Taking control with goals. Dream Big. Act Small.

I use goals to find a sense of control and purpose, to stop me getting distracted, and to make sure I’m working on the right things in the first place.

It wasn’t always this way, and actually it took for me to reach absolute rock bottom before I started paying much attention to goals at all. I’m going to tell a little bit of that story here, and also I’m going to give some practical advice on the way that I set goals and break them down.

But first, an admission.

I hate goals

Well. This is an awkward start to an article about goals, isn’t it? But you know what, I think it’s important you know that I have a love/hate relationship with goals.

I find goals in a business setting generally (even some of those that I produce) to be vague, time consuming and sometimes frustrating. Especially when they have to be created and managed in a formal process to specific deadlines - as though it’s normal for truly exceptional work to always be started on April 1st, and not in August when you finally figure out what’s needed.

Sometimes they’re much too commercial (“make £profits this quarter!”) and lack the focus on the customer that everyone knows one should have; other times they’re all about the customer, but they’re not grounded in a commercial reality (“be the best at stuff for our customers!”)

These comments are not about my current employer, or any employer in particular, the point is that these are comments that I’ve found to be true everywhere - from startups to mid-sized businesses, all the way to large multi-nationals with tens of thousands of employees.

So yes, I hate goals at least as much as the next person.

But.

I hate no goals more

You know what’s worse than a vague goal which exists only because a system shouted at you and told you that you needed one?

No goal.

This article is much more about the personal impact of goals than the business impact of goals, but if it were my business I would have goals, too. And I accept that sometimes they would be vague, and sometimes they would be too commercial, and sometimes not commercial enough (not deliberately, of course!) but I would have them all the same.

Why? Because it forces you to commit - and by you, I mean everyone. From the CEO to the most junior employees, you have to commit, and I think that’s important. It forces a conversation about direction between different teams or functions, and it forces a commitment from managers to people they manage that they’re going to support these goals; that the work you plan to do is in the right direction, and has value. If you know the people around you will really value your work because they share (or at least value) your goal, that can be very motivating.

By contrast, the goals which I don’t value at all are the ones which have forced no kind of commitment. This is normally the case when there are simply too many of them. It’s very easy to reassure yourself with platitudes (we have enough people to work on all of these things at once!) but the truth is, having too many goals is largely the same as having no goals at all. When everything is important, nothing is.

Hopefully I’ve sold the dream of having goals in a business setting to you, so maybe now we can start to talk about goals at a much more personal level. You can use this same benefit of prioritisation and commitment in your own life, whether it’s for the benefit of your career or for your own personal growth.

I’d like to share with you how goals helped in my recovery from a debilitating mental health problem. But first, a little intro in to how I use goals now.

Dream big, act small

These four words are the most powerful force in goal setting for me, and in my generally being a productive human too. Let me explain how these two parts work together, starting with the exciting bit first!

Dream big: when setting goals, start with a big goal. Don’t water it down. Don’t try to make it more achievable by lowering the bar. You have to make sure that it’s inspiring to you! You do need to make sure that you’ll know when it’s done, but otherwise try not to constrain yourself too much.

I think most people have had SMART objectives smashed across the back of their head a few hundred times already, and it tends to be over done, but I mention it here just in case it helps you think about whether your big goal could be refined so that it’s clearer to you. If you’re not familiar, take a quick look!

Often while trying to make goals SMART people water them down and make them less exciting - try not to do that for your own Dream Big goal, just make sure there’s no room for you to kid yourself that you achieved it when you didn’t.

This goal shouldn’t be something that you can just do. For example, you could set yourself a personal goal to run a marathon; you know for sure that no matter how hard you try you can’t just get up and run a marathon tomorrow (or if you can, this is a pretty weak goal). That’s the point of a goal - it’s not a to do list. Another example might be to become a senior developer; it’s an achievable goal, but not one that you can just do in one step.

So now you have an inspiring big goal - something that you would be really proud to have achieved, but you also have a fairly obvious gap in that you can’t actually do it. Now you need the next part!

Act small: is all about deciding which specific actions that you can do, and are in control of do you believe will lead to hitting your goal. Work within the constraints that you have and be realistic about what things you can do now. Make sure you start from where you are, not from where you want to be. This is the place to pour some cold water on your ambition - this is where you need to be very realistic.

