2024 Goals: Setting, Prioritizing, Maintaining, Enjoying

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why. -Hunter S Thompson

Goal Setting

Things took a turn for weird this month and the more I look at the outcome, the more normal it feels. For years, I’ve set goals around this time of year, using a Word Doc, bulleting lists, and thinking deeply about where I want my goals to take me. Some years I’ve crafted decade goals – what I wanted to accomplish in my 20s, 30s, 40s. Other years I’ve pulled up the goals from the previous year and aimed to iterate beyond those. Still other years, I’ve really dug into goal setting with a tiered approach to celebrate wins, set new year goals, and lay out a few key places that I want those goals to take me in five years. This year, I took a similar but different approach, and it organically evolved into a really fun project because my Word Doc got crowded.

Approaches to Goal Setting

Having just completed my MBA, I’ve spent the last two years thinking deeply about goals. S.M.A.R.T. goals, stretch goals, near goals, far goals. Narrow goals, broad goals, personal and professional goals, and the always visually inspiring B.H.A.G.s (Big Hairy Audacious Goals). I’ve read and written a lot about goals this year, and I’ve focused on deconstructing goals into steps for everyday actions, which helped reconstruct them into journeys, which led me to rethink goal setting this year and create the image at the top of this article.

Rethinking the Approach

While my coach and I were meeting last week to continue working through our end of quarter review and 2024 objective setting – an exercise we’ve been evolving since we started working together two years ago – we started talking through the growth of this exercise and other ways to visually represent the ideas and data that we were pulling together. Our problem was the limitations of the platform – there’s only so much you can fit on a Word page; there’s only so many ways to split and contrast it visually. This led to rethinking the approach. At work, I live and breathe in PowerPoint. All of my goal drafting, plan crafting, objective setting, sharing, presenting, collaborating is done in slide decks.

I’m not sure why it took so long to have this idea, but perhaps this was just the next natural synergy between personal and professional life?

The North Star is Born

This is how my North Star 2024 Journey was born. Leading with a north star does a lot of positive things. (If you’re new to North Star thinking, here’s a great podcast to check out: Masters of Scale: How to find – and keep – true north, with Susan Wojcicki ).

Over the last year, I’ve done a lot of reading and increased my writing volume. While I didn’t make my goal for quantity, I did reach my goal of increased output, with a slight up and down trajectory. As I set goals, I try to count on this type of journey because that is the inevitability of life – there are ups and downs: to acknowledge these and allow for flexibility avoids discouragement and keeps me on track towards my achievements. For example, my wife and I converted our toddler from a crib to a bed several weeks ago. At the same time of this conversion – which was forced because she was starting to climb out – she also got an ear infection.

Newfound freedom + feeling terrible doesn’t add up to a positive sleeping situation for anyone. But it’s still the end of the year, deadlines still exist, our other kids still need us, and essential things still need to get done.

Prioritization

Ruthless prioritization is a huge part of parenting, as it’s a huge part of business, as it’s a huge part of life. Not everything can be accomplished – some stuff needs to get done, some stuff needs enough attention to keep the lights on, and other stuff can wait, even when it seems urgent.

There’s lots of books out there that talk about prioritization – I’m always personally drawn to Stephen R. Covey ’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People , specifically the “Time Management Matrix.” What’s important? Urgent vs. Not Urgent? What’s less important, but urgent? Where do your pleasant activities fit in? Do you have pleasant activities? While I’m thinking about it, what are pleasant activities?

Anyway, the North Star is a massive help when prioritizing and a steadfast reminder to redirect when I’m veering off in a non-priority direction in a high priority moment. Goal-achievement is hard and staying the course in the face of noise, distraction, and difficulty makes it even harder. If that isn’t challenging enough, it compounds when you want to focus on enjoying the journey and fires are burning (hopefully just metaphorically) all around you. Prioritization helps address each with the right amount of yourself, while acknowledging that you can’t be everything, for everyone, in every situation. ?

Maintaining the Journey

Of the progress I’ve made this year, the North Star image from my goals pitch deck best captures my trajectory. I’ve been working for a few years to change from a steep goal-focused path that leaves disappointment or emptiness in the wake of goal achievement and have been working to replace it with a continual journey approach, realizing that the path to the goal is as enjoyable – if not more so – as the end achievement. This approach also helps when the plan gets interrupted, say, by a 2-year-old that slams doors and drops elbows on your face at 2am, 4am, 5am…

This journey appreciation also sets up headspace for thinking about ways to continually evolve the path. One goal is achieved and the next step along the road naturally appears/is set. This allows for “seamless” (as seamless as our messy lives get) continuation of the journey towards goal after goal. All of this fosters enjoyment along the way by minimizing the stress of “what’s next” thinking.

Owning ‘What’s Next’

The end of year always puts me in this goal-setting, journey-enjoying headspace. It’s a busy and often stressful time of year for everyone. Cutting out stress is one powerful goal for 2024, and something that I really focused on accomplishing during 2022 and 2023 with reasonable success. I look at this as very much an ongoing journey vs. a goal like cutting out stress on the drive to Philadelphia to celebrate Christmas with my parents, which is a much different goal that demands a differently structured approach – leaving early, packing enough snacks for the kids, getting the Kindles loaded with relevant content for each kid (Dora vs. Pokémon vs. Movies).

As you think about wrapping up 2023 and launching into 2024, I hope some of these thoughts and ideas are helpful in your own planning.

Last Thought

Comparison is the thief of joy. - Teddy Roosevelt

The Happiness Curve by Jonathan Rauch has been on my mind lately. The subtitle of this book is “Why life gets better after 50". In the book, Rauch talks through an analysis of life satisfaction, drawing global comparisons and age-related conclusions while looking through large data sets that spanned people’s 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond. His analysis found this trough of life – what’s traditionally identified as the mid-life crisis – in people’s mid- to late-thirties and extending through their forties. Much of this trough is related to disappointment grounded in expectations vs. perceived reality.

Why I’m bringing it up here is because I believe that this crisis is at least in part driven by a stop and start approach to life – set a goal, achieve (or don’t achieve) a goal, repeat the cycle – and I want to advocate for embracing a journey approach in 2024 if you aren’t already. The goal is but a moment in time – the journey is your life. Use 2024 (and beyond) to savor each part of it. We all fail along this route – I certainly do all the time – because it takes practice, a willingness to fail, and the dedication to start again.

What are your goals for 2024? How are you planning to achieve them? Will you achieve them as a moment in time or part of a bigger picture journey to enjoy along the way?

Thanks as always and, if you read this far, please recommend this newsletter to someone you think would appreciate it like you do!

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