Achieving your goals is this simple

Over the last 5 years I have struggled to keep the goals I set in January.

I have always found it difficult to follow through with goals on a long time horizon.

Give me a week to do something, and it’ll be done.

Give me a year, and I have no idea what the result will be.

A month into 2024 and I have made more progress on my goals than I did in all of 2023.

There were 3 main changes I made that have allowed me to accomplish this.

Today we are going to break each of them down and show you how to do the same.

Shift to Input Goals

Like most people, I was setting output goals.

AKA results focused goals that have many factors outside of our control.

Something like:

• Reach 10k followers

• Make 100k dollars

• Lose 20 pounds

These are all great goals, but each relies on things that we can’t directly guarantee.

The solution is creating strictly input based goals, with a hypothesis attached to it.

For example here is one of mine.

Goal: Post 260x on LinkedIn

Hypothesis: This will grow my social media

A big focus for me in 2024 is growing my social presence (basic I know). But, the goal I am actually tracking is posting 5 times per week on LinkedIn for a full year (260 times in total)

The hypothesis is that if I post 260 times, my social following will growth.

In the first 35 days of input based goals, my LinkedIn following has grown 135 followers.

The main benefit is that input goals are 100% in our control.

At the end of the week, month and year I can simply ask myself “Did I do what I said I was?”

This removes the outside factors, and focuses us on the one thing we can control: our actions.

100% Visibility

The other problem I faced was literally forgetting about my goals.

Yes, I did.

This was a trend I noticed multiple times over the year, but couldn’t figure out how to counter it.

This year I figured it out.

In my notion dashboard, I have all my goals listed at the top— front and center:

Every single day I open this dashboard and get reminded of what I am working toward.

It’s the visual aspect that has helped me the most.

The other key component is gamifying the goals.

Every goal has a progress meter updates as I complete the input requirements.

It helps gamify the process and make it more fun to actually complete tasks.

This is also always visible to ensure nothing is slipping through the cracks.

Start Using Productivity Sprints

The final issue I addressed was lacking an ability to focus properly.

We all have competing priorities and many things we are trying to accomplish.

So I started applying the concept of sprints to my productivity.

Sprints are used by product teams to select a primary focus for what to build.

The same can be used for personal productivity.

For example my current sprint is YouTube.

From Jan 1. to March 31st, my primary focus is YouTube.

If I have to drop something or have limited time my decision is already made: YouTube will be the one that remains.

This offers a quick and easy framework to prioritize what your most essential projects are at this given time.

It removes the stress of having to decide what is “important”

Recap

If you are looking to achieve more in 2024, this is the framework I have been using:

1. Using input goals to maximize my actions

2. Making my goals constantly visible to reinforce their importance

3. Leveraging productivity sprints to pre-select my focus areas for the year

Happy goal setting.

PS— here’s this week’s YouTube video on what the real key to earning more money is:

PSS— if you found this at all useful, consider sharing this newsletter with a friend who might also get some value 🙂 

Talk soon,
Matt