A Single Tool for a Seismic Shift in Motivation and Productivity

Let’s get practical. Let’s get tactical. Let’s talk about goal setting.? With a little explanation and a little experimentation, this single tool produces a seismic uptick in productivity and performance.?

The real point of this article is to highlight one of the least understood aspects of goal setting, and to teach you how to best leverage it for massive results, but it’s helpful to start with the macroscopic. Humans function best with three tiers of goals.

On a daily basis, we need clear goals—or a well-crafted daily to-do list. Over multi-month and multi-year timescales, we need high hard goals; or those larger aspirations that business leaders sometimes call? BHAGs, for Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals.

Finally, to govern our lifetimes, we need mission-level goals or those purpose-aligned efforts that steer choices over the decades, and what Peter Diamandis and myself termed a “massively transformative purpose” in our book Abundance.

Think about it like this:

Becoming a great writer is a massively transformative purpose, or a mission-level goal to aim for over a lifetime.?

Writing a great book is the next level down, a high, hard goal that could take years to complete.?

Writing 700 words before 7:00 am—now that’s a clear goal. Writing 700 words before 7:00 am that create a feeling of excitement in the reader—that’s an even clearer goal.

What does this look like in the real world? Daily “to-do” lists. A proper to-do list is just a set of clear goals for your day. Each item on that list originated with your massively transformative purpose, was chunked down into a high, hard goal, then further reduced to what you can do today to advance that cause. A clear goal is a tiny mission. Why does all this matter so much??

Motivation. Engagement. Focus. Flow. Let’s go in order.

As goal-setting research pioneers Edward Deci and Rob Ryan discovered, if an individual’s? ?tiny mission (aka, their clear goal) is properly aligned with their core values, the act of going after it will provide the focus and motivational burst needed to go after it. Well set clear goals provide their own focus and fuel.

Even better, once accomplished, a clear goal provides an additional dopamine reward, which is what provides you with the motivation needed to get after tomorrow’s clear goals. ?This is the feedback loop known as engagement.

Equally critical, clear goals are a flow trigger. Flow follows focus. Clear goals tell us where and when to put our attention. When goals are clear, the mind doesn’t wonder what to do or what to do next—it already knows. As a result, concentration tightens, motivation heightens, and extraneous information gets filtered out. Clear goals act as a priority list for the brain. They lower cognitive load by telling the system where to maximize its attentional energy, and this extra focus helps drive us into flow.?

Applying this idea in our daily life means breaking tasks into bite-sized chunks and setting our goals accordingly. Think challenging, yet manageable—just enough stimulation to push your attention into the now, not enough stress to pull you back out again. A proper clear goal sits right inside your challenge-skill sweet spot, meaning it’s hard enough to make you stretch, but not hard to make you snap

And this brings me to my most critical point, which is about how many “clear goals” to put on your daily to-do list. This requires a little experimentation. First, you need to run a counting experiment.?

Count how many tasks you can do in a day and still be excellent at all of them. We all have a number. Sure, it varies based on sleep, energy, anxiety, the quality of our relationships, and a thousand other variables, but we also have an average.

That’s what you’re trying to find.

But run this experiment for the next two week. Count how many things you’re really good at in a day. To be clear, those tasks where you run out of motivation or focus or energy… those don’t count as excellence.

Use this number to determine how many items to put on a daily clear-goal list. Don’t try to do more than that number (if you can avoid it).

Here’s why.

Mastery is maybe our most important motivator. It provides one of the most consistent and most beneficial dopamine lifts the brain can produce. If we are great at everything we do in a day, we’re juicing this motivator. If we produce sucky results, the brain notices, our jets cool, and we go in the wrong direction.

What’s more, by emphasizing excellence we’re emphasizing our strengths, which is another basic motivator. We like being good at the stuff we do, and the feeling of being good makes us want to do more stuff. It’s another motivational feedback loop.

And there’s a combinatory benefit. Strengths and mastery are both ways to amplify focus, which is why they’re both flow triggers. This where that feedback loop of motivation kicks into overdrive.?

The result impacts both quality and quantity. The number of tasks one can be great at in a day expands.

For many of us, limiting the number of tasks we do to only those we can be great at feels like we might not get enough work done in a day. This might true.

But thanks to the expanding envelope of motivational feedback loops that drive flow which drives performance which drives the next motivational feedback loop… my point. You may have to go slow to go fast—for a little while.

But fasten your seatbelt, as there’s a rocket ride in your future.

If you would like more practical and actionable flow content, check out Flow Radio , a Top Ten iTunes Science Podcast from The Flow Research Collective.

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