How to re-invigorate your goals
Hey Malcolm! I'm having a general conundrum that I'm sure you've encountered, and I'm wondering what advice you have as it relates to using Complice.
I've been using Complice for the last year now (and love it, thank you for all your work).
Lately, I'm have been doing a horrible job of tracking anything at all.
I'm still following through on many of my goals, but tracking them with Complice has started to feel like a stale task I have to get done rather than a valuable activity.'
A few explanations I have: I've set too many goals so I'm a bit overwhelmed, the goals themselves are not specific and exciting.
My question to you: how have you dealt with this general feeling of 'staleness' towards goal-tracking? How do you hit the reset button, and reinvigorate yourself?
As much as Complice is designed to avoid staleness, the app can't do anything about the fact that priorities do shift and change over time.
I think your general ideas are probably pretty good, so I'm going to build on them.
If you have too many goals, and you're trying to do something towards every goal every day, then you're going to either end up...
Regularly failing to do anything (some of) your goals, and feeling bad.
Doing some little thing towards (some of) your goals each day, and marking that as "enough" for the day "because, I mean, it's not like I had more time to work on that goal, so it has to be enough, right?"
Working really hard, not sleeping, and burning out. And then feeling bad.
None of these is a fun situation to be in. But, having identified these, we can use them as diagnostics for answering the question "do I have too many goals?"
If you're genuinely spending a lot of your time in a goal-oriented way, but one of the above things is happening to you, then probably you have too many goals. Or perhaps your goals are too ambitious, but particularly in Case #2, this is a sign that you've spread yourself a bit thin, and you're not able to actively care for all of these different things at once.
Take a moment and let in the reality of that, if it's true.
Okay, now what? Well, now you can stop pretending that you're going to be able to do 30 hours of stuff in a 24 hour day, and you can prioritize what you actually want to make happen. You might realize that one of the responsibilities you have isn't actually that valuable, and scale back your involvement. You might merge two related goals together. You might decide to demote your Fitness goal to just being a daily habit:
(&) do 10 pushups and 10 sittups before breakfast
It's not gonna get you totally in shape, but it's better than nothing and it's much better than nothing-but-I-feel-bad-about-it.
If your goals aren't specific enough, make them more specific. My general heuristic is that you don't necessarily need a concrete or quantified definition of what completeness will look like, but it's worth at least having a description that can let you say:
Have I achieved this goal?
In setting more concrete targets, you want to be wary of feeling bad for not already having achieved them, and also wary of feeling bad for not achieving them as fast as you hoped you would. You're probably still doing better than you would be if you didn't have the target, so having the target isn't a reason to feel bad.
On the other hand, if your goals are already specific, but your actions aren't specific, then it's time to do something thinking, asking, or research about what sorts of actions you'll actually need to take to achieve your goals. One of my favorite hacks for this is to try to find 1-3 people who've done something similar before and ask them what they'd recommend. Maybe even find someone who tried and failed and see what they know about it.
If nobody has done this before, or you don't know anybody who has, then you're a bit more on your own, but you can still generate a best plan of approach, and then set out to follow it, updating it as you go.
Above I included the conditional "if you're genuinely spending a lot of your time in a goal-oriented way". What if you're not? Probably, it's because you aren't tapped in with why your goals are awesome.
Did those goals excite you when you first laid them out?
If yes, consider: did you learn something such that you're not excited anymore? Or did you just get distracted from the aspect of the goal that was motivating you in the first place?
If you're no longer excited because you realized that the goal isn't a good fit for you, then this is actually very exciting news! It means you can stop feeling bad about not doing it, and find something better to do instead.
On the contrary, if you still feel really excited about the goal when you feel into it, but you just... forget to... then probably the thing to do is to find some ways to get yourself back in touch with the excitement, more consistently.
This could be things like
Change the name of the goal. I once had a fitness goal called "Tiger" because I really liked the aesthetic of the lithe power, beauty, and grace. It was much more motivating than "get in shape" or just "fitness" would have been for me.
Find a friend with similar interests who you can talk to about your goal regularly to get back in touch with the energy of what you want to achieve.
Do some writing first thing in the morning or first thing after work about what you're hoping to achieve.
Close your eyes and feel into how awesome it will be to achieve your goal: to finally be a published author or debt-free or graduated or a entrepreneur, or whatever it is. Make sure to also reflect on the obstacles that stand in your way. More on this technique here.
Each time you go to submit intentions, or to start working, look at the names of your goals, and take a moment to remind yourself: why am I doing this?
You don't need to do all of these, just pick one or two that work well for you and your situation.
...some combination of complex factors
Sometimes you need to refactor your goals. They used to represent your sense of the most direct vectors along which you could move towards the world you want to live in, but now they're feeling blocked or frictiony. That happens!
When it does, it might be time to look at the various actions that are feeling important to you that you're doing, and also to consider actions that feel like they might be important that you're not doing, and to write them all out, then try to find a new way to dimensionalize the space of what you're trying to achieve. Maybe "reading" and "writing" get combined under "information diet", while your "content production" goal turns into a more specific "start a podcast" goal.
Or you could start over. Instead of trying to fix your existing goals, become a new homunculus: imagine that you're an alien who just woke up in your body, your life, etc, and with your values. What would it make sense to do in the current position? Try thinking about this while thinking minimally about your existing to-do list for the day or week, and consider "what do I really want to be moving towards? what goals would feel really exciting to pursue?"
Once you've found your excitement, then you can excitedly figure out how to get there from here.
I think that this post contains good advice, but the most important piece of all is this: actually take the time to think about it. Knowing all of this advice is no good if you don't actually spend time improving your goal architecture. And even without this advice, I bet most people could do a reasonably good job of figuring out what they need to do with their goals, as long as they actually do something at all.
If you're feeling inspired to think about this, sign up or log back into your Complice account, and we'll help walk you through it!
Also, a secret feature! You can access a goal-setting guide by going to complice.co/YOUR-USERNAME/goals/wizard. It shows up automatically for your first goal, but you might find it helpful for other goals as well. The disadvantage is that you can't see all of your goals at once, which means it's easy to overcommit.
