Make sure your abstract goals don’t get lost in the daily grind.

Intan­gi­ble goals that resist mea­sure­ment are a con­stant prob­lem for any­one try­ing to improve their qual­ity of life.  It is easy to mea­sure your progress towards quan­tata­tive goals; for exam­ple, if I want to have some indi­ca­tor of my gen­eral phys­i­cal fit­ness, I can use the num­ber of push-ups I can do or my rest­ing heart rate.  But for things like,

“How well am I main­tain­ing my friend­ships?” or “How much do I con­tribute pos­i­tively to my work envi­ron­ment?” it’s a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing to mea­sure your progress.

But resis­tance to mea­sure­ment doesn’t make these kinds of goals any less impor­tant.  Luck­ily, there a few strate­gies to wrap your mind around your abstract pursuits:

Mea­sur­ing the Human Touch

I have a real prob­lem main­tain­ing per­sonal rela­tion­ships — I always seem to have a hard time keep­ing a reg­u­lar stream of com­mu­ni­ca­tion going with any­one but the peo­ple I see every­day.  And it’s not because per­sonal rela­tion­ships are not impor­tant to me, it’s more a func­tion of hav­ing other things going on and it gen­er­ally slips my mind at the end of the day to write an email to a friend abroad or to call some­one nearby that I don’t see very often.

I’ve addressed this prob­lem by reduc­ing the social clut­ter I have and being explicit about what I need to do to feel connected:

1. Ruth­lessly elim­i­nate dis­trac­tions from your goal. Dis­crete, mea­sur­able activ­i­ties can be way­laid by unim­por­tant dis­trac­tions, abstract goals dou­bly so.  In order to keep an eye on how much com­mu­ni­ca­tion I’m actu­ally hav­ing with my friends and fam­ily, I’ve sopped spend­ing time on Face­book or any sort of chat plat­form when I can afford to, and instead started focus­ing on phone calls and emails. By choos­ing only two streams of com­mu­ni­ca­tion to focus on, I’m less dis­tracted by mean­ing­less buzz.
2. Be clear about how this goal con­tributes to your life. Because abstract goals can’t be mea­sured in dol­lars earned or time saved, they tend to be rel­e­gated to a lower level of impor­tance. But even if I can’t always be clear about the why or the how, I know my social net­work is inti­mately con­nected to my sense of well-being and pur­pose, as well as my pro­duc­tiv­ity. I now bud­get time for my friends and fam­ily the way I would any­thing else, because they’re as if not more important.
3. Make a list of tan­gi­bles that describe the intan­gi­ble. While your over­all goal might not be clear-cut, a care­ful exam­i­na­tion of the con­tribut­ing actions reveals lurk­ing indi­ca­tors. For exam­ple, I recently made a list of the 20 rela­tion­ships I need to main­tain on a monthly basis at a bare min­i­mum. If this sounds cruel and arbi­trary, con­sider the alter­na­tive: a chaotic, unco­or­di­nated effort to “stay in touch” with every­one all at the same time — some­one always gets inad­ver­tently left out, but they’ll see it as inten­tional.  I can cer­tainly expand this list, but I know that to shrink it would be unac­cept­able, and so fol­low it.
4. Record your progress, or you might as well not be mak­ing any. This is one of our main tenets here at A Life Out Loud: if you’re writ­ing your thoughts and actions down, you have no way to wit­ness any change in your­self. It’s nec­es­sary to be explicit about your goals and put them into words, but it’s even more impor­tant to then track those goals. See­ing progress recorded makes it more real to you and encour­ages you to keep going. I now inte­grate email writ­ing to friends and phone calls to fam­ily into my Google Cal­en­dar, so I know that they won’t be for­got­ten.  For friends that I don’t talk to all that often, I keep a run­ning list and try and call two or three at a time every week. If we hap­pen to have more fre­quent con­ver­sa­tions, ter­rific (i.e. I’m prob­a­bly being suc­cess­ful in my endeavor for more social inter­ac­tion), but if not I know at least I’ve kept in reg­u­lar con­tact with every­one that matters.

Take a Well-deserved Vaca­tion from Your Guilt Trips

I used to really give myself a hard time about this, but I’ve since learned that guilt is not a pos­i­tive moti­va­tor.  Even when it works, you gain very lit­tle emo­tional reward for meet­ing your goal.  Actu­ally, when you moti­vate your­self through guilt, you don’t really have “goals,” because you define them in neg­a­tive terms, so instead you just have pun­ish­ments for not doing those things, there is no sat­is­fac­tion in meet­ing them, other than relief.