To extend my earlier example of a marathon run, your Act Small goal could simply be to run 5 days a week. (Note that I said simply, not easily - that’s a hard goal to do, but a simple one to understand). You don’t even have to commit to a time or distance. Just run.

Getting out of bed on a random rainy Tuesday morning to run may not be particularly inspiring to you, and nor will you have run a marathon once you’ve done it, but the combination of having done this every day for months is what’s going to get you there! Making that explicit link for yourself between these smaller steps and the bigger goal that you’re really trying to achieve might just be enough to get you out of bed a few more times, and that’s what we’re aiming for.

Now before I lose 99% of folks who do not want to run a marathon and think this is overly simplistic for real work, let me talk about some more real world examples.

Back to reality: it’s 06:57 a.m. as I’m writing this sentence, and it’s a Friday morning. I had a very, very tiring day yesterday and whilst I don’t need an alarm to wake up at this time, being awake is not the same being productive. There’s a reason I’m writing though, and that reason is 100% about my goal.

As the COVID-19 outbreak hit I decided to find a way to help people. This was my Dream Big goal, to help others in some small way to cope with the COVID-19 outbreak. That wasn’t a thing I could just do, but with that thought I started to look around for my Act Small goals.

My constraints were that I’ve got a full time job that I still need to do well (so I can’t realistically take any time out of my working day) and I’m a single parent for half of the week (so there are quite a lot of times when I can’t, and won’t, do anything but be with my kids).

It took a few weeks to find anything at all I could even consider doing. This was not a short process! Eventually it clicked that I have spent a LOT of my career interviewing people, and that there are a LOT of people who are going to be trying to find new jobs unexpectedly as a result of this pandemic. I figured I could produce some material to help folks do this better. That wasn’t specific enough to be an “Act Small” goal though, but it was a step in the right direction - so I kept thinking.

Originally I considered recording a video to share about the interview process, but I don’t have much experience producing videos of any quality, and it’s actually quite hard to find a time where everything is quiet enough for me to consistently do this anyway!

In the end, I decided that I could spare 30 minutes per day to write.

This was (and is) my Act Small goal. Every day, write. 30 minutes only. It took nearly a month to produce this article on getting an interview, and interviewing well and it was done in painstaking and frustratingly small steps of 30 minutes, but each time I woke up and ticked off another 30 minutes of dreary writing I felt a step closer to meeting my Dream Big goal.

Hopefully you can see just how small the “Act Small” really needs to be in order for you to keep moving. It’s a thing that you need to be able to DO. Something that you are in control of. If my goal had just been “help others during the COVID-19 outbreak”, can you imagine how useful that would have been as I woke up each morning at 0630 and groggily tried to work out what day of the week it is? It’s absolutely no use whatsoever. I don’t have empathy for others when I’m still half asleep; in fact, I’m not even sure I can remember the names of my own children this early in the morning - but I can remember that I committed to mash my fingers on a keyboard for half an hour, and that’s why the Act Small part works.

I’ve described this fairly long winded process so that you can see that goals don’t have to emerge miraculously and fully formed; even when you have an idea for a goal it might not even be ready to be a goal yet, and you’ll have to keep searching and trying things to figure out how you make it concrete and achievable for you.

What about YOUR reality?

“Great news!” I hear you say. “Some dude on the internet has been able to use his goal to slowly churn out an article of average quality by waking up moderately early!” Slow hand clap for this breakthrough.

How does this help you, though?

It’s obvious that we are living with uncertainty while the COVID-19 outbreak is changing the whole world, and that there are many many things which we cannot control. This is a stressful and anxious time for everyone, and for lots of reasons, but not least of which because of this lack of control which we all face.

This is where the “Act Small” element of a goal might really help you. Being able to take some control of your surroundings can really help, but to do that you have to really think small. So small that it seems sort of irrelevant at first.

Perhaps you think I’m being silly, perhaps you think tiny things like this won’t make a difference. Well, if you’ll indulge me one more time, I’ll explain how these Act Small goals made a huge difference to me, and how I came to think about goals like this in the first place.

How it really feels to lose control

There was a period in my life where everything fell apart. This is not a statement for dramatic effect, and I’m not talking about having a few bad weeks, or a tricky time at work. I hope that you’ll understand that I don’t want to talk in detail about the things which happened in my life here; not because it’s a secret, but because it’s private.

