Are You Wasting Attention (and Time) on Goal-setting? - DBR 032

Do Busy Right - The Task and Attention Management Podcast

I try to help you think about how you’re using your attention and, thus, how to manage yourself. What you need to manage is your attention. So, when I see systemic waste of attention or weak self management practices, I try to call them out for you so you can begin to think “do I really need to do this?” If you’re spending a lot of attention and time on setting and tuning goals, and if that raises your stress level, this episode is for you. I don't think of goal setting as the ‘one treatment to rule them all’. And that there's no other way for you to motivate and manage yourself. We'll talk about some nuances of goals. Hopefully, at the end of our talk, you have some more knowledge to understand how to use goals well, as compared to blindly. Because the hype is there; there are a lot of people whose whole deal is you got to set goals, and here's how you got to do it. That the goals have to be this, that, and the other thing. I think it tends to be just a lot of overhead. The question is “does it help?” The science behind goal setting

• Background science
• ‘Tuning’ your goals
• SMART goals
• So, the tenor of the discussion is around motivation

Critique of the science

• Behaviorist thinking
• Stimulus and response – humans, Covey, and Victor Frankl
• Brain as machine
• But, humans have an ego, a ‘soul’
• So, I think the reporting on the science on goals is overblown

The Tickler file instruction video is at dobusyright.com/tickler-file Challenges of management via goals

• The psychology of goals seems weak to me, contradictory
• It's not a lack of desire or motivation that causes us to miss goals.
• To visualize or not?
• There’s no real science around how many goals are reasonable – does the total number of goals in our heads change how likely we are to succeed?
• Goals become a binary thing – we either make them or we don’t – what does this do to our motivation or to our performance?

Challenges of doing the goal-setting and tracking goals

• Goals and estimation - humans are bad at estimation
• But that's not the way goals are typically proposed.

My own experience

• My own weight loss example
• With that experience (and only with that experience) I am now capable of estimating to a point where the SMART-goal stuff could be accurate.

The Tickler file instruction video is at dobusyright.com/tickler-file Intent

• Thinking about Intent
• Example of intent (kids getting driver license) What would have been a good goal?
• My concern is with goals as some panacea
• In organizations we use management by objectives – good or bad?

Summary Surely there are better and worse ways to manage ourselves. I think that over-reliance on formal goal-setting (i.e. SMART goals) poses too many challenges, both procedural and scientific, to be the best way. But goal-setting is generally considered to be just that. If you find it stressful and unproductive in your own self-management process, you're not broken. And it's probably not that you need to learn more and do it in a more sophisticated way. I have significant doubts about the science and the practice around the idea. Instead, think about your Intent, commit to a next task to move you toward that state of the world, and manage yourself at the task level. Manage yourself and your attention with the Attention Compass process. Implementing a Tickler file is a good way to start. Or reach out to me [e-mail] to talk about the Attention Compass.