Goals and Roles
How to prioritize the important stuff
Welcome to All the Tasks Fit to Print, my weekly newsletter on all issues productivity-related for authors (and other solopreneurs)!
What are the things that matter most to you?
Not belongings, or holidays, or specific people. I mean The Big Stuff: parenthood, your business or your career, your health, a significant personal goal, your faith community…you get the picture. The "meta projects" of your life, which determine how you spend your time, energy, money, and love.
In my productivity method Personal Projects Management (PPM), those are your "guideposts." I decided to call them guideposts because I feel like they are the things we use to guide us through our decision making processes, as well as signal to us what our priorities are. You are your guideposts, and your guideposts are you.
It follows, then, that one of the main questions I get when I teach the PPM method is "how do I decide what my guideposts are?" Maybe it sounds like it should not follow. After all, if your guideposts define you! Shouldn't you already know them?
Of course. You do know them. What you might have trouble with is articulating them, or narrowing them down, or condensing them. Guideposts by their nature are time and energy consuming, so it is recommended that you only have between three and six (at most!) at any given time. This can fluctuate, of course, but if you have more than six then at best you will not be very competent at any of them. Human attention (and energy) is finite, alas! This is where people stumble, especially high achievers/highly ambitious people, because it feels like leaving food on the table to shorten that list in any way.
So, first, we need to agree on one important point: Trying to do too many things is counter-productive.
Sorry.
I say this as inveterate Attempter of All the Things. Some of the goals lists of my youth are downright painful to look at, what with the extensive catalogue of twenty to thirty activities I thought I could do every day in earnest, grasping for what I thought I should accomplish (I know, "don't should on yourself" but I was young and unreasonable). Usually, the end result was some form of burnout and zero progress.
Worse than zero, in fact. It often ended in regression, or abandonment of, the goals I longingly dreamed of.
Simply put: the fact that we have 24 hours in a day does not mean that we have 24 hours of energy and focus.
Work, relationships, exercise, emotions, and creativity all take their toll. You might be able to fill up every minute you are awake with activities but you cannot maintain that kind of "100% schedule" for long before crashing out. I've seen it happen way too many times, and that's not even counting the times it happened to me.
Guideposts are a starting point for PPM because the exercise of winnowing down what is important to you decides what projects/programs you will be spending your actual time on. True, you can still overbook yourself even if you only have three guideposts, but it will be much more obvious that you are setting yourself for defeat.
You can't hide behind "busy" when you are clear about your guideposts.
The key here, as in all personal productivity advice, is to know thyself. Deciding on your three-to-six guideposts is a fantastic way of beginning that journey.
A good starting point is to think about the roles you have in your life. This is an old idea from Stephen Covey's First Things First, although as a concept it is pretty basic to most productivity systems and advice. You might come up with a list of roles: spouse, parent, friend, business owner, teacher, religious leader, and so on. If that list is six or fewer roles and that works for you, congratulations! You've got your guideposts!
However, sometimes there is no set role for a given goal. If "peak physical fitness" is a goal for you, then it makes sense that it would be a guidepost, even if it is not a role you are filling.
Other times, you end up with a list of ten roles and goals and no idea how to squash them down into a list of six-or-less. Maybe you just don't want to!
Been there, done that, and can attest to how self-sabotaging that is. Yes, self-sabotaging. You are literally setting yourself up for failure, even if you don't see it that way in the moment. If you can't cut your roles/goals down to five, then it is time to sit back and do some self-reflection. Or, as they used to say, "check yourself before you wreck yourself." Truly the wisdom of the sages.
On the other hand, sometimes you have listed out things individually which can be combined into one role. I use parenthood a lot as an example, despite being childless myself. I am surrounded by friends and clients who have children, and I understand the time and toll parenthood takes. When parents first identify their guideposts, their initial instinct is usually to make each child a separate guidepost. Honorable, but not helpful.
Instead, I suggest that they make "parenthood" a guidepost instead. This may or may not work if one of your children has special needs, but generally, "parenthood" is specific enough for a guidepost.
Maybe you've listed our your job, your side hustle, and your spouse's business as separate guideposts, when in fact it might be more accurate to group them together in a guidepost called "prosperity" or "financial wellbeing."
Or maybe, like me, you are a solopreneur with several irons in the fire. I am a professional author with several online platforms, and I used to break out my separate pen-names as guideposts due to the very different genres they represented. However, I eventually folded them into one guidepost I just labeled "Author" (a role, you'll note) and made each pen-name into a separate program under that guidepost.
The last thing to do if you are having trouble, especially if you have a list of six or more potential guideposts even after combining some goals/enterprises, is to prioritize. Do not overthink this, simply list them in descending order of importance.
Then, you guessed it: cross out all but the top five!
If you do this and rebel against the remaining five, then you start over with reprioritizing in a different order. Then once again cross out all but the top five (or the top four, if you are feeling committed to the process!). Repeat as needed until you have the six-or-less guideposts you are comfortable with.
(If re-ordering them is difficult, then assign each one a number and use an online randomizer to do it for you!)
I find that once someone has identified their guideposts, a lot of things fall into place, both on their calendars and with their implementation of PPM.
All right! Time to wrap this up. If you are having trouble identifying your guideposts, go through this simple exercise:
Identify Roles
Identify Goals
Merge where possible/makes sense
Prioritize
Implement!
I'd love to hear from you about your process doing this, whether it worked for you or if you have any questions about it.