I do want to share with you that I was diagnosed with depression, and was taking Sertraline tablets for it. This isn’t a medical article, nor is it the place for medical advice, I share this because I think it’s important for everyone to know that this happens to people like me and you and there’s no shame in that. I want to encourage you to make sure you take your own treatment seriously if you suffer, none of the things I talk about here are a replacement for that.

I couldn’t concentrate, and couldn’t make decisions. When I say I couldn’t make decisions, I don’t mean just big ones; the moment that sticks in my memory most strongly was walking in to a supermarket with only one aim - to purchase food for my own dinner. Just me. Just one meal. Nothing else. I stared at one section of shelving for about 5 minutes, frozen with overwhelm, and I could not choose.

Every second that passed I felt a pressure building: “How can I not choose dinner? Who takes this long to choose? Why am I still stood in the same spot? People must think I’m mental. Some people have finished their whole shop in this time. Come on! It’s just dinner!” I left the supermarket with no dinner, in pieces. There are not words to describe how that feels.

I hope you don’t know how that feels. I hope you never do. If ever you do, know that you’re not alone.

The impact on my work was drastic. My job consists of lot of different parts, like everyone’s, but certainly a large part is having to make decisions. Things tend to come to me when something went wrong, or because it has significant (or irreversible) impacts for the future of our team, or just because there’s no clear right answer. Whether you do a similar job to me or not, I’m sure there are many small decisions that I make a hundred times a day which would be familiar to you - should I work on this next, or that? I’ve only got 15 minutes before my next meeting… is that enough time to start this? I need to talk to [person], should I email them, send them a message, try to call them?

Imagine being trapped inside a mind where you can’t even choose dinner, and then being faced with decisions like this relentlessly from morning until night. Every decision you don’t make gets added to the pile to come back to you tomorrow. It was utterly debilitating. Exhausting. Humiliating. My doctor suggested I take time off work to recover. I did take some time off, I had no idea how to recover. What does it even mean to recover when your whole world has turned upside down? I wanted to get back to work and do all the things I was best at again. This felt like an unachievable goal.

The road to recovery, and the birth of “act small”

It took me a couple of weeks to work out where to even start on my goal. It seems horribly forced to use that language here… my goal? I didn’t call it a goal then, you should know this, but it was my absolute focus, and it was something I wanted to achieve. That’s all a goal is, whether you call it that or not.

Eventually I decided that I needed a way to practice the things that I had lost. It seemed obvious to me that practicing something was the right way to get better at it - but the two key things I needed to practice were deciding, and concentrating.

Concentrating, and deciding. These are not things that have an obvious way to practice! At first I wondered if computer games might be a helpful way to practice concentration - but something about them didn’t feel quite right. Most of them are engineered deliberately to make sure they hold your attention for long periods, with very well tested learning curves to make sure you’re constantly challenged but not overstretched; it didn’t feel like the right kind of practice.

Whatever the thing would be, I had at least decided I would directly measure the time spent concentrating. I measured it in chunks of 25 minutes. If you’ve never heard of the Pomodoro technique, it’s worth a look, and this is what I did. I counted the total number of times that I could sit and concentrate for 25 minutes in a day as my goal.

But what to concentrate ON? I finally decided that I needed to produce something with this time. To feel a sense of accomplishment, I needed to show myself that I had been creative, that I had really made something.

I started with a goal of 3 blocks of 25 minutes for a whole day, and literally my only other measure was that I needed to produce something during that time. I figured that having no clear plan about what I would produce would also force me to make constant decisions about what I would do next, which I wanted to practice too. (Remember me saying sometimes goals can be vague?!)

Concentrating three times per day seemed like it should be embarrassingly easy when I set that goal. 75 minutes of concentration in a whole day does not seem a lot, but I couldn’t consistently do it to start with.

I have no idea why, but I decided to start by soldering two ends of a wire together. I knew how to solder in theory, and had a soldering iron already, but I was really bad at it - so I started there. Once I’d mastered soldering I moved on to programming an Arduino (I spent a significant part of my career as a developer, using C-like languages, but never plain C which the Arduino uses). Once I felt like I’d got the hang of programming an Arduino, I decided to make some small electronic circuits. And so it went on like this, day after day after day, I would sit at my kitchen table with no idea what I was going to do next, figure out what skill I could learn or apply for 25 minutes, and sit with it.

