Austin Kleon beautifully quoted his friend on twitter saying “We expect too much from January, and not enough from February” and said we need to change this perception. I thought this was so accurate.
This year, however, I’m already expecting a lot from February after I designed January 2021 around quiet reflection and past year review. I’m planning to start working on my goals and implement the insights I had in February. Winter break for kids is going to be over very soon so my morning and evening routines will change with this and the end of online schooling (for now). Let’s all make the best of this lovely short month. Let’s really start walking the talk. As James Clear says in Atomic Habits quote below: Less motion, more action.
When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategizing and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result. Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome. If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that’s action. If I search for a better diet plan and read a few books on the topic, that’s motion. If I actually eat a healthy meal, that’s action. Sometimes motion is useful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself. It doesn’t matter how many times you go talk to the personal trainer, That motion will never get you in shape. Only the action of working out will get the result you’re looking to achieve.
I have been choosing a word of the year for 2 years now and this year I decided to choose a mantra.
My word of the year 2019 was Teach because I wanted to start sharing what I learn through weekly instagram videos. My word for 2020 was Clarity which I was seeking through three pillars inspired by the book Clarity First, mindfulness, questions and self-care.
I couldn’t choose just one word for 2021 as I have been thinking about several themes to live this year.
One of the themes is The Practice, which is committing to my creative practice day in and day out as Seth Godin so brilliantly explained in his latest book with the same title. My practice for this year is going to be writing. I want to take my writing very seriously and hone this skill by committing to daily writing on this blog starting Feb 1st 2021. Writing more can only improve my podcast and my learning capabilities because writing will help me synthesize the information I’m consuming.
Another theme I’m thinking about is Life of Focus based on the amazing course I enjoyed by Cal Newport and Scott H. Young. I have been fascinated by the ideas in this course which you’d be familiar with if you listened to Cal’s podcast or read his books Deep Work and Digital Minimalism or Scott’s book Ultralearning. In this course Cal and Scott defined focus as “The ability to guide your attention in ways you desire, not just following the random tugs of the environment.” I believe that our attention is one of our most valuable and limited assets and that’s why I have started my year with the digital declutter challenge. I believe that we need to be stingy with how we spend our attention and that improving our focus is a skill we can learn through practice. Here is this word again.
I have also been trying to commit to tracking my deep work (focused) sessions at work and keeping a tally of them as advised by Cal over and over. Deep work session are 30-minute intervals where I focus solely on one task which requires mental effort, no task switching, no glancing at my email inbox or God forbid my phone. This year I want to contribute more value with less time. Committing to such sessions will improve my focus muscles and my attention quality and help me exaclty do that.
I’ve been also wanting to better redirect my attention to the present moment where life happens after completing The Power of Now Book discussion series (Arabic) in 2020. This way I will feel more alive. My family will feel my attention with them too as I practice being present. My morning meditaiton practice will support that. My improved digital wellbeing -after the digital declutter challenge ends and implementing the rules I’ll set moving forward- will create strict boundaries between family time and work time. I also recently realized that my social media time is work time. I’m not there to scroll. I’m there to share my work that I do here in my blog and in my podcast. It’s not ok to work during family time. It’s not ok to do it when I’m at my 9-5 job. I’d better start setting proper work hours for my personal creative work including my social media.
Practice Focused Attention
Practice: Writing, Podcasting, Meditating & Deep Work consistently.
Focused: Tracking Deep/focused sessions at my job. Creating Boundaries between work and family with digital wellbeing rules.
Attention: With a life of focus and minimized distractions I will have more attention to spend on meaningful connections and be more present wherever I am.
What about you? Have you chosen your word/mantra of the year? It’s such a beautiful exercise, here are some resources to help you that I shared in my newsletter.
“The reason we don’t set goals is that we’re afraid. We’re afraid of saying a goal out loud, even to ourselves, and certainly afraid of writing it down. We’re afraid of trying to achieve a goal and failing. And, surprisingly, we’re afraid of reaching our goals, because reaching them means our lives will change, and change is often at the center of our fear. “
Seth Godin
We all know that writing something makes it easily remembered. In this post I gathered for you some resources to convince you that writing your goals is very important for achieving them.
