How to set goals

Three writers and I are one month away from our cruise writing retreat aboard the QM2! We’re having our pre-cruise meetings to create the action plans for our week together. I thought I’d give you the same prep questions I’m giving them. (You could change the timeframe from “week” to whatever timeframe you’re working in, whether it’s a day, a weekend, a month, etc.)

• Let’s start with the end in mind: How do you want to feel at the end of the week?

• Let’s work backwards from there: What will make you feel that way?

Inspired by Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s Tiny Experiments, I wanted to take the pressure off setting a goal that was tied to outcomes that may not be feasible and instead focus on doing good work during the time we have together. She says to focus on output, which you have control over, versus outcomes which are out of your control. On page 69, she describes output as “success from deliberate experimentation” and outcomes as “success from fixed destination.” I find the concept of experimentation more expansive and freeing as opposed to a destination I might not reach despite my best efforts.

I recommend you read the book for “how to live freely in a goal-obsessed world,” as the subtitle promises, but here is a bit from a blog post by Le Cunff that describes how to shift from outcomes to outputs:  

Replace your SMART goal with a PACT

Instead of SMART goals, which don’t encourage ambitious, long-term endeavours, I prefer to make a PACT with myself. While a SMART goal focuses on the outcome, the PACT approach focuses on the output. It’s about continuous growth rather than the pursuit of a well-defined achievement. Which makes it a great alternative to SMART goals.

PACT stands for Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, and Trackable—the four factors that make for great goals:

Purposeful. Your goal should be meaningful to your long-term purpose in life, not just relevant to you right now. It will be much harder to stick to your goal if you don’t actually care. When a goal is aligned with your passions and your objectives in life, you are feeling much more motivated. (many tasks don’t feel purposeful but need to be done in order to achieve a meaningful long-term goal, and that’s fine—they are tasks, not goals)

Actionable. A good goal is based on outputs you can control. Your goal should be actionable and controllable. It’s all about shifting your mindset from distant outcomes in the future to present outputs you can control and that are within your reach, taking action today rather than overplanning for tomorrow.

Continuous. It’s important that the actions you take towards your goal are simple and repeatable. So many goals are not achieved because of what’s called choice paralysis. That’s when there are so many options that you end up spending more time doing research than actually doing stuff that will make you progress towards your goal. The good thing about continuous goals is their flexibility. What you need to do is get started, and as you learn more, you can adapt your approach. It’s about continuous improvement rather than reaching a supposed end goal.

Trackable. Not measurable. Stats can be overrated and don’t apply to lots of different types of goals. I’m a big fan of the “yes” or “no” approach to goal tracking, similar to the GitHub tracker. Have you done the thing or not? Have you coded today? Have you called three potential customers? Have you published your weekly blog post? Yes or no? This makes your progress very easy to track.

Let’s say your goal is to grow your newsletter. Here are two versions of the same goal:

SMART version of a goal: “Get 5,000 subscribers in 25 weeks.”

PACT version of a goal: “Publish 25 newsletters over the next 25 weeks.”

As you can see, the first version measures success based on metrics that are largely out of your direct control, whereas the second version puts the emphasis on purposeful, actionable, continuous, and trackable progress.

That’s it. PACT won’t work for goals such as washing the dishes, but it will work for long-term, ambitious goals.

Like writing a book.

Now – what to pack for the Red & Gold-themed Gala Evening on the QM2?

How would you like to work on your writing project on Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 while crossing the Atlantic Septermber 3-10? Visit https://www.amygoldmacher.com/cruise-writing-retreat for more info.