Designing My Yearly Theme

14 February 2022 - 9 mins read time

In this article, I’d like to detail how I designed my personal goals to set myself up for success, using what I’ve learned about goal design from my experience working in business intelligence. It was helpful for me, and hopefully it’ll be helpful for you too.

Resolutions vs Themes

• I probably don’t have to convince you that new years resolutions have issues.
• NYRs end up usually being too specific, too idealistic, and too fleeting to be actionable enough to result in real change. I’m not the first person to say this, nor will I be the last.
• As a result, I’ve adopted an alternative system popularized by CGPGrey - Yearly Themes.
• The idea is that, instead of setting a highly granular goal like “run one mile every day”, you set a much larger theme like order, adventure, branching out, and so on. This theme gives you enough room to find your own goals, interests, and solutions within it. It allows for your focus to change when you learn what’s important and workable, while still making sure you have some domain to focus in. Themes allow for choice.
• This idea of prioritizing personal choice is echoed in one my favorite books on goal design: The Game Of Work, a book that has informed my own views on goal design and something I’ll be leveraging heavily throughout the article.
• The core difference between work and play is a higher degree of personal choice of methods.
• When people feel that they have no choice in what they are doing, they lose their enthusiasm, and performance suffers. On the flipside, most people become committed to what they freely choose.
• When you set goals that are too granular, you cut yourself off from the kind of bottom-up thinking that will naturally occur as you become more intimately involved with the problem.
• Example: you set a granular goal of “go running 3x/week”. After a few weeks, you realize you’re really bored by doing this. In the meantime, you go rock-climbing with a friend and really enjoy it. If you switch now, you’ve ‘failed’ your NYR. But if you had set a more high-level goal of “be more active”, you would have more freedom to adjust your methods to be more effective to meet your true goal.
• Likewise, I like how this theme lets me decide for myself how to tackle these three focus areas.
  • I get to decide if connecting to ideas means studying flashcards, doing writeups, taking Coursera courses, etc.
  • If I go to a conference, I make myself connectible by putting myself out there, connect to people if I exchange any LinkedIn info, and connect to ideas during the talks themselves.
• These are flexible enough that no matter what I end up doing at different points in the year, I have some way of connecting it to my goals.
• Last year was The Year Of Actualization for me, focused on applying and putting into practice a lot of the things I already knew. While I wasn’t perfect at it, it did end up being something I more or less had in the back of my mind for the entire year - something most NYRs can only dream of.
• My theme this year is the The Year of Connection, which has three high-level focuses within it. Connect To Ideas, Connect To People, and Make Myself Connectable.

Setting up the goals

• From this high-level theme, I’m going to break it down into some specific measurable buckets. These can (and should) change over time as my priorities shift.
• OKRs
  • I want to track my three aforementioned sub-themes as OKRs, and evaluate how well I’m doing in each area.
• KPIs
  • These are the specific trackable things I’m doing. Number of flashcards memorized, number of people added on LinkedIn, etc. Each one should roll up to an OKR.
• With that in mind, I created 5 KPIs to track on a regular basis.
  • Clear my daily flashcard queue. (OKR: Ideas)
  • Learn a new concept (OKR: Ideas)
  • Get out of the house (OKR: Connectible)
  • Publish something (OKR: Connectible)
  • Talk to a stranger/acquaintance (OKR: People)

Measurable and Specific

• If you can’t measure it, how will you know when you achieved it?
• All of these KPIs were then further refined into trackable metrics. I specifically chose metrics that were atomic - the sorts of goals you can point to. Goals must be measured in something you can see.
  • I can conceptualize “work from a coffee shop today” better than I can “spend 250 minutes at a coffee shop today”, and I don’t personally see the need to add the increased tracking-cost of recording things at a higher granularity.
• This structure is also more inflation-proof and maps better to the actual value I’m trying to obtain from the task. Goals are best stated in Inflation-Proof terms.
  • By inflation, I refer to the sort of metric-hacking that occurs when we track something too granularly.
  • For example, if I set a goal of “publish X number of words a week” vs “publish something meaningful a week”, I would be incentivized over time to quickly pump out high word-count garbage, because the goal has created a structure of “more words = more good”.
• I’d rather publish something that is only as long as it needs to be to provide value.
• A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt; long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest. - Winston Churchill

Time-bound

• Each of the goals was also set to have a rate of completion: 1x/week, 4x/week, etc.
• These rates should be low enough to allow me to catch up if I go into the red for any of them, but high enough to be challenging.
• I also set all of these 5 KPIs to have an active period of Jan 1st to March 31st. Why? Goals need to allow for evaluation and readjustment.
  • Maybe I need to decrease the goal rate. Maybe I need to add new goals. Maybe I need to rewrite them.
• Feedback from the goals (how it’s going, what do I need to improve on, how long does this take, what are my priorities) are of critical value, and something the system should be able to revise itself based on.
• At the same time, I can’t change the rules half-way through the game. If I could, there would be nothing stopping me from cheating by dropping the hard stuff whenever I want, and it’s demotivating to be doing well and then have the rules change.
• With this short lifespan, I allow myself three months to do these goals, then a period to create a new set of goals for the next three months based on how this went. I can continue any I still think are necessary, change the goal rates to make things easier/harder, and add new goals that I think make more sense.

Interrelated

• Part of my goal is to leverage the concept of Open Loops and Progress Stacking.
• If you’ve ever played an MMORPG, this is a familar concept.
  • Example: Quest design
    • In a game, you may quickly find yourself with the following quests:
      • kill 10 boars
      • retrieve a lost satchel in the forbidden forest
      • walk 10k steps
      • kill 25 enemies
      • get 12 boar pelts
    • Some of these are highly specific, and some of them are generic. This way, whatever you’re doing, you’re always making some kind of progress.
    • On the way to and from the satchel, you kill a few boars, knocking out several quests at once.
    • The more goals you’re simultaneously knocking out, the better it feels.
    • You feel clever for figuring out the optimal path, and you want to collect as many quests as possible to stack your progress as much as possible.
    • Gamification should aim to use the same ideas in business.
• Here’s some of the ways I plan to leverage the same idea:
  • As I learn a concept, I’m taking detailed notes. Once I’m done learning, I’m basically 80% of the way to an article I can publish.
  • If I need to learn something, that’s a good opportunity to ask someone new a few questions.
  • If I need to write, I might as well do it at a coffee shop and get out of the house.
• Theoretically, I can score a point on every single one my KPIs in a single day if I stack the deck correctly, and that feels good . It feels like I’ve found a way to crank maximal value out of my work.

Flexible

• I gave myself the “learn something” goal, which I can then map onto a book chapter or course, instead of those directly, because I want to let myself be flexible.
• I have concepts I want to learn, and many resources all saying they can teach me it. Instead of locking myself into a book or course, I’d like to play the field.
• Maybe Fast AI has a great chapter on learning CNNs, whereas I’d like to switch over to another book like Grokking Deep Learning to cover NLP.
• The system should allow me to alter my behavior based on what works now, not based on what I thought might work a few months ago.

You can’t win without a goal

• With all of these ideas in mind, my hope is that I’ve set up a stack of well-structured goals that make it possible for me to stay oriented and motivated over the longer term, since natural motivation only lasts about two weeks.
• In Part 2, Designing the daily scorecard, I’ll detail how I actually implemented all this using task management and visualization software Clickup and PowerBI.