It was nearly a month before I felt able to do this consistently 3 times per day. Though these sound like fun projects, and indeed I’d love to spend my days doing this kind of thing given the choice now, it was horrible most days. I hated it because it felt forced. I didn’t want to be doing hobbies, I wanted to do my job. Even though I was clearly “producing” something each time, it was also obviously of no value to society or the people around me, and I felt utterly rubbish about myself. I kept going anyway, because my goal was not to make any particular thing, but to practice concentrating. I reminded myself of this often. It helped. All I had to do was sit there for 25 minutes and stay focussed on one thing.

Eventually, I’d built myself up to doing 8 or 9 of these 25 minute blocks every day. I had learned how to produce parametric drawings using CAD software (Fusion360), how to use a laser cutter, a 3D printer, some more advanced electronics (all of which I did with the aid of my local hackspace - if you have one near you, they’re amazing, support them!) and I ended up building some things that I look at now and feel proud of. These were the side-effects of my goal. They were not my goal, but they were evidence to me that I was improving. I was sticking to my “Act Small” plan and I could see myself concentrating often, the tangible output of that work fuelled me to keep going. The net result? Confidence. I could prove that I hadn’t tricked myself in to believing I was improving. I could prove to myself that I wasn’t as unwell as before. There was no doubt that I was getting better, and that confidence fuels itself. It’s harder to stop when your progress is so obvious.

This whole journey started with me joining two ends of the same wire together for 25 minutes. It continued for weeks with small steps that were equally mundane.

The final result of all this was a Dream Big goal that I categorically achieved. I was able to work again. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, and whilst I’ve had struggles along the way (mental health is never done, or finished) I haven’t found myself in such a dark place for so long since. What’s more, I learned a valuable lesson about how small things can compound to achieve big things.

This was the birth of Dream Big, Act Small for me. I didn’t call it that at the time, I couldn’t find the right words until months later, but this is where it started.

That habit of concentrating deliberately for 25 minutes stuck with me. It’s what I used to write my last article, and now this one. I sit down, throw words at the screen, and then later I replace or remove the ones that I don’t like. Most of all I just keep going, in tiny steps, believing that I’ll improve every day. Sometimes you just have to show up and grind out another 25 minutes.

A word on mental health

As I re-read this section above it feels much too simplistic, but I can’t find a way to correct that. There were many components to my recovery. Finding a way to properly eat, sleep, exercise, use medication, balance resting with working - all of these are things that I had to learn and all of which, as well as the incredible patience of my friends and family, came together to help me recover.

This wasn’t easy, nor was it linear. It did not feel smooth like the journey that you just read, but that was my journey, and using goals like this played a big part and brought me a huge amount of confidence. Goals played a very big part in my recovery, exactly as I’ve described, but it’s important that you know that it took more than just this.

My challenge to you

If you’re not in a good place, and you don’t feel able to take on another challenge, you should feel fine about that. This is not an article about life-hacks or productivity tricks or 5 sick ways to hustle more. You don’t need to compare yourself to anyone but yourself, and just because I did a thing, doesn’t mean you have to do a thing.

If you are ready to try something new though, then set yourself a goal. Dream Big. Make it really ambitious - exciting but scary. Then break it in to tiny, miniscule, embarrassingly small things that you believe will help achieve that, and which you know you can do today. Act Small. Keep doing those small things every day. Embrace the work, and learn to enjoy the journey, not just the outcome.

Looking for a promotion in your career? Look for people who have done it before - and set an Act Small goal of asking one person for specific advice on something you’d like to improve every week. Want to improve your skill as a developer? Complete 30 minutes of online training every day/week/whatever in a language you don’t know. Learn to touch type. Want to improve your communication skills? Write every day. Publish or present one of the things that you wrote once a month. Can’t think of a goal, but have a vague idea of what you want to do? Give me a shout, it’s my goal to help you.

It’s my hope that you can use goals like this to help you on some small part of your own journey, whether you’re finding a way to recover lost momentum, trying to improve your performance, or just looking to find a sense of control of the world around you.

Have fun, but remember, not everything that matters can be measured.