Add a ‘fast-Paced Goal’ to Your Day
My wife and I hope to do a lot every weekend. All our goals, from “washing our hair” to “paying taxes,” we write down on a small informal to-do list in the Reminders app or on a piece of paper. Making a to-do list for the weekend turns into an assignment in itself. Push yourself too hard and we’ll burn out; take it easy and we’ll regret it on Monday. One way to achieve flexibility while maintaining urgency is to designate several of our tasks as “long-term goals”.
Partial challenge, partial reward
On such kraudfandingovyh sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Patreon, enhanced goal – it is an additional goal to raise funds after your first goal. If your project achieves its primary goal, you deliver the product or service as described. If you reach the stretched goal, you get something extra: black and white print goes in color, or everyone gets a free pin along with their T-shirt, or you add three additional characters to your RPG. This is optional, but in a certain way: it depends on achieving a more important goal in the first place. A challenging goal is partly a challenge and partly a reward.
Let’s go back to our piece of paper. When we have goals that we hope to achieve, but that are less urgent or important, we put them at the end labeled “extended goal”. This weekend, for example, ambitious goals were set: “Free up space in the dressing room” and “Take things to housing work.” The other weekend it was Watch a Movie. Sometimes the challenge, sometimes the reward, is always what we really want to do. But only if we have achieved all or most of our main goals.
For me, the “stretched target” characterization is of great importance. I am easily distracted, so I have a habit of putting off one thing for another. (I always check my e-newsletters when I have a deadline for publishing a Lifehacker.) So I can ruin the productivity of the day by ignoring important assignments and only doing simple or dumb ones. By marking some of these as “challenging goals,” I remind myself to put them off until later.
What challenging goals are not
Not everything that is pleasant or unnecessary is a difficult goal. When “watching a movie” was a tricky goal, it’s because if we didn’t have enough time, we would have watched the TV show beautifully. But on a sunny weekend we didn’t abandon the “family walk in the park” as a far-fetched goal. It was the most interesting thing we did in the afternoon, whether we got it done or not. If we were to express this in terms of achievement, it was vital to our mental health. But in the usual sense, it was fun and enjoyable, and cleaning the toilet can wait.
Stretched Goal is just a shortcut that helps you prioritize without a full priority ranking system. If you have too many complex goals on your to-do list, you might want to make a second list. If you keep flipping the same stretch target from list to list, it might be time to replace it with a new one.