Hi Friend,
I’m back! It’s SO ironic that my last post was all about commitment and how I was finally showing up for myself…. and then I immediately stopped committing. I can come up with so many excuses - family, school, extracurriculars - but the truth is, I struggle with managing my time for long-term sustainability, so I struggle with staying consistent with my personal goals.
Recently, my company started implementing trainings on the Agile mindset. While, obviously, the training was geared towards implementation at work, I was shocked to discover how distinctly the training highlighted my weak spots with goal/time management.
As someone who struggles to stay consistent and committed, adopting the Agile mindset has revolutionized how I show up for my personal goals and has already shifted my lifestyle to enable sustainable consistency and commitment to my goals.
So, what’ve I been doing to make space for commitment and consistency that is sustainable long-term?
Step #1: Prioritize your goals for the near-term and set a review cadence.
Personally, I always have a laundry list of goals I’m pursuing, but I very rarely sit down and distill it down to only what I want to focus on for the near future.
This means that I don’t make much progress towards any goal because I’m trying to tackle all of them all at once, which leads to me feeling demotivated and hurts my commitment to my goals. To avoid this, it’s super important to spend time thinking about what goals you want to make the most progress towards now, and focus your energy on those.
To more tangibly explain this, let’s see how this applies to my life. I have many big goals for myself, including building my blog, getting my teaching certifications in both Yoga and Ayurveda, creating a podcast, building my business, becoming a trail runner, etc. Trying to tackle all of these alongside my full-time job and adulting has led me…. well, nowhere. Resulting from limited time and the sheer intimidation that comes with thinking about my long list of goals, I’ve made little to no progress towards any one.
This past week, I’ve shifted to only focusing on my blog, my Yoga Teacher Training (YTT), and trail running. As a result, I’m not only splitting my time in just three ways instead of twenty, but I’m also reducing my decision fatigue because I have significantly less options to choose from when planning my day.
The results after a week?
I’ve made more progress towards each goal individually in one week than I have towards all my goals combined in months
I’ve spent less time trying to decide what to do and spent more time doing, leading to more space for flow state and creativity
I’m more energized and productive because I’m not wasting as much energy trying to decide what to do!
I also set a cadence for when I’ll reprioritize which goals I’m actively pursuing; since my YTT is a hefty commitment, I’ll be re-evaluating priorities on a 6-month basis. This is important because based on the scope of your big goals and where you are in your life, the goals you’ll want to actively pursue will change.
As a result, along with prioritizing your goals now, it’s important to set a cadence for when you plan on intentionally reviewing your goals going forward, so you can make significant progress towards the life you envision for yourself at any point in time.
Step #2: Come up with a hazy long-term path to your goal and set a short-term cadence for task-planning.
As humans, we don’t typically like the unknown and uncontrollable. As a result, when we have a goal we’re excited about, it can be tempting to plan out a clear path to our end goal to minimize uncertainty on our way there.
While having a plan is good, it’s important to leave plenty of room for the universe to play its magic along the way. So, make a hazy long-term plan that will eventually get you to your goal, but focus your tasks and planning efforts to the short-term (no longer than a month).
If you’re working on training for a marathon for example, your bigger plan might be “run 5k”, “run 10k”, etc. until you get to “run the Boston Marathon”. However, when you’re planning out your runs (the exact what, where, when), runners typically keep it to only a week or two, which is your short-term work cycle or “sprint”. This limits the impact to your larger goal because you’re not impacting any long-term schedule or elaborate plan, and it allows you to pivot your short-term plans as things pop up (injuries, vacations, etc)!
Having space to adapt on a short-term scale will allow you to complete each task more efficiently and with less stress, which effectively helps you reach your long-term goal.
Step #3: Make a clear list of bite-sized, actionable tasks to complete in each short-term work cycle (aka sprints) based on realistic capacity.
As with step #1, we want to minimize decision fatigue as much as possible, so we can maximize our brain potential on the things that really matter.
Hence, compiling a list of clearly defined tasks will allow you to spend more time on the task and less time on figuring out what to do.
