2019 Goal Diary

This year I decided instead of “resolutions” I would commit to a few and by few I mean a lot of goals I would like to accomplish. I grouped them in 5 categories:

You will notice there is no “work” or “career” tab. I run my own business and so work has its own set of goals for 2019. These goals are all about self development.

To facilitate the goals I got a small A5 notebook and I made a mind map on the first page of everything I wanted to accomplish. Then I use the rest of the pages in the book to strategise and think through how I am going to get to these goals. I don’t make any other notes in this notebook. I manually numbered all the pages and then next to each goal I put the page number of the notes associated with it. This is nice because it allows you to track what you are doing towards a goal, while keeping in mind why you are making plans in the first place.

For example, one of my goals is to write a book. (A little one) I’m not going to write the book in my goal diary but I can write out a series of steps needed to write a book. Then follow the steps systematically and record anything extra I learn on the way. That way all my work towards a published book is kept in the same place.

Side bar – if you are interested in writing a book, John August has a podcast called “Launch” which is all about writing and publishing a book. His experiences are based in the USA but it is a great podcast and you know, I’m a John August fan… so… link to podcast here Or see johnaugust.com.

The goal diary also reinforces the idea of systems not goals. Well it reinforces my goals with some systems thinking about how to accomplish them. It is not enough to have a goal, it’s about figuring out what you gotta do daily, weekly, monthly to achieve it. These systems are written behind the goal in this diary making sure I not only know where I wanna be but also that there’s some sort of strategy of how to get there.

You can read more about “systems not goals” from Dilbert writer Scott Adams

https://blog.dilbert.com/2013/11/18/goals-vs-systems/ as well as this medium artlice by Darius Foroux, author of Think Straight https://medium.com/@dariusforoux/think-in-systems-not-in-goals-92db94d6eded and here’s a systems over goals perspective from Atomic Habits author James Clear

As we are almost two months into the year I thought I should quantify my progress. I have a total of 16 individual goals. Some are bigger than others. I have achieved none of them and actively started working on 5 of them, none of them near completion. Looking through the 5 that I’ve started, I’ve still got a long way to go 😱 I’m about 8,7% a pretty slow start for the first 2 months of the year.. but it’s good to take stock and inspire yourself to keep going. It’s only the start of the year, there is still so much hay can happen.

What are your resolutions and goals for 2019? And how can you use systems to help you achieve them? I wrote a post about creative coupling a few years ago that might help. See it here.