In Your Best Year Ever, Michael Hyatt shares the research done by Professor Gail Mathews who conducted a study that confirmed the power of writing down our goals.
“She tracked 267 professionals from several different over 5 weeks by dividing them into five groups. men and women from all over the world, and from all walks of life, including entrepreneurs, educators, healthcare professionals, artists, lawyers and bankers.
She divided the participants into groups, according to who wrote down their goals and dreams, and who didn’t.
Matthews discovered that the simple act of writing one’s goals boosted achievement by 42%. “
Who of us wouldn’t like more chances of goals achievement? Writing them does that.”
Study after study shows you will remember things better when you write them down. Typically, subjects for these types of studies are students taking notes in class.
“Mueller and Oppenheimer (who conducted this study) postulate that taking notes by hand requires different types of cognitive processing than taking notes on a laptop, and these different processes have consequences for learning. Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture. Instead, they listen, digest, and summarize so that they can succinctly capture the essence of the information. Thus, taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy “mental lifting,” and these efforts foster comprehension and retention. By contrast, when typing students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning, as faster typing speeds allow students to transcribe a lecture word for word without devoting much thought to the content. “
“Writing things down happens on two levels: external storage and encoding. External storage is easy to explain: you’re storing the information contained in your goal in a location (e.g. a piece of paper) that is very easy to access and review at any time. You could post that paper in your office, on your refrigerator, etc. It doesn’t take a neuroscientist to know you will remember something much better if you’re staring at a visual cue (aka reminder) every single day.
But there’s another deeper phenomenon happening: encoding. Encoding is the biological process by which the things we perceive travel to our brain’s hippocampus where they’re analyzed. From there, decisions are made about what gets stored in our long-term memory and, in turn, what gets discarded. Writing improves that encoding process. In other words, when you write it down it has a much greater chance of being remembered.
Neuropsychologists have identified the “generation effect” which basically says individuals demonstrate better memory for material they’ve generated themselves than for material they’ve merely read. It’s a nice edge to have and, when you write down your goal, you get to access the “generation effect” twice: first, when you generate the goal (create a picture in your mind), and second, when you write it down because you’re essentially reprocessing or regenerating that image. You have to rethink your mental picture, put it on the paper, place objects, scale them, think about their spatial relations, draw facial expressions, etc. There’s a lot of cognitive processing taking place right there.”
And Finally, once more in “Your Best Year Ever” , Hyatt makes a compelling case to go ahead and write our goals due to the following reasons:
1. It forces you to clarify what you want. Clarity is a precondition for writing.
2. Writing down goals helps you overcome resistance.
3. It motivates you to take action.
4. It filters other opportunities. Establishing your priorities up front equips you to intentionally avoid what some call “shiny object syndrome.”
5. It enables you to see—and celebrate—your progress. Written goals can serve like mile markers on a highway. They enable you to see how far you have come and how far you need to go. They also provide an opportunity for celebration when you attain them.
Ready to write your goals? Dedicate a notebook for your goals and start now. This doesn’t have to be perfect, make a mess now.
Next post, you will learn how exactly to write our goals in a way that helps you achieve them.
You can listen to this blog post in Arabic through episode 9 of my podcast:
We practice goal setting all the time in business settings. If you’re an employee you usually receive your goals every year or every six months, which would align with the strategic goals of the company. At the end of the semester, you review your achievements with your boss against the defined goals, you discuss what worked, what didn’t, and why.
However, we usually coast through our personal lives, letting things happen to us and reacting as necessary. We are not charting our own paths to where we want to go. We are walking pre-defined paths for us. That’s why our days and years look a lot like each other. We are not living goal-oriented lives, we are not living on purpose. This gap in goal setting between our work life and personal life was an insight that clicked for me in a conversation with a business leader and a mentor I’m lucky to have met called Iman Mutlaq. I’ll be always grateful for helping me notice this.
It’s true, many of us set new year’s resolutions, but resolutions without a plan are not goals, they are only hopes and aspirations, and that’s why they fail by mid-February.
