I use a Trello board for my 10 year goals. Lists are:
1. Primary Goals
2. Secondary Goals
3. Immediate Goals
5. To-do this week
6. Daily
I started it at the end of 2015 so there's a card in primary goals list for each major thing that I would like to have accomplished (or just continued to do) by the end of 2025. Each primary goal gets its own label and a checklist of what specifically accomplishing that goal means to me.
Secondary and immediate goals are how I broke down the bigger goals into smaller, more manageable parts. For example, one of my primary goals is "Health." So a secondary goal might be "rock climb twice per week" or "research ways to improve my memory". Every card in every list has a label/labels that relate them back to a primary goal.
The weekly and daily todos further break everything down into things that I can focus on in the next day or week.
Here's what I learned:
- For all of 2016 (the first year) I would update this Trello board religiously every day with my weekly and daily todos. I found that I actually didn't enjoy doing this. While things were getting done, they didn't seem to be things that were that important or impactful. I stopped doing this so I could completely cut out those last two lists. Now I re-visit the board every so often when I feel like I need a reminder or what past-me thought was important. Sometimes I update the primary goals (I've only added to this once and never removed from it) and more frequently I'll decide that a secondary or immediate goal didn't make sense so I'll get rid of it or add a new one. The whole process is much more free form and I think that works better for me.
- One of my mantras that has come out of this exercise has been "don't do something for just one reason." The things that I tend to enjoy and accomplish successfully are ones that have multiple primary goal labels on them. Sometimes they only have a loose relation or benefit but it's still more compelling to me because if it turns out one of the benefits doesn't work out the way I planned then there's still a reason to be doing this thing for another reason.
Still an ongoing experiment but I'm generally happy that I'm doing it.
I also use a trello board. I have one column for each year, plus a wishlist column with short/mid/long term goals and a separate column just for travels that I want to do. Once a task is completed I mark it with the green label. If I just don't care anymore about something or I "fail" the task, then I mark it in red.
I find this setup quite helpful for:
- breaking down huge goals (such as learning a new language)
- having short/mid/long term goals all available at a glance
- giving priority to stuff I'd otherwise keep procrastinating (I tend to procrastinate for weeks or months doing several things until I put everything in one checklist at the top of the current year column and power through them all in a short time)
- giving myself some perspective and appreciate all the things achieved in the past months/years. Things that were once just dreams or seemed very hard to achieve are now the normal day-to-day life and it's way too easy to undervalue them.
I use the board in a positive way, in the sense that I don't see deleting tasks or failing to achieve something as some kind of failure. I only celebrate the green "done" labels.
I also use a Kanban board mine however keeps track of completion on books and courses. I suppose a ten year goal would be a good idea along with yearly.
1. Primary Goals
2. Secondary Goals
3. Immediate Goals
5. To-do this week
6. Daily
I started it at the end of 2015 so there's a card in primary goals list for each major thing that I would like to have accomplished (or just continued to do) by the end of 2025. Each primary goal gets its own label and a checklist of what specifically accomplishing that goal means to me.
Secondary and immediate goals are how I broke down the bigger goals into smaller, more manageable parts. For example, one of my primary goals is "Health." So a secondary goal might be "rock climb twice per week" or "research ways to improve my memory". Every card in every list has a label/labels that relate them back to a primary goal.
The weekly and daily todos further break everything down into things that I can focus on in the next day or week.
Here's what I learned:
- For all of 2016 (the first year) I would update this Trello board religiously every day with my weekly and daily todos. I found that I actually didn't enjoy doing this. While things were getting done, they didn't seem to be things that were that important or impactful. I stopped doing this so I could completely cut out those last two lists. Now I re-visit the board every so often when I feel like I need a reminder or what past-me thought was important. Sometimes I update the primary goals (I've only added to this once and never removed from it) and more frequently I'll decide that a secondary or immediate goal didn't make sense so I'll get rid of it or add a new one. The whole process is much more free form and I think that works better for me.
- One of my mantras that has come out of this exercise has been "don't do something for just one reason." The things that I tend to enjoy and accomplish successfully are ones that have multiple primary goal labels on them. Sometimes they only have a loose relation or benefit but it's still more compelling to me because if it turns out one of the benefits doesn't work out the way I planned then there's still a reason to be doing this thing for another reason.
Still an ongoing experiment but I'm generally happy that I'm doing it.