Concentrate Your Ambition With the Lifehacker Goal Hierarchy
Setting goals is easy, but prioritizing is difficult. People do not know how to properly weigh what we need to achieve our goals. We take on too much, skip steps, and often give up as a result. Once you choose a structure to prioritize your goals and get rid of the unnecessary, achieving your goals becomes much more realistic. Here’s one way to do it.
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If you’re like me, you have tons of goals. Unfortunately, obsessive goal-setting can be a serious obstacle to achieving them. Taking a rigorous approach to goal setting is not only a great way to help you on your way to achieving them, but also a way to get rid of unnecessary things. Earlier, we talked about how writing down all of your goals is a good way to prioritize, and essentially that’s what we’re doing here. However, instead of listing them, we are going to classify and compare them to a simple pyramidal structure. (Imagine Maslow’s hierarchy of needs , but for your goals.) By the end, you will filter out unnecessary steps and discard goals that you don’t really care about.
Think of it as a life design system that helps you question assumptions and figure out what you really want. I’ve put together a Google Doc that you can copy and fill out yourself (File> Make a Copy). This is how I split the different goals.
Level 1: main objectives
Your primary goals are at the core of all other goals – one or two things you strive to do before you die. Almost anything above this lower level should help you reach these goals one day. Write the goals that will really matter to you 20 years from now. It could be something like: living happily until the 90s, or becoming the CEO of a company. You should only have two or three high-stakes goals listed here that you will build around for the rest of your life.
Level 2: long-term goals
Your long-term goals are the main goals you need to achieve your main goals. These can be stable habits that you need to form over the years, or achievements you want to achieve in order to achieve your main goals. Let’s say your main goal is to stay healthy and mobile in your 90s. You can’t achieve this without working on it, so a long-term goal would be to lose (or gain) a certain amount of weight or improve your diet by age 50.
Level 3: short term goals
Think of short-term goals as weeks or months. Consider goals such as finishing a drawing, assembling an added deck, or eliminating cookies from your diet. It is important to remember that these goals are short-term and not short-sighted. So, if your main goal is to lose weight, consider what you can do now to make this happen. If you want to stage an art gallery show, you need to finish the painting first.
Level 4: repeating objectives
Your recurring goals are what you want to do daily / weekly / monthly, no matter what else is going on. Consider goals such as going to the gym, jogging, writing a page a day, or something similar. These are not exactly the same as short-term goals, because they are habit-forming. Let’s say one of your main goals is to reduce your daily stress levels. Ask yourself what you need to do on a daily basis to make this happen in the long run (if you need some tips for getting started, be sure to check out the post on What You Can Do With Your Stress ).
Level 5: Nearby targets
These are goals and objectives that you can and want to accomplish right now. When you make your list, you will likely notice a few things you could do instead of writing your list. It is an ever-changing but necessary part of your pyramid because it allows you to measure your daily responsibilities to see how they affect your overall life goals. It can be as simple as cleaning the bathroom or making a phone call. The purpose of including them here is to see where they affect other aspects of the pyramid both positively and negatively.
How to use the pyramid to weed out debris and achieve your goals
Now comes the tricky part: turning this pyramid into an actionable life plan in which you can prioritize and use your baseline goals as the basis for everything else. As author David Foster Wallace points out in his introductory speech to Kenyon College , life is about what you pay attention to and you can build your goals in the same way. When you have too many conflicting goals, your focus too often shifts. Get rid of unnecessary goals to get things done and find a workable path.
Get rid of the trash and focus on as few goals as possible
The purpose of the pyramid is to ensure that all aspects of your goals work together. In this sense, it works like an old pyramid of culinary guides . The advantage of a pyramid is that you can see where your ideas fail and don’t merge. Let’s get rid of everything we don’t like together.
- Start at the base of the pyramid and draw lines across the overlapping targets. For example, at the bottom of your main goals, you might specify “Publish a Novel.” In the long run, you have “Write a novel” and at the top you have something like “Write the first sentence of a novel.” The line must go through each level and achieve one or two different goals along the way.
- Do this so that all of your targets move up the pyramid.
- When you’re done, you will likely have a few outliers scattered around. Ask yourself a couple of questions about them: why do I need this? Does this refer to something else that I want? If you don’t have a good answer, cut them off the list. If you want to keep goals, focus on them to help you with a different goal.
- Finally, go back through your levels and see what goals you can pass on to other people. You may be surprised at how many unnecessary steps you take yourself.
As an example, here’s what I did for one of my goals. The main goal at the bottom is to create and publish a video game. Along the way, I had a variety of goals: learn how to draw a pixel, improve my programming skills, write project documentation, and much more. When I saw all this in one image, I realized that I made it impossible for myself. I looked at each level and cut out everything I knew I wouldn’t do. Did I really need to learn programming? No, because I know a lot of people who do this. Art? No, I know people who do that. Instead of learning five new skills, I’ve reduced it to one goal: to work with people I know.
By the end of this, you should have a coherent basic structure in which all of your goals and desires work together in a controlled manner. It’s time to start achieving your goals.
Formulate a plan and get to work
You’ve removed all the fat and crap, so it’s time to formulate a plan to achieve your goals. Smaller goals are believed to lead to higher levels of success, and fleshing out those goals helps you achieve them . Fortunately, your pyramid should already be filled with details, so now it’s only about management.
The planning of the process depends on how you want to do something. We previously pointed out that publicly broadcasting your progress towards a goal is a great way to stay on track, highlighted some great goal tracking services , project management tools, and pointed out that sometimes you just need to embrace it and start . Find the system that works for you and get started.
However you plan your goals, the essence remains the same: Focus only on the goals that matter, break them down into smaller steps, and get to work immediately. This is a one-time exercise and does not involve permanent organization. You can tinker and tweak each level as you go, but stick to the basic high-stakes structure if you really want to get things done. Photo by Dan Zen .
Goals are ambiguous things that we humans try to define and strive to achieve. Hopefully the above method will provide a framework for creating a path to where you want to end up. Be sure to share your own tips for organizing goals in the comments.
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