Instead of guilt, it’s use­ful exer­cise to develop indi­ca­tors for your own suc­cess in improv­ing in cer­tain areas of your life and apply­ing them every cou­ple of weeks or so. As an exam­ple of the above, if I want to make it a point to main­tain my rela­tion­ships with a sec­ondary group of friends (those I don’t see often in per­son), I can make a list of ten peo­ple I want to call or email every two weeks just to be sure there’s a con­sis­tent ebb of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.  If that sounds too ster­ile or prag­matic to you, then you’re in the same place I was.  I thought that mak­ing any list of rela­tion­ships was exclu­sion­ary and cold, and that try­ing to quan­tify some­thing like friend­ship was at best a fool’s errand.  How­ever, when I thought more about it, I real­ized by refus­ing to make deci­sions about who I wanted o include in my life, I was exclud­ing every­one in the process.

In addi­tion, by not keep­ing track of how well I was doing toward this end, I had no indi­ca­tion of exactly how reg­u­larly Iwas com­mu­ni­cat­ing, and I no way to mea­sure how suc­cess­ful I was in improv­ing my sec­ondary per­sonal rela­tion­ships.  How was I win­ning by being “pas­sion­ate” and “spon­ta­neous?’  Pas­sion is a moti­va­tor, the most impor­tant and healthy of moti­va­tors, but it’s not a method, it’s not a recipe for suc­cess.  As for spon­tane­ity, it can be won­der­ful to ran­domly decide you want to take your girl­friend out for din­ner or take some vaca­tion time and visit a fam­ily mem­ber. But that doesn’t mean that you can be suc­cess­ful in achiev­ing your goals by hav­ing a half-formed inten­tion and assum­ing it will come to fruition.

One of the most eye-opening real­iza­tions of my life was under­stand­ing that great peo­ple who achieve great things work tire­lessly with con­sis­tent focus and pas­sion; you sim­ply do not stum­ble into suc­cess in you goals. While that may make you feel over­whelmed, it’s actu­ally a very pow­er­ful idea; there is noth­ing inher­ent that deter­mines your path or your achieve­ments, they are a func­tion of your abil­ity to deter­mine what you want, to devise a way to get there, and to find a way to mea­sure your progress.

Now to refine this a lit­tle, let’s choose another exam­ple.  So you notice that when you leave your office job at the end of the day, you gen­er­ally feel tried, unmo­ti­vated, you’d pre­fer to sit in front of the TV, and you feel frus­trated with your co-workers and their atti­tudes.  A proac­tive, mea­sur­able way to deal with this prob­lem might look some­thing like this:

You assign your­self a score weekly from 1 to 5, 5 being the high­est.  You get one point for doing each of the following:

• You take a con­ver­sa­tion past ordi­nary pleas­antries with some­one you don’t know very well and learn some­thing new about them.
• You re-work how to do some­thing in your job that will pre­vent unnec­es­sary work later and thus reduce stress and your work­load in the future.  This might mean reor­ga­niz­ing a folder on your com­puter, or cre­at­ing a tem­plate for some­thing you type infre­quently but is time-consuming to make from scratch, or sim­ply clean­ing up your office and get­ting rid of things you don’t need.  This really has an unbe­liev­able effect in the long run.
• You do some­thing spon­ta­neous and unnec­es­sar­ily nice for one of your co-workers.  This could mean buy­ing a few apples and putting them on a nearby table for peo­ple to take (notice I didn’t say donuts, donuts are not food), or writ­ing a thank you note to some­one for some­thing which you know they expected no thanks.
• You make it point to take your whole lunch break, invite cowork­ers to eat their lunches with­out out­side or at a restau­rant, or sim­ply take your sand­wich for a walk (even in the win­ter: a brisk walk in the win­ter will make you feel bet­ter than eat­ing at your desk under flu­o­res­cent lights).
• You keep a running-to-do list of things that need to be done imme­di­ately and things that you would do if you were the kind of pro­fes­sional you wanted to be.  The lat­ter cat­e­gory might be any­thing from learn­ing to touch-type to learn­ing 20 words in Ger­man to send­ing some com­ments to a col­league on how some­thing might be improved.

Each week, you then grade your­self out of 5 and then reflect on what you could do bet­ter.  As these things become habits, you can add new things or remove things that don’t seem to work.  All of these tasks have com­mon themes — they focus on plan­ning instead of respond­ing to life, they increase your pro­fes­sional and per­sonal value, and they enliven your own day and those of the peo­ple around you.  The more mun­dane your life seems, the more oppor­tu­ni­ties there are to fill it up with some pas­sion and productivity.