Category: Decision Making

The Death of Goals

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Have you recently created a set of clear, written goals?

Most career advice emphasizes the idea of writing down measurable goals that one then pursues with laser focus. This is said to be the key to success in work and life. However, is this advice sound?

In a post on his website, Tiago Forte pondered the idea that we have reached the Death of Goals. He starts by lamenting the continued assumption that SMART goals are the be all and end all of achievement.

Every time I bring up “SMART goals,” I can see the light go out in my students’ eyes. An unmistakable feeling of dread and aversion fills the room, and the decline in energy and enthusiasm is palpable. They know they should set goals that way, but they don’t want to.

The SMART framework was developed 44 years ago by a director of corporate planning at an electric and natural gas utility – not exactly a paragon of modern business in the information age.

I knew traditional goals were an outdated relic of a bygone era, but I hadn’t figured out what to replace them with. After all, they seem like such a load-bearing pillar of modern society: you set an objective, you make a plan, and then you follow the steps to get there. 

To Tiago, a possible solution lies in the book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, by Kenneth O. O. Stanley and Joel Lehman. For the authors, goals are fine when the project is about incremental improvement or completing rote tasks. However, the value of goals collapses when the scope of possibilities grows larger.

The problem arises when we try to scale up this modest strategy to greater achievements – those that involve true ambition, novel invention, innovative breakthroughs, or pushing the frontier.

These are the kinds of pursuits in which goals lose their power, and can actually become counterproductive and lead you in the opposite direction of progress.

To understand why, it’s helpful to think of achievement not as creating something completely new from scratch, but as searching a space of possibilities.

Tiago believes that goals work best when the environment is well defined. The problem comes when we encounter undefined and unknown conditions. As technology and society advances in unexpected directions, a reliance on goals can be a dead end.

For the most interesting, exciting, impactful achievements, goals are a false compass, distracting you from the highest potential directions. They induce a narrow tunnel vision, eliminating the serendipitous discovery, unorthodox creativity, and breakthrough innovation that are most valuable.

In other words, the best path through the vast hall of possibilities is not a straight one; it’s a twisty turny wild ride of daring leaps and hairpin pivots that would seem positively crazy to any outside observer.

The article ends with Tiago’s six steps to think outside of goals. These steps allow people to appreciate the value of interesting problems and expand their realm of thinking to a broader range of possibilities for success.

Read the full article to learn more about the limitation of goals and a possible alternative for progress.

So, what is your non-goal?

Who Should Attend?

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Have you ever attended a meeting and wondered why you are there?

Sometimes people send out meeting invites across the entire organization on the assumption that many heads are best. However, more attendees often make a meeting less productive. An article from Flowtrace indicated that 35% of survey respondents believed that limited the number of people in the room was important for meeting success.

When participants start to believe the meeting is a waste of time, their engagement slips. This can lead to mildly disruptive behavior, such as looking at phones or side-conversations. At worst, it can rise to active disruption in the form of pointless argumentation or snide comments.

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A cardinal rule of meetings is to invite as few people as possible, but enough to make the meeting effective. How should a meeting planner determine whom to invite? Here are a few parameters:

  • Does the meeting topic directly affect a potential attendee’s core job functions?
  • Are they directly responsible, or part of the team responsible, for the item discussed?
  • Will they carry out actions resulting from decisions made at the meeting?
  • Do they have specific expertise relating to the topic of the meeting?
  • Could a team leader attend in place of the whole team and report back?

For example, an early high level meeting to discuss the allocation of the materials selection budget could be attended by the division leaders, including collections, finance, and administration. A future meeting where the discussion reaches branch level allocations could be expanded to include the branch division head and specific managers who oversee special collections.

In addition, keep in mind that not all participants need to stay for the entire meeting. When someone is done with their portion of the meeting, allow them to exit if feasible. To that end, it is helpful to organize the meeting agenda to enable participants with limited roles to have their items discussed early so they can leave to resume their regular duties.

Remember, employees work time is valuable. Don’t waste their contributions by obligating them to attend unnecessary meetings. They will appreciate it.

The Secret to Success – Take Time Off

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When was the last time you took a vacation from work? I mean a true vacation where you unplugged completely from the office, not even peeking at your email once.

There is a mindset that we need to keep working to succeed. Breaks and vacations are seen as distractions from accomplishing goals. However, is this true or simply a recipe for burnout?

