Design Your Day

by Claire Diaz-Ortiz

  2. Withhold Criticism: It’s easy to think of this only being an issue when you brainstorm with someone else, or in a group setting, but in reality this is just as important when you’re brainstorming by yourself, since many of us are our own worst critics. Come up with a bad idea? Don’t throw it out without writing it down. As Osborn’s fourth tenet shows (“Combine and Improve Ideas”), even “bad” ideas can be tweaked to become great ideas.

  3. Welcome Unusual Ideas: A similar concept to #2 (Withhold Criticism), the idea of welcoming unusual ideas is just to make sure that you are really thinking outside the box, and not limiting yourself to only “tame” ideas. Sure, some tame ideas might be great ones, but I’m willing to bet that most of the better ideas in your life (and mine) are the unusual ones. Also, as we’ll see below, remember that often a wild and crazy idea can be the genesis of a fantastic (tamer) gem.

  4. Combine and Improve Ideas: Your best idea isn’t necessarily going to come fully formed to your brain. Instead, to really excel at brainstorming you’ve got to be ready to tweak, massage, and coax a great idea out of an okay or even poor idea. Combining and improving on ideas is essential to make this happen.

  Ultimately, these tenets prove the point: with brainstorming, getting to good usually has to start with bad. So come up with lots and lots of bad, and, if you’re like me, feel free to do so in gigantic sparkle-blue pen for added mirth.

  FREEWRITE

  Sitting down and asking your brain for a list of ideas is not always the best way to brainstorm, and many folks find that freewriting is a great way to supplement the brainstorming process to get that list of goals you need.

  The act of freewriting is, in essence, the act of writing anything down without thought to what you’re writing, why, or if it’s even legible. The idea is that by writing out whatever you are thinking about, an idea will generate over time. Although people historically think of freewriting as a tool mainly for writers, Mark Levy’s wonderful book Accidental Genius explains that anyone can use it as a powerful tool for ideation and idea generation.

  Levy says there are a few key reasons for this.1

  First, freewriting gets the juices going and gets the writing and thinking process to flow. The concept of getting your writing flowing is often the only reason most people think freewriting exists. And this is a good reason. Freewriting does get the energy unblocked in your mind and gets your fingers clacking across the keyboard. But, critically, freewriting also gets the thinking juices flowing.

  Second, freewriting tells you what you know. Are you having trouble coming up with any goals at all for the year ahead? Do you have way too many in your mind that you don’t think are worth writing down? Are you not really sure what you want to focus on when thinking of potential goals—work or family? Are you simply baffled at where to start? Writing down what you do know is a key way to help you sort out your thoughts. If you start a brainstorming session and have no ideas, a ten-minute freewrite will induce some, guaranteed. By the same token, if you start a brainstorming session with lots of ideas you’re not sure are fully fleshed out, a ten-minute freewriting session will help give clarity on which ones you really care about.

  HOME IN: IS THIS A GOAL?

  (Or is it a falafel?)

  I don’t mean to make fun of falafels. But I do have a saying.

  If I’m at a restaurant, and I order lasagna, say, and it comes and I am taking my first bite and it doesn’t taste like what it’s supposed to taste like, I bring out my phrase: Is this a falafel?

  It’s the same with goals. You’ve come up with a whole host of words. But some of these aren’t goals at all. They are falafels.

  By now, you’ve written down a lot of ideas. You’ve ideated. Now it’s time to take out those dozens and dozens of ideas and hold them up to the light. Shake them around. Look at them real good. And eventually distill them into your goals for the year (or season) ahead.

  This is a process. It’s not always linear, it’s often messy, and it may or may not involve bulletproof coffee. (Coffee with butter. Yes, butter. Look it up!)

  So, how can you start sorting out the goals from the falafels?

  Goals, as we’ve all heard before, should first and foremost be actionable, and they should have a timeline. A goal is not “I want to make a billion dollars this year!”—unless you made 80 percent of that last year, of course, and a billion is actually a specific, reasonable number. A goal is something that you really can potentially achieve with a little sweat, grit, and (yes) luck thrown in.

  Good goals must also have a timeline, or deadline. (The “line” at which said aim is “dead,” if you will.) I certainly didn’t create the concept of SMART goals, not by a long shot. Instead, a smart man named Paul Meyer did. According to Meyer, a SMART goal2 is a goal that fits the following criteria:

  • SPECIFIC: A goal should never be vague. For a few years now, I have set a goal to read two hundred books per year. This is not a vague goal. It is not “I want to read some books,” or “I want to read dozens of books.” No. I want to read two hundred books. A specific goal is specific. Period.

  • MEASURABLE: It’s not hard to measure a measurable goal—so find a goal you can count your progress against. If you are training for a 10K run, say, you need to plan out how many times you are going to run each week and for how many minutes. Three runs, twenty minutes each, say. Numbers are measurable. So are other things, but you get the point.

