Did I actually accomplish them? Well, reviewing my fist week (I keep a journal, which is a requirement for this) showed that I accomplished 63% of them. That's a start, but I clearly need more work on this and want to do better the 2nd week.

However, mid way through the 2nd week I'm facing the reality that I completed 0 out of 3 MITs for the last two days. Part of that was because of family activities (attending a local county fair), and part of that was because I thought it was worthwhile to watch the CNN special series on "God's Warriors".

This brings up some interesting questions. (1) Why didn't I write down the family outing to the county fair as one of the MITs for that day? I probably should have in in retrospect. Family activities are important, and this process is reminding me to keep that perspective. (2) The CNN series was certainly educational, and it was time critical (watch it when it's on, or miss it for the foreseeable future). But was it really the most important task for that evening? You can't do everything you want, so you have to make priority calls. That's what being "effective" is all about. This process is forcing me to clearly think about such priority calls, and the likelihood that I made the wrong choice to view a TV show just because it seemed interesting. Yes it was a good show, but in reality there may have been better ways to spend my time. This is a difficult consideration I simply would not have faced without the processes of specifying my MITs ahead of time.

Do Something Scarry

My son asked me recently what lessons I had learned in the first half of life. The one that immediately popped into mind was a philosophy that I adopted recently that has turned out to be quite beneficial.

Do something scary on a regular basis

I'm not talking about doing something physically dangerous here. I'm talking about taking a step with your life that you may be a little scary. We often are faced with options that have only a small downside if they don't work out, but have a potentially significant benefit if they do work out. A reasonable view would normally say such is risk is well worth taking, but we to often fail to do so because of fear of failure or embarassment, uncertainty, or just lack of initiative. The philosophy of "do some thing scary on a regular basis" is a way of saying - take that risk. It could be submitting a letter to the editor, joining an organization, attending a conference, creating a business venture, starting a new project, or making a phone call.... Or starting a new blog as an experiment. So far, this philosophy has worked out very well for me.

Less than ideal examples of life goals

There are some very interesting web sites out there dealing with setting life goals and life after 50 in general. One that I came across in my searches was http://www.eons.com/ which uses the catch phrase “Lovin’ life on the flip side of 50". Overall it seems to be a nice site, but one thing caught my eye. People can submit their life goals and dreams, then the web site tabulates the 100 most popular ones. When I first saw this, I thought "great, this should give me some really good ideas for setting my own life goals." However, here is a list of their top 20:

1. Lose weight
2. write a book
3. stay healthy
4. exercise more
5. Become debt free
6. Take a cruise
7. Go to Hawaii
8. Retire
9. Travel to Europe
10. Pay off my mortgage
11. Travel in Italy
12. Learn Spanish
13. Go to Alaska
14. Visit Australia
15. volunteer
16. Be financially secure
17. Take an Alaskan Cruise
18. See the Grand Canyon
19. Get a college degree
20. Make new friends.

Does it occur to you that many of these goals are rather superficial?

Write a book (#2), and volunteer (#15) – OK, these seem admirable to me as ways you can indirectly or directly help others. Lose weight (#1), stay healthy (#3) seem to be more examples of good habits than important accomplishments.

The rest, which seem to be dominated by travel, are nothing more than expensive vacations. If you sit down and list what you most want to accomplish in life, and visiting a popular vacation destination pops up to the top of that list, then I think it’s time to do a little soul searching about what’s really important to you. I once heard that nobody wants to die and have the epitaph on their grave stone read "He took exotic vacations".

More on some better web sites I found in the next append.

Most Important Tasks (MITs)

One of the common themes from many experts on organizing your time and your life is that you should be aware of and pay attention to your long term goals. Unless you give them some attention, the most common result is that short term day-to-day activities, which are easier to do but much less important in the long run, tend to crowd out work on the more important longer term goals. If you have to chose between starting to prepare for a second career after retirement, and checking your email this morning..... well I think we'll all generally decide that checking your email is an easier task to get your arms around, so let's do that first. And so it goes, with an unlimited stream of short term activities continuously sprouting up and pushing out the really important stuff.

One way around this is to make a short three item to-do list each morning containing of your three Most Important Tasks (MITs) for the day. You can then add other tasks which may or may not get done, but make sure that you spend adequate time on the three MITs. At least one of these tasks, if not all of them, should be related to longer term goals.

The more I think about it, the more I like this approach. Even my wife said it sounded like a great idea. So I started giving it a try, with the goals of keeping up this habit rigorously for 2 months to help get it established as a longer term habit. The results after the first few days? Great success at writing down my 3 MITs - it really does help you focus on the important longer term tasks. I strongly recommend it. Actually getting my MITs accomplished (or at least spending adequate time on them to make some progress)... well.. it turns out that habit is going to take some work still. Simply having a birthday does not cause change to happen, it's going to take some more work.

Effectiveness vs. Efficiency

I just turned 50 (a few minutes ago in fact), so it's time to make my first posting to this blog. I've spent the last few days reading books and articles on how to better manage your time and life in anticipation of this event. It's clear that one of the most important things to do to achieve success is not to focus on becoming more efficient, but to become more effective. Effectiveness means selecting the best task to do from all the possibilities available and then doing it the best way. Making the right choices about how you’ll use your time is more important than doing efficiently whatever job happens to be around.

Obviously being more effective means setting the right goals, having a reasonable plan to actually achieve them, and realistically pursuing that plan. That's what I plan to discuss in more detail in my next append.