In an article on his website, Darius Foroux suggests that taking time off is actually vital to completing your goals. In fact, time off not only is good for your physical and mental well-being, but it also a way to increase creativity and focus. To start, he chastises the idea that taking time off is for wimps.

People who never take time off to do nothing are short-term focused. “I want to reach my goals! NOW!”

But as always, short-term thinking harms your long-term development and growth. What happens when you power through work and burn yourself out? In most instances, your results suffer, and you become less productive.

In some cases, you even become depressed — which will set you back even longer. 

His solution is to embrace time off from work. Whether it is deliberate breaks during the day or taking an unplugged vacation, time off has many benefits. One of the primary reasons breaks are important is that they give us time to think and process.

All ideas require processing. Are the ideas any good? Do I really want to do those things?

Again, that’s a thinking process. When you go from idea to execution, without processing, you often waste your time in hindsight.

Of course, you can never entirely prevent that. But by taking the time to process your ideas, you can prevent your future self a lot of pain, worry, and even money.

Read the full article on Foroux’s website to learn more benefits of taking time off.

Do You Measure Your Wealth in Money or Time?

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When people consider the idea of success, often they equate dollar signs as the measure. The belief is that having more money in the bank account equals greater satisfaction. However, one can have an abundance of dollars, but it is worthless when there is no time to enjoy it. Therefore, is it more accurate to say that a person should be measured by how much time freedom they have?

In a recent article on Lifehacker, writer Jeff Somers explores how control over one’s time rather than monetary wealth may be the best sign of success. He writes:

Time affluence—the feeling that you have enough time to accomplish everything you want to get done—is a crucial aspect of our happiness and sense of personal satisfaction. Time poverty is the opposite—that stressful feeling you get when there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. Between commuting to and from our jobs, the time spent working, then the chores at home, many of us barely have time to eat some dinner and maybe stream a show before collapsing into bed—and starting the process over again the next day.

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Later in the article he offers some time hacks that can free up valuable space in the day. The first method he discusses is organizing and prioritizing.

Since your time is limited, stop treating it like an amorphous, infinite resource you always have more of. Make lists of things you need or want to do and prioritize them. Then use time blocking to break each of those priorities into a fixed amount of time needed to accomplish them or at least move them toward completion. This avoids letting tasks pile up, which increases stress and that sense of not being in control of your time, and provides a visual guide to how your day will play out. And having clear times for specific activities to end will increase your efficiency.

Learn his other techniques for building up time affluence by reading the rest of the article.

Opening Up Your Personal Constraints

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Oftentimes personal development seems like a nebulous task. Since a lot of it takes place in our heads and hearts, it would seem that attempts at self-improvement are hard to quantify. However, could there be a way to use physical world productivity systems to produce inner growth?

On his YouTube channel, Tiago Forte recently explored using the Theory of Constraints to improve personal productivity and development. For those not familiar with the theory, it was developed decades ago to better understand how large-scale systems, especially factories, could function more effectively. A key focus of the process is identifying the bottleneck. The website Lean Production defines it this way:

The core concept of the Theory of Constraints is that every process has a single constraint and that total process throughput can only be improved when the constraint is improved. A very important corollary to this is that spending time optimizing non-constraints will not provide significant benefits; only improvements to the constraint will further the goal (achieving more profit).

Thus, TOC seeks to provide precise and sustained focus on improving the current constraint until it no longer limits throughput, at which point the focus moves to the next constraint. The underlying power of TOC flows from its ability to generate a tremendously strong focus towards a single goal (profit) and to removing the principal impediment (the constraint) to achieving more of that goal. In fact, Goldratt considers focus to be the essence of TOC.

Tiago believes that this theory can be applied to personal growth. In the video, he gives an example of how he uses it to improve his deep-thinking time for writing his next book. Since there is no physical bottleneck, what he explores is how his personal energy is the obstacle to his process. He then identifies ways to overcome it, such as blocking out time in the morning, exercising, eating healthy, and minimizing distractions. All these actions are ways to expand his capacity to think deeper.

The video is only five minutes long and easy to understand. I invite you to watch it and learn how the Theory of Constraints could improve your life.

Never Start a Meeting Without One of These!

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Have you ever attended a meeting that lacked focus and direction?

No doubt you thought that was a rhetorical question. More often than not, meetings drift onto strange paths or seemingly hit a dead end. While there are many reasons why this happens, one way to prevent it is straightforward. Never start a meeting without drafting a clear, written agenda.

