Everyone’s talking about goal setting.
You see it in books, podcasts, and blog posts. Everyone has a method. Most of them sound good on paper but fall apart in real life.
I’ve tried all of them.
SMART goals, GTD, vision boards, you name it. Some made me feel busy. Others made me feel inspired.
None of them helped me follow through in a way that lasted.
Derek Sivers said a good goal should make you jump into action. If that’s the standard, I’m great at setting bad goals.
Eventually, I realized the problem wasn’t with me. It was how I was thinking about goals in the first place. That’s when I started to put together a different way to approach it.
I call it the Unified Theory of Goal Setting.
How the Unified Theory of Goal Setting Works
So what was the big realization I had?
Goal setting is just a way to cut through noise.
They help you focus on what matters most.
Think of it like a funnel.
At the top, you have everything you could spend your time on.
As you move down, you narrow that list based on what matters most right now.
Every goal-setting method you’ve heard of tries to do the same thing: turn the chaos into focus.
That’s the whole point.
1. You Start at Top of the Funnel
Let’s start at the top with “anything you might do.”
That’s a lot.
It’s way more than anyone can manage or even really conceptualize, so we need helpful abstractions.
I’ve found that the best abstraction at the top of the funnel is “life areas” because that’s something most people can wrap their heads around.
The goal is just to divide everything into smaller categories.
Some examples of life areas would be career, finances, health, or family.
Let’s focus on your career.
2. You Define Your Long-Term Vision
Before we can start filtering down every possible career-focused task, we need to establish what kind of life you want to be living in 5-10 years.
Take some time, let your mind wander and dream.
Now ask yourself, “Why?” a few times.
We’re trying to define what kind of life you want to live, but also your values.
What is important to you?
It’s important to have both because your vision and values align now, but you may find that they diverge as you go down this path.
You don’t want to lock yourself into a particular vision and wake up in 10 years realizing you 100% achieved your vision and hate your life.
3. You Ask Yourself Who Do You Need To Become
Next, you’ll identify who you must become to achieve this vision.
If you were already that person, you’d already be living the vision, and this whole exercise would be pretty pointless.
You need to identify the skills, abilities, and qualities that this ideal you will have.
- Does this future you have skills in sales and marketing?
- Are they an expert Python developer?
- Do they have excellent time management skills?
Jot down each attribute and give it a score of 1-10, then score your current self.
Be realistic when you do this.
Your future self doesn’t need to be a 10 in everything.
Now, you can see where you need to grow and where you lack.
4. You Set Your Mid-Funnel Goals
Next, we can start to zero into the specific goals we need to set.
A mid-funnel goal might be “I want to learn how to learn efficiently, most likely including skills around note-taking, reading comprehension, etc.” or even simply “I want to take my learning to learn skills from a 3 to a 4 or 5.”
This goal is vague and certainly not actionable yet, but it’s perfect because its purpose is to filter “all career tasks” down to “all learning to learn tasks.”
In my case, after some research, I found the iCanStudy course.
It teaches skills that build on each other, so early progress makes later learning easier.
Now that I know how to approach my mid-funnel goal, it’s time to visit the bottom of the funnel.
Defining Tasks & Systems
This stage is unique depending on your mid-funnel goal, but here are a few things to help you.
SMART goals (mentioned earlier) can be a great way to narrow down from a subjective mid-funnel goal to an objective bottom-funnel goal.
It’s also a good start to scheduling your recurring tasks.
“I’m going to write for one hour every morning at 6 am” is something you can check off on a habit tracker.
However, when you create habits in this way, it’s important to have a goal associated with it to verify that the habit is useful.
If I’m writing for an hour every day because I anticipate that it will support my ability to publish one long-form article every week, I can check to see if it’s working.
“Yes, my daily writing habit has allowed me to publish every Tuesday for six weeks,” or else you need to reflect on why you’re missing your goal and what needs to change.
Wrapping It Up
Goal setting isn’t about being inspired.
It’s about making better decisions with limited time and energy.
The funnel helps you do that:
- Start wide with your vision and values.
- Narrow it down by figuring out who you need to become.
- Then, define clear goals and build systems to support them.
If you’re not getting the results you want, something in the funnel is off.
Step back, fix it, and move forward.
That’s it. Keep it simple. Keep it useful.