A1 – Open or close your high-level goals


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The review stage ends on 2025-11-01.

What

At any stage in your life, you have certain goals. You won’t achieve those goals unless you consider them in the tasks you do. Your goals can have a profound impact by

  1. changing the quality and method of doing tasks,
  2. creating new tasks for you, and
  3. changing how you spread your energy among tasks.

For example, if you have a goal to “become a better designer”,

  1. You might spend more time on your design tasks and use them as an opportunity for learning and experimenting. If you don’t have such a goal, you might select the fastest way of finishing your design tasks instead.
  2. You may also add two extra tasks such as reading a recommended book on design and doing design-related charity work for a local community.
  3. Finally, you might consider this goal when planning your next day (D4) by selecting more tasks that contribute to improving your design skills.

Why

If you don’t make your goals explicit and don’t manage them well, they will be forgotten in the pressure of your everyday life with its infinite stream of urgent tasks. One day, you’ll open your eyes and see that many years have passed without you achieving anything noteworthy.

Task management systems are normally bottom-up, meaning that they focus on small tasks and trust that larger achievements will be gained by completing those tasks. In addition to that, we need top-down management to make sure that higher achievements will be realized by completing the tasks. Many of your tasks probably come from sources such as projects, which have their own advanced top-down project management systems. However, you need to have your own simple top-down approach as well to

Remember that most of what you do for someone else’s project should contribute to the ultimate goals of that project as well as to your own personal goals. It’s a valid expectation: proper project management systems acknowledge it, and good project managers support it. If contributing to both goals is impossible for most of your tasks, it means that your work environment is not suitable for you and you might need to make fundamental changes.

How

Have a recurring task in your system for doing this activity every year. It’s common to do it at the beginning of each calendar year, but you can schedule it for any time during the year; for example, after a significant event such as your birthday! In addition to that, sometimes, you may need to run this activity before its normal timing to adapt to significant environmental or personal changes.

Most recurring tasks should have checklists, lists of tips, or some other form of information that makes repeating them easier and enables continuous improvement. So, add such information to this activity. Each time you run the activity, check to see whether you can improve your checklist or list of tips. For example, you may decide it’s best for you and your life partner or business partners to set joint goals together or at least have them compatible with each other. In that case, you can think of the best way of doing so and document the approach in the recurring task.

In general, first review your old goals and see which ones you want to close because 1) they are fulfilled to a reasonable degree, or 2) you don’t want to pursue them anymore. Sometimes, you want to keep the goal open for another year, which would be the case for larger goals that need more time. Finally, you may open completely new goals for the next year.

You have two options for documenting your goals:

Goals can be about one-time achievements or about building or changing habits. A goal doesn’t necessarily have to be concrete and actionable. When it’s not so, you will gradually make it actionable in different ways such as by identifying new tasks for it.

Common pitfalls

For some people and organizations, setting goals is an empty action without any impact. They do it because someone is forcing them to, not because they see any value in doing it. Make sure you’re not like them, because being goal-oriented can benefit you greatly.

Many individuals are used to setting goals during the New Year’s celebrations, but then soon forgetting them as they subsequently get busy with life. Taking your B1 and other P1.express activities seriously will help you avoid that common pitfall.

It’s common for people to have only modest goals, fearing that they won’t be practical otherwise. However, goals are not the same as actionable tasks. You can have grand ambitions that you’re not even sure you can ever achieve, but having them directs your actions toward a better path and creates better intermediate achievements for you. So, don’t be shy about having a lofty goal like “eliminate violence against children worldwide”.

Remember that only having ambitious goals is not enough for your subconscious; it needs frequent successes as well. So, compose and arrange your tasks in such a way that you can have at least one small win per day and a bigger win each week.