A vital factor to holding an effective meeting is a pre-planned agenda. In fact, 67% of
respondents in a Flowtrace survey said that having a clear agenda is important to a successful
meeting. It is the responsibility of the person calling the meeting, or the standing committee secretary, to prepare an agenda, ideally for distribution at least a day before the meeting.

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Simple agendas have at the top of the document the committee’s name or subject of the meeting, date
and time, and a bullet point list of items to be discussed. If it is a recurring meeting, the date/time/place of the next meeting should be listed at the bottom. The first item of business is for everyone in attendance to agree on the agenda, with an opportunity to add items as needed. Only after this is done should discussion commence on the items listed.

Agendas may contain specific sections, such as approval of prior minutes, depending on
the official status of the meeting. For example, Governing Boards follow local or state rules in
their operations. This means having roll calls, obeying rules of order, and publishing their
agendas in advance to the public. This ensures proper notice for anyone who wishes to attend.

Therefore, the next time you call a meeting, draft an agenda in advance. No doubt you will find the meeting more productive and quicker to complete, resulting in greater satisfaction and success.

Never Leave a Meeting Without Doing This

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Imagine a meeting where all the participants are active in the conversation. Great ideas are shared and built upon. Everyone feels excited about the goals discussed. Was that a successful meeting? It could be, so long as something important is done before the meeting is adjourned.

Many seemingly productive meetings end up being for naught if the follow-through is fumbled. To ensure it happens, follow this simple rule.

Never end a meeting without summarizing the decisions and assigning the next actions to move items forward.

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Prioritized next actions are the fruits of a successful meeting. When there is uncertainty over who is responsible to do tasks decided upon in the meeting, the risk of inaction is huge. Everyone attending the meeting should be clear on his or her responsibilities before adjournment.

Five key steps to remember:

  • Write down the specific next actions decided on in the meeting
  • Assign the task to participants and make them responsible for completing each action
  • Be clear on the deadlines for each action item
  • Have a means to share updates on each action completed with the rest of the group
  • Finally, decide when and where the next meeting will happen if needed

Follow these steps to ensure that your valuable meetings lead to success afterwards.

Don’t Know the Reason for the Meeting? Then Don’t Meet!

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Have you ever left a meeting with a variation of this question spinning in your head:

“What was the reason for that meeting?”

It is very easy to call a meeting, yet few people consider the organizational impact of these gatherings. By simple logic when people are meeting, they are not doing their regular work. If the meeting does not provide value by its end, the impact on the organization is negative in terms of time wasted and energies drained.

Here are three disheartening statistics found on the website Flowtrace.

  • 71% of meetings are considered unproductive by employees.
  • 45% of employees admitted to feeling overwhelmed by attending too many meetings.
  • An estimated $37 billion is lost annually in the U.S. due to inefficient meetings.
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Therefore, it is important to know the right time to call a meeting. Thankfully there is a simple way to determine if a meeting is unnecessary. It goes like this:

If you are unable to articulate the purpose of a meeting, then a meeting should not be called.

Without clarity of purpose, a meeting is destined to slip into a time sink of wasted words. A tool to get off on the right foot is to fill in the blank below with ten words or less:

The purpose of the meeting is ____________.

If you can’t spell out a clearly stated purpose that anyone in your organization can appreciate, then don’t hold the meeting. According to the Flowtrace article, 72% of survey respondents listed setting clear objectives as important for a successful meeting. Therefore, being clear on the purpose is key to making meetings more impactful and energizing.

So, what is the purpose of your next meeting?

6 Ways to Be More Productive

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What do experts in efficiency say are the best ways to be productive?

Journalist Emily Laurence reached out to productivity coaches to learn what they recommend to their clients. She summed up her findings in a recent article in GQ magazine titled 6 Ways to Be More Productive and Actually Get Stuff Done. The first piece of advice was to prioritize what needs to be done.

Productivity coach Juli Shulem says that there’s one word she repeatedly hears from all her clients: overwhelmed. When it comes to being more productive, she says that the biggest roadblock is that most people have no idea where to start. So instead of doing anything, they’re paralyzed and do nothing. Can you relate?

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So how does one decide where to start? The coach offered this advice.

Shulem says the first step to being productive is getting on paper everything you need to do. This includes both tasks that are immediate and need to be done that day as well as what eventually needs to be done. For big “to-dos” that are farther out, Shulem recommends breaking it down into smaller micro tasks. For example, if you have a big work presentation in three weeks, the micro-tasks could be research, building your deck, and doing a run-through of exactly what you’re going to say.

To learn the other five ways to be more productive, please read the rest of the article.