Ben Scofield

In light of the impending new year, I thought I’d offer an alternative to the associated flood of well-intentioned but ultimately-doomed resolutions: weekly goals. (And yes, I contributed to the flood myself. Color me somewhat hypocritical.)

I see several problems with annual resolutions, all related to their length. When you’re making year-long goals, it’s extremely difficult to figure out exactly what is possible, so you’re less likely to set appropriately difficult (but still achievable) targets. Even when you succeed in that, however, the size of the goals can be intimidating, so it’s harder to get started. Weekly goals deal with both of these issues – it’s much easier to figure out how much you can do, and it’s simpler to see how to tackle a smaller goal. In addition, the feedback cycle is so much shorter that you can easily adjust your goal-setting from week to week, which means that it’s possible to improve at goal setting in a reasonable timeframe.

What does this mean? Well, take one of the most popular resolutions: losing weight. The first obstacle is moving from a vague “lose weight” to something more concrete, but what’s the appropriate target? It’s all too easy to shoot too high when your primary knowledge about weight loss comes from The Biggest Loser. Even if you figure out a reachable target, having your goal be “lose fifty pounds this year,” can be intimidating all on its own. Larger goals are harder to get your mind around; at times, it can be hard to figure out how best to get going.

Contrast that with the weekly version. If you’re aiming to lose a pound a week, that means you need to burn 3500 calories more than you take in for the week. With a solid target, it’s much easier to plan out how to do it – pass up dessert here and there, eat less calories in snacks, park farther away from the door, and before you know it you’re meeting your goal. At a weekly level, you can also experiment – see just how much better or worse you do by replacing a steak with a salad, etc.

Of course, this points to a useful strategy: you can still make your ill-defined annual resolutions, but back them up with weekly goals to help you make the longer-term goals work. Good luck, and happy new year!

Seth’s post yesterday struck a chord with me, as it reminded me of how I felt a few months ago. At the time, I was posting extremely regularly here in the blog, and it seemed like ideas were flowing easily – my idea notebooks in Evernote were overflowing. This continued into November, even when I turned away from the blog in favor of working on a book proposal. I was still writing things down, however, and that kept the ideas flowing.

Towards the end of November, however, I took a break from writing (RubyConf, travel, and a few other things intervened). At first, the idea flood continued – I essentially ignored them, and for a time they continued to build, until I felt an almost-physical pressure. Finally, I gave in and recorded a dozen or so into trusty Evernote, but by then the damage was done, and what had been a constant stream of ideas (both good and bad) ended up more akin to a floodplain than a flood.

It’s taken some effort, but I’m finally getting back into things, and I’m wiser for the experience now. Ideas seem to be one of those “rich getting richer” phenomena, where the people who respect and encourage the flow of all ideas are the ones who end up having more of them. So, if you haven’t tried, start carrying a notebook or a voice recorder around, and record all those things that pop into your head. Who knows which one of them might be amazing, and end up changing your life?

I’m generally a pretty calm guy. We’ve all got pet peeves, though, and one of my occurs all too frequently. I’m talking about people who think their decisions and mistakes while driving are irreversible. You know, people who cut across three lanes of traffic to make a left turn into a mall parking lot, when they could easily make a u-turn at the next light – that sort of thing. In the grand scheme of things it’s clearly trivial, but it never fails to tick me off.

I discovered the Myers-Briggs personality inventory nearly fifteen years ago (I’m an INTP, thanks for asking), and one of the dimensions it evaluates is very much related to the idea that decisions are irreversible. People range from perceiving to judging (I know, they’re pretty awful names for the trait, but go with it) – where perceivers typically put off making a decision, and judgers tend to prefer having things settled.

I mentioned I’m an INTP, where the P stands for perceiver. Given the above brief description, then, you might expect me to be on the side of the irreversible-deciders, but in fact reversibility makes being a perceiver much easier. What better way to decide what to do could there be than actually making a provisional decision and seeing what happens? This has parallels in all sorts of fields: minimum viable products, agile development, tasting while cooking – they’re all predicated on committing to a course of action as little as possible, and being able to adjust (or even reverse) that commitment as necessary.

I think we’d all be a lot happier if we realized that relatively little in life is irreversible – and who knows what you may discover by trying something out without the fear of having committed to the wrong course forever.

I just read a post from Micah Baldwin that I found very interesting, so here’s a quick response:

Failure is bad.

Success is good.

Sure, failure can teach you valuable lessons – but so can success, and success has the added benefit of being success.

What the “failure is good” mentality misses is that failure is good only as a means to future success. Micah’s friend did exactly the right thing: he used his past failures to guide him to the choice that he perceives has a greater potential for success. In my book, that merits much more than a, “Fair enough.” Anything else would be actively courting failure – mistaking the process for the goal, and forgetting the lessons of follow-through.