Lucky for you, I have good news. Goal setting can be done anytime. You can do it at the beginning of each year, on your birthday, every month, every quarter, or whenever you decide to pursue something new. As Lara Casey always says: “There is nothing magical about January 1st“.
In this series, I will share with you what I have learned about goal setting from my favorite authors on the subject Michael Hyatt and Lara Casey.
This Post is part 1 of 4.
Goal Setting Starts in the Past.
Your past has only one value, learning from it. Reviewing your past will help you design the right goals for yourself. If you start goal setting by reviewing the past you’re more likely to set meaningful goals that you will invest time and effort to achieve.
First: Do a Life Audit
Our lives are multi-faceted as Michael Hyatt asserts. Our lives are not just our careers or health or families. These life domains are all connected. When we’re not doing well in one domain of our life we can feel it impacting the satisfaction we have in other areas.
We start the life audit by rating the key life areas on a scale from 1 to 10 where 1 means you are not satisfied and want to see a big change there and 10 means you’re happy with how you’re showing up in this domain. While at it, write a few words about the reason you selected the score for each domain. State facts and how you feel, honesty is key here because the opportunity for improvement starts taking shape now, the lowest scores indicate the bigger opportunity to make a change.
Life domains are differently grouped depending on the writer, you can add categories or remove those that don’t apply to you. Feel free to make your own life categories that work for your unique life.
The categories I recommend are:
Health: How you feel about your body.
Mental/Emotional: How you feel about your psychological well-being.
Relationships: How you feel about your relationship to:
Spouse/Significant other
Friends
Family
Finances: Your personal or family’s financial situation
Work: Your job, your 9-5, and side projects.
Spiritual Growth: Your connection to God.
Learning: Your educational development.
Personal Environment: Your home and work environment.
Fun & Recreation: Your hobbies, playtime, relaxation, and adventure experiences.
Service & Contribution: how you serve the world/volunteering.
You can also take an assessment I really like by Michael Hyatt to assess how you are generally doing in life’s different domains by answering a series of helpful questions. Make sure to save your answers so you can go back to them after a while. I guarantee you will see improvements after you commit to setting goals in areas where your satisfaction was the lowest.
Second: Evaluate your past.
Select how far you’d like to go in your past, 6 months, one year, 3 years? Answer accordingly.
I assumed you want to go back one year and wrote the tips accordingly:
Start with the positive: While our human tendency is to remember the negative first, it is recommended to start with the good. This will help us have the energy to complete the past exercise. Write a list of the wonderful things that happened to you. What are you most proud of? What worked well last year? A few ways to remember:
You can consult your family and friends to remind you of your highlights
You can check your social media posts to remember
You can go through your camera roll.
You can check your calendar or planner.
You can check your goals from last time, and celebrate what’s done.
You can check your past financial statements, this will remind you of your priorities and events.
Name the challenges: Write a list answering questions like what did not work this past year? What disappointments or regrets did you experience? What goals did you want to achieve but did not? What were some blocks you faced? What achievements did you want to be acknowledged for but were not? It is hard to write our answers here. But power through it. This list will guide your focus when you set your goals, your challenges are your biggest opportunities for improvement.
Distill the lessons: What did the positive and the negative from the past year teach you? Make them into short sentences of wisdom that you can repeat over and over to yourself.
Third: State what you are grateful for.
Gratitude time: Write the names of people who helped you during this past year. Find a way to thank them for specific things they did for you or ways they stood by you. Feeling gratitude is one thing, expressing it to those who caused it is an another level. They will be so surprised, and you are going to make someone’s day.
Bonus Step
Identify your hidden opportunity. The opportunity principle states that feelings of dissatisfaction and disappointment are strongest where the chances for corrective action are clearest. Consider your setbacks this past year, and brainstorm how they might point you toward your next opportunity.
Now you are ready to move on to the next step of goal setting which is: dreaming about the future.
New post coming up soon.
I’m deeply grateful to Michael Hyatt and Lara Casey for all that they taught me about Goal Setting that I have shared in this blog post.
You can listen to this blog post in Arabic through episode 7 of my podcast:
