Snippet 17: How To Set Better Goals for 2023 - Oliver Burkeman
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- Hey friends, welcome back to Deep Dive Snippets. This is a clip that you're about to hear from Oliver Berkman, the author of "4,000 Weeks: Time and How to Use It." And it relates to the idea of goal setting. Now, if you've seen videos on my main channel, link to the video description, you'll know I have a bit of a weird relationship with the idea of goals in that part of me thinks they're a bit pointless and part of me thinks they're kind of useful. Anyway, here is what author and fellow productivity guru, Oliver Berkman has to say on the topic of goals. I hope you find it interesting. - On the goal setting front, I also keep on trying to find the perfect system for this.

in terms of like personal goals. One of my theories, one of my philosophies, shall we say, is that setting, like I don't like it when I set goals that are outside of my control. For example, when I'm,

I set the goal of I want a YouTube video that hits a certain view count compared to I want to make a video I'm proud of when I think I want to write a book that hits the Sunday Times bestseller list versus I want to write a book I'm proud of and that's all fine but that almost feels like it's oh well I'll just do my best and not worry about the outcome which also which feels a little bit unsatisfying given a bunch of research around the idea of like effective goal setting and challenging goal setting and the fact that kind of

high performers in inverted commas in most fields you know it's not like Michael Phelps is just you know what I'll just try my best and see what happens it's like yeah right right right yeah so yeah any any thoughts around that tension between I'll try my best versus I have this specific outcome I'm aiming for which maybe is somewhat outside of my control it's interesting I mean I there's a sort of sub distinction there between there's the goal there's the things you can control and things you can't control but then there's specificity or vagueness

in the things that you can control. And I, I do think that like things like doing your best and being proud of things, like they're really important values in life, but I can see how they're not, they're not particularly helpful in this setting because it's sort of completely open-ended. And so. It's not very smart. No, right. Exactly. Either you,

can either you will end up sort of not doing what you could have done because you say, well, I was my best, so I don't care. Like, and you sort of, you sort of make it easy for yourself or you do what I think I would do and have done in a lot of my early adulthood, which is like, be convinced that trying your best is really important. And then like torment yourself constantly with like, am I doing my best? Is this my best? Can I, you know, and those kinds of open-ended things seem unhelpful. You, on the other hand, if you say, I mean, this is where I feel like quantity based goals can be really helpful, right? If you say like, I'm going to,

put out this number of videos or this number of i'm going to write this many words uh on a by a certain point firstly it's specific secondly it's within your control and then thirdly it's kind of

it's somewhat drained of the sort of the qualities of goals are sort of they they go wrong because they're so sort of emotive there's something kind of nice about a very very sort of mechanistic yes goal in that area i don't think it's the whole piece of the puzzle because i do think even though i wrote in my first book about like how positive visualization is largely nonsense and all sorts of things i do think there's clearly a role for kind of

the having a vision of why you'd like things to be and using it to determine what you do in the, in the present. But that idea of just being, maybe this is like systems versus goals. It's that old distinction, but it's like, it's like the idea of saying like this many words, um,

or just something really sort of that sort of takes out all the angst from it. I think that's really useful. Yeah, well, one of the ways I'm thinking about it, because I was writing the chapter about this in the book like this week, last week, I intended to do this week as well, but then time going away is yeah, like systems. I feel like all of this stuff converges on a few central themes and

We as productivity writers try to put our own stamp on like a thing which people have been doing for centuries, not millennia. But that aside, what I really like is that if I kind of break down my implicit process of goal setting, because it's never been like explicit. If I break down what that looked like, what it looked like was step number one,

a kind of destination goal that is within my control, like write a book I'm proud of, which is like this big project. Maybe in my mind, it's like, it would be really cool if it hits the bestseller list. It would be really cool if I get invited on conferences and if I, I don't know, get on a podcast because that would be sick. But like, those are outside of my control. So let me just...

Not think about those and just recognize that actually it's a preferred indifferent as the Stoics might say. So the destination goal is within my control. And then I'll break that down into the kind of journey goals, which is more the system stuff. Therefore, what I like tangibly need to do is that every week or every day I want to aim to write X thousand words or X hundred words. And again, that is within my control.

And then kind of my step three of this three-step process is for that journey goal, that like, let's say I want to write 500 words a day to lower the bar of quality as much as possible.

I literally write on my to-do list, write 500 crappy words for crappy first draft of chapter two. And I find that putting the words crappy in there twice really makes it easier to be like, okay, you know what? This is actually doable. Let's do this. It makes me think of two other things. Dan Harris, the meditation writer and the podcaster, said,

talks about doing things specifically meditation uh aiming to do them daily-ish and having this built-in built-in fuzziness like because you know whether you did something daily-ish like in a given week you you have a feel like if you did it twice it wasn't daily-ish but it but it reduces this kind of like oh if i break my streak it's all over and i might as well spend the next three weeks not doing anything um so i think that's a that's an important part of that and then something i've found really helpful i don't know if this is writing specific but like

might be just specific to writing but it's also like not keeping going even if you're on a roll so if you say like I'm gonna write 500 words and you write them and then things are going well you're like I get another 500 out it's like actually making yourself stop and walk away like that kind of enforced low-balling of your of your aims for the day and like

That's really, I think, for people like I suspect you and certainly for me, like that's really hard to do. Like when the opportunity for a bit more productivity arises and you don't take it. Yes. But there's this amazing old book that I had to like buy as print on demand because it's because it's so hard to get called them. How writers journey to comfort and fluency by a psychologist called Robert Boyce.

And it's like a really in-depth study of academic writers and what caused them to be either productive or not productive. I mentioned him in the book a couple of times. And like one of his big findings was that the writers who made writing into a moderately important part of their lives did lots more.

than the ones who made it into a very important part of their lives because then it becomes this kind of intimidating thing and you have sort of all sorts of angst about it and you forget about it for weeks at a time because you don't dare go back into that scary thing. And part of that is like you figure out what is your short daily session of writing. And he said like, you know,

for people sort of amateur writers that might be 10 minutes a day even for professional writers it probably should never be more than like three or four hours and when it's up you just you have to stop and like go and do something else because otherwise you're kind of giving in to a an impatient urge to be done with the whole thing that will ultimately backfire on you and cause you to sort of dread returning to the project that ability to keep important things

relatively small in your life. I think it's like, it's really, I'm not saying I'm any good at it, but it's, it's really interesting.