Setting goals is hard. Most of the time we focus on the outcomes and not the actions themselves. This detaches the goal from the actionable steps to produce the desired outcome, thus increasing the cognitive overhead and perceived difficulty of achieving the goal.
As a solution to this, there’s a notion of setting goals from the perspective of actions and tiny habits instead of big milestones. Assuming that goals area about driving you towards the person that you want to become, we can think of them more in terms of “what my ideal self should be doing every day” as opposed to “what big things my ideal self should accomplish”.
According to my priorities established in Managing multiple interests, these are my main goals for the foreseeable future:
- Running 3x a week. Any distance, really.
- Write one line of Rust every day.
- Write on my Zettelkasten every day.