The first step here is to create a healthy backlog. Essentially, this entails brain dumping all the bite-sized tasks you will need to do at some point in the next 2-5 sprints. This makes sprint planning much easier because you already have a list of tasks to choose from, so you’re not wasting as much time brainstorming ideas for what to do next at the beginning of each sprint. It also gives you tasks to immediately pull from if you finish your planned sprint tasks without forcing you into another brainstorm session partway through your work cycle.
Continuing to add to the backlog as ideas pop up and treating it as a brainstorm board will ensure you don’t waste unnecessary time brainstorming in the long-run and allows you to focus your energy on getting things done!
When creating your backlog, putting in bite-sized tasks is important to keep each task clearly defined and to reduce productivity-paralysis from being intimidated by the magnitude of a task.
It also helps our brain’s reward mechanism because the more checkboxes we complete, the more rewards our brain registers, which boosts motivation and the overall perception of our productivity, leading to more feel-good hormones!
While creating your list, it’s also super important to remember a key point from Agile:
underpromise, overdeliver and not vice versa.
The truth is, life always has a way of surprising you, so no execution will ever perfectly follow the plan; if you plan for an ideal, you are setting yourself up for a high likelihood of failure. To add to this, no human is working at 100% productivity 100% of the time. This means it is inevitable that we will lose time to distractions, multitasking, task/project swapping, and a multitude of other reasons.
Planning based on realistic capacity means that if you have 3 free hours to work on a task, you might only plan for 2.5 productive hours to account for bathroom breaks, distractions, etc. This ensures that even if you’re not productive all 3 of those hours, you’ll still get your work done in that time. It also means that if something goes wrong, you have some extra time to play with before you’re running behind.
As a result, create a list of bite-sized, actionable tasks that can be realistically completed within the time you have allocated to them and underestimate how much you can complete; remember: getting more done than planned is always more satisfying than falling behind!
Step #4: Clearly define done for all bite-sized tasks.
For every small, actionable task, have a clear definition of done. For the running example, it can be as simple as “completed a run and gave my best” or more specific like “completed the planned run”.
The difference between the two, whether you’ve subconsciously or consciously set the definition of done, will make or break that feeling of satisfaction afterwards.
If you pick the latter, but you were super tired that day and couldn’t complete the entirety of the planned run, you’re going to feel like you didn’t achieve your goal for the day even if you gave it all you had and still moved closer to your goal… is that a success or a failure for you? And how does that change what you define as done?
Every person will behave differently based on a task’s definition of done, so it’s super important to refine your definitions to make sure it works with your brain chemistry and you personally, so that it helps you stay motivated and consistent long-term.
Step #5: Re-evaluate, pivot, and start again!
Setting a cadence for your sprints and reviewing your long-term goal priorities will give you time to incorporate lessons learned, adapt to unforeseen circumstances and opportunities, and make sure you’re consistently taking focused, effective strides towards your goals.
Closing out for now…
All the steps I’ve mentioned above are already being implemented in my life. While I struggle with consistency and commitment long-term, it’s also hard for me to maintain short-term (literally talking a week) because I’m so fluid and easily excited by everything.
Adopting my learnings from Agile have decreased the resistance against consistency and commitment EXPONENTIALLY on the daily scale, so I effortlessly make strides towards one or more of my goals every day - an absolutely unprecedented achievement.
So, I highly suggest you give something like this a shot. It doesn’t have to be super crazy and can be very easily implemented in the notes app on your phone or a notebook you already have (i.e. I just have a list of blog post ideas for my blog backlog and a screenshot of classes I cross off for my YTT backlog, where the posts and classes serve as my “bite-sized” tasks which I pick from each week).
How extravagant you want to make your task tracking is up to you - implementing this mindset in your approach to planning and pursuing your goals is the real key to changing your life.
If you try this, let me know how it goes, and if it changes your life as much as it did mine. Either way, I truly hope I've given you something to think about.
Until next time,
Shreya
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