  • ACTIONABLE: With an actionable goal, you know what to do next. If I want to finish my current book manuscript (I do), then I have a nifty word processing program called Microsoft Word I can go ahead and open up to get going. In fact, I can keep doing that every day for ninety minutes (or five hours, depending on the day!). Actionable goals tell you (or at least strongly hint at) what needs to happen next. To finish that book, I better fire up my MacBook Air.

  Do you have a goal to expand your business? You’ve got to turn off House Hunters International and get cracking. Choose goals you can count progress against.

  Although measurable goals don’t need numbers attached, they do need a yardstick you can work against. They should not be things that will randomly be either done or not done come December 31. So if you have a goal to have one out-of-town family reunion this year with your extended family, you can reasonably guess that if in June you have not thought about this at all and neither has anyone else in the family, you are likely behind. Thinking creatively about ways to measure non-numeric goals is key.

  • RELEVANT: Goals should be relevant to you and the year before you. Three years ago, health was top of mind for me, so I set a goal to try eating a thirty-day “Paleo” or Whole Foods diet. It’s worked so well for me over the years that this year my goal is to eat 90 percent Paleo. Always make sure your goals are relevant to the particular season of life you are in. The year I had a baby, I decided it was not realistic to read two hundred books, and dropped my goal by 25 percent. (I heard that babies took up time. I heard right.)

  • TIMELY: Goals must be timely. Let’s say I want to write some ebooks, and I have a goal to self-publish two in a given year. It’s best to put more of a timeline on that goal. The first book when? The second book when? Put a date by those numbers. And never forget important life events that aren’t necessarily in your goals chart. If I have a goal to have at least one annual reunion with my college roommates (I set this goal every year, and luckily it’s a fun one to cross off), I should not plan for that to happen in the spring, when I have a baby due.

  By understanding the SMART goals framework, we can now look back and see if the things we came up with during our brainstorming were actually goals, or if they were something else.

  Take a look back at your list. If something doesn’t fit the profile of a goal as outlined above, then is it a word of the year? Or a dream to think about later on? Or is it perhaps just an idea of something cool you’d like to do, but don’t want to prioritize?

  Sort all the ideas you came up with
into three categories:

  1. A Word of the Year (or a Word of You): Your word of the year, as discussed, should be one defining word to help bring together what you wish to feel and accomplish in the year or season ahead.

  2. Dreams: Your dreams should be big, bold ideas that you may want to pursue one day, but aren’t ready to start actively working toward by prioritizing or putting a timeline on. If you’re thirty, and you have dreams of retirement, say, or if you’re eighteen and coaching your kids’ little league games isn’t around the corner.

  3. Goals.

  “We overestimate what we can accomplish in a day, but underestimate what we can accomplish in a year.”

  —Chris Guilleabeau

  At this point, you should have a list of goals that all fit the SMART goal framework. We now need to pare these down to a list that will work for you for this year.

  One of the keys to goal setting is not to set too many of them. It can be easy for some folks to make a laundry list of things they’d like to accomplish that all meet the basic requirement of being a SMART goal. But it is not easy for most folks to accomplish every one of these goals. Ultimately, there is little worse in goal setting than getting 2 percent of the way through your massive list of annual goals, giving up, and throwing the whole list out with yesterday’s recycling, never to be looked at again.

  Keeping motivation high and your chances for success higher is essential, and doing so is dependent on not thinking too grandly about what can be accomplished. That said, I do not believe there is a specific number of goals you should set, and I don’t stick to one number year in and year out. Instead, I (almost always) stick to the same categories.

  Here’s the concept: If you’re going to live a life, you’re going to have more than one goal to go after. Once you have multiple goals, categorizing them into areas of your life not only helps organize your thinking, but also helps take the pressure off of prioritizing one goal over another.

  Let me explain: Many of my annual goals have more or less equal weight in my life, or at least fluctuate in their importance over the course of a year. Thus, putting goals into categories frees me up to choose a goal that might be “small” in one category of my life, and not worry that it’s not equal to a goal that might be “large” in another category.

  Let’s see what this looks like in practice. Here are the categories I use for my goals most years, and the ones that many other folks find useful.

  • God

  • Family

  • Health

  • Personal

  • Work

  • Money

  Within each of these categories, I have at least one goal each year, and often more than one. For some people who suggest that you should only have three to five goals a year, say, this may sound like a lot. After all, with six categories, just two in each means twelve goals a year. As I’ll show, however, categorizing allows me to set “smaller” goals in some areas that do not require significant work on a daily basis, but are things I do want to be intentional about.

  Let’s look more deeply, using some of my goals in the past as examples.

