My Goal-writing Framework
Having something to aim at is one of the easiest ways for people to experience positive emotion in their personal and professional lives. This is the purpose of having goals. We aspire to achieve something in the future, which makes our present lives meaningful.
Articulating a goal is just the start. There are several things you can do to build upon your goal that I’ve distilled into a simple writing exercise. This exercise shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes per goal. If you have three goals, that’s less than an hour of work.
Writing Bends Reality Toward You
Writing is both a form of capture and creation. When we write our thoughts and ideas down, they achieve an immediate level of permanence, as opposed to leaving them swimming only in our memory, where they can fall away and are more likely to be forgotten.
The more time you spend writing about your ideal future, the more likely you will be to move successfully in that direction.
You are essentially bending reality in your direction, or perhaps you are bending yourself toward the future. Whatever the case may be, I’m convinced that there is a bit of magic to it.
Why I Created a Framework
Over the course of my professional career as a product designer, I’ve written dozens of goals. Some I have achieved, and others not. Learning from the wisdom of others and my own experience, I’ve devised a very simple goal-writing framework that I use at least once per year when generating my professional goals.
There are three specific benefits to this framework:
A Planned Approach: By creating specific strategies and tactics for each goal, this framework will help individuals break down their goals into more specific actions and a pathway toward success.
Motivation Through Emotion: Using positive and negative emotions, this framework will help individuals become more invested in their own goals.
Organic Recognition: This framework will also help individuals consider how their peers and leaders will become aware of their achievements by helping to generate a plan for communication.
What This Framework Isn’t
This framework isn’t going to guide people toward selecting the correct goals. It’s about everything that comes after that. It’s up to each individual to identify and generate realistic goals for themselves. Apply this framework to those already generated goals to supercharge them and make them more easily achievable.
The Structure
There are four elements to every goal: strategy, tactics, communication, and positive/negative fantasy.
Strategy: How are you going to get there?
At a very high level, you need to know the approach you are going to take to pursue your goal. This approach should be a concise idea that isn’t overly specific.
If you are a product leader whose goal is to lead my product teams to deliver innovative ideas no one else is thinking about, your strategy might be to take on the mindset of a startup trying to disrupt your business.
Tactics: What steps are you going to take to get there?
In order for your strategy to be a successful one, you need to know where the rubber is going to meet the road. Tactics are where we get into the specific actions you are going to take to achieve your goal.
If your strategy is to take on the innovative mindset of a startup trying to disrupt your business, you might consider hosting a workshop aimed at precisely that goal where you bring together your most forward-thinking contributors with the explicit goal of disrupting your own product.
You should have a handful of these kinds of tactics that all make sense in service of your overall strategy.
Communication: How are people going to know what you are up to?
This section of the exercise is about ensuring that people can see what you are up to. It may seem a bit self-serving. It is. You should be advocating for yourself and promoting your accomplishments. Do it with a genuine sense of humility and give due credit to everyone you collaborate with along the way.
Imagine if the people you work with, especially the person you report to directly, could easily recount every important thing you accomplished in the last 6-12 months. That’s what you’re hoping to accomplish with this exercise.
If you are a product leader hosting an innovation workshop aimed at disrupting your own business, you should take every opportunity to present takeaways from that workshop to people within the organization and to share asynchronously on Slack.
Positive Fantasy: What does the future look like if you succeed?
Emotions are one of the most powerful tools we own. They raise the stakes of our ambitions and can compel us to turn abstract goals into action.
Imagining what the future looks like if you are successful utilizes positive emotions to help motivate you to take action toward your goal.
If one of your innovation workshop ideas is made into a successful project, you might be asked to take on a bigger role within the organization. Your efforts might open the doorway toward a promotion. You may be asked to do more innovation workshops and have an even bigger influence on the overall vision of the product.
Negative Fantasy: What fears and anxieties might be holding you back? What will the future look like if you don’t succeed?
There is a dark side to motivation as well. Imagining a future where you don’t achieve your goal is another helpful tool that can compel you to move forward and take action. It will also help you identify the future you want to avoid.
The idea here isn’t to be hard on yourself from the get-go and to feel anxiety before you’ve even started. Chances are you already have doubts and negative emotions that relate to your ability to move toward your goals.
The point of this part of the writing exercise is that articulating your negative fantasy makes you conscious of all the fears and anxieties that may get in your way. Pretending negative emotions don’t exist won’t work. If you’re deliberate about identifying them from the start, these negative emotions will have less power over you.
You may be hesitant to ask a group of very smart people to come together for a two-day workshop. That hesitation is likely based on the fear that you won’t do a good job executing and the quality of the workshop will be poor. If you do nothing but simply articulate why certain emotions are holding you back, you will have already dispelled some of the power those fears have over you.
Accountability
Sharing your goals with people is another important step that creates accountability.
You don’t need to share every word you write down from this framework, but you should consider sharing your goal, strategy, and tactics with the person you report to. Your manager can help identify opportunities for you if they know what you are trying to do.
Download Writing Goals To Follow Through On, which includes more examples and a worksheet for following this goal-writing exercise.