A New Framework for New Year’s Goals

I have made a list of goals every year since I was about 10 years old. And in 10 years of making yearly goals, the most important thing I have learned is about how to actually set goals. In short, I’ve been doing it wrong.

At the start of the previous decade, I used to set rigid, long term goals: read exactly 10 books, be able to run a mile by the end of the year, etc. But I found that at the end of the year, I would have gotten part way to the goal, but would have to mark it as incomplete. These goals were all or nothing, and seeing many unfulfilled goals was rather disheartening to my 12 year old self. Over time, I changed the way I wrote my goals, instead of “be able to continuously do 100 pushups”, I wrote, “do at least 30 pushups every day.” Suddenly, I found it easier to start accomplishing my goals. But around the 3rd month, I found myself failing to complete the daily goals with the justification that I had already done so much over the past three months, and that now I could skip a day here or there. But one day off became two days off, and then a week, and then a month… and then the rest of the year.

Was it because I was lazy? Was it because I lacked will power? At the time, I assumed it was due to my own inability to follow goals that I set for myself. But over the past year, I read a fair amount on how to build habits (Check out The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg) and how to set goals. What I learned, in summary, was this: set small, achievable, and tangible goals. Even if your overarching life goal is far out of reach, setting realistic checkpoints can help guide and motivate you to continue through the hard parts. But more importantly, what I realized from setting yearly goals for over a decade is that you can’t realistically set goals that span the entire year.

The biggest mistake I made when making my goals was assuming that I would be the same person I was at the start of the year. But this was, hopefully, not going to be true, as if I were working through my goals throughout the year, I would have changed a significant amount by the end of it. Yet, at the end of the year, I was holding myself to the same standards I had set for myself at the beginning of the year. So, the biggest change that needed to made was not the way I wrote the goals, but the entire goal setting framework itself. So, here is what I decided upon.

I am going to set overarching goals which will span the entire year. Wait, what? But I thought I just said… ^^^ Well, I will set the goals for the whole year, but I will review and update them every month. I feel that a month is short enough to effectively review and update my goals as the year goes on, and long enough to actually accomplish a sizable amount of things. In fact, I will use this blog to keep track of how I am doing and honestly reflect the state of my goals.

So without further ado, THIS YEAR I plan to…

• Read more:
• I read 20 books last year, so this year I have to read at least 20. My softer goal is to read around 25 (putting me at about 2 a month (this is the small, tangible goal)) and my reach is to read around 30.
• Do more projects:
• In December of 2019, I completed two projects. A very basic version of Tetris and my Personal Website (finally, you can check it out at anandtyagi.me). For January, I am going to polish those two projects so that they are done to my liking. And for every month of the year, I plan to push out at least the baseline of one project and polish the previous months project. These are just individual projects, though they can be part of a class (only if I am doing more than the class requirements, effectively making it an independent project), and the scope or size of the project is not important, it’s more about making things.
• and Overall: (this section is for more generic goals or secondary goals)
• I want to get back into the Entrepreneurship scene at NYU. I used to be rather active in it during my freshman year, but since then, I haven’t been as involved. So, starting with this semester, it’s time to head back to the eLab.
• Continue practicing my guitar and playing piano. I actually have a lot of pieces I want to learn on the piano which I haven’t gotten to yet, so I’m hoping to learn some of those this year.
• Maintain this blog. I know I will be posting at least once a month to update my goals, but I hope to post to this blog more often about the books I read and movies I watch and the thoughts and ideas I discuss with my peers.

Well, there it is. My goals for the year and my new framework for dealing with them. Good luck with accomplishing your goals for this year and I hope this decade is even better than the last!