  GOD

  When I got my first iPod back in 2006, I named my list of Christian music “God.” This name has stuck. In this category I set goals related to my faith, which is the bedrock of everything else I do—the largest rock in the jar, and the one that goes in first. For me, this category often has to do with how I spend the time in my morning routine in terms of what types of books and devotionals I plan to read throughout the year.

  Here are some examples:

  • Read through the New Testament as a part of my morning routine.

  • Read at least twenty books (as part of my larger reading goal) that guide or inform me in my faith.

  FAMILY

  For me, this is the category where my husband and I think about what we want to accomplish as a family this year. For example, last year I thought it was important to make two solo trips with my husband sans our glorious babe. I’ve also often set a goal to have one trip a year with extended family. So I set goals in this category like this:

  • I want to take two solo trips with my husband this year.

  • I want to do one extended family trip this year.

  HEALTH

  At times, like when I find a breath-o-meter on Kickstarter that promises to measure my hydration levels, I wonder if I’ve gone too far with the whole human guinea pig thing. (And then, I tap the sleep band on my wrist and fall asleep for exactly 9.5 hours like a baby.)

  The health category is the place where my inner spreadsheet really shines, and where I take real advantage of the category system of goal setting to allow myself to set some goals that are about keeping me on track, and not producing or creating something.

  In my health category, I think about what I want to do, and then I stick a timeline around it. Here are some examples from past years:

  • I want to eat 90 percent Paleo this year. (This means about two or three non-Paleo meals a week. As I’ll discuss, I use a simple app to check off when I eat non-Paleo meals, when I exercise, and when I do other things. This makes it easy to track.)

  • I want to exercise an average of five out of seven days each week.

  • I want to get a massage twice a month.

  • I want to sleep an average of 9.5 hours a night.

  PERSONAL

  This is the category where I think of what I want to personally achieve that doesn’t best fit elsewhere. Here are a few of the types of goals in this category:

  • Do my morning routine (The Present Principle, which I’ll explain later) an average of five out of seven days each week.

  • Read two hundred books.

  WORK

  This is a big category, and there’s always a lot in it, so I find that with this area in particular I need to really pare down and not overdo. I try to stick to the really important things.

  Here are some examples from past years:

  • Submit one book for publication this year.

  • Publish thirty blog posts over the next twelve months.

  MONEY

  This is the category for setting goals for earning, saving, investing, and giving. When single and traveling the world for several years in my twenties, I was extremely frugal and very budget conscious, and began to write down everything I spent, thanks to the wise advice in the great book by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, Your Money or Your Life.

  Ultimately, this gave me a habit that has been hard to break—and it makes it easy to track financial goals. If that’s not the case for you, I would encourage you to see what you’re comfortable with in terms of ongoing financial tracking to help you meet your goals in this category.

  Here is an example of one of my goals in this area from past years:

  • Increase my giving by 10 percent over the next twelve months.

  Now it’s time for you to get started, and the first step is to create your categories.

  Many folks use a version or variation on the ones I use above, so I believe they do serve as a good starting point. That said, some obvious other or substitute categories you might want to include are: Home, Parenting, Marriage, Extended Family, Nuclear Family, Giving, Church, Running, Sports, for example. Essentially you should think about the most important things in your life, and distill them into meaningful categories that work for you.

  Once you have these in place, it’s time to start placing goals into categories and evaluating where you stand. So, with a keen memory for catching those falafels, plug the remaining true “goals” into your chosen categories.

  Now comes a critical, important test, and one of the hardest things you’ll do in this entire process. It’s time to ask yourself, honestly: Do I have too many goals?

  As I explained, there are some folks who believe that a specific number of goals is important. No more than five. No more than eight! Three is just right.

  I’ve never jumped on that bandwagon, though, and t
he most I can say for sure is that I do believe that having too many goals is a surefire way to lose focus. I’m not going to give you a number, but I will say this: Be realistic, and choose less rather than more. Also remember to think about the work involved with various goals.

  For me, this is always most clear with my health goals. When I set a goal like, “eat 90% Paleo,” it’s not a goal that actually takes me more time or that I have to put in extra work or manpower to accomplish. I have to eat, and I have to shop for the food I eat no matter what kind of food I eat, so choosing this path simply replaces another one. Same with a goal like “read 20 books that relate to my faith.” This goal, in terms of time, does not add to the goal “read 200 books this year.” It just clarifies what my specific intention is within that larger goal, and writing it down on my list of goals that I regularly reference makes sure I will endeavor to hit it. That is not true, though, with a goal like, “submit one book for publication this year.” I could easily spend my time doing a lot of things other than writing and publishing a book, and so setting this as a goal means that I must set aside time to do the work required to get it done.

  Another key thing to remember is that some of your goals may be “fun” to work toward and execute, and others may be less so. This makes a difference when thinking of the overall number you can handle in a given year. For example, although I love my work, I find it more fun to read than work. So “publishing a book” will feel like more work to me than reading for pleasure will.