An annual goal-framework that actually works: Part 1
An effective mind mapping guide to setting, tracking and achieving goals
2024 has been a year of fulfillment for me. While fulfillment is largely a mental state, it's one that can be influenced by gaining clarity on the person you aspire to be and the life you wish to create. On a practical level, aligning career and personal milestones with your life aspirations, achieving them incrementally, and enjoying the journey leads to a sense of fulfillment.
A significant part of this year's success can be attributed to a mind-map I've been developing over the past two years. This mind-map has allowed me to frame interconnected, synergistic life areas with goals, identify key levers to achieve them, and establish new habits that align my daily activities with my annual goals. It has served as both a map and a compass, guiding my daily planning, decision-making, reflection on setbacks, and assessment of progress towards my annual targets.
I'm excited to share this process with you through a series of blog posts. In this first part, I'll explain how to define meaningful goals that can lead to a fulfilling year. In subsequent posts, we'll discuss how to identify key levers and integrate this mind-map into your daily routine by cultivating habits that will drive progress. We'll also explore how to map out career goals and align your efforts towards achieving them.
Let's begin by discussing how to choose the right set of goals, and then we'll delve into determining the activities that make a significant impact.
Why Another Goal-Setting Framework?
As the year comes to a close, many of us reflect on the goals we set at the beginning of the year and start framing goals for the upcoming year. The struggle to set the right goals, track them throughout the year, and achieve them while maintaining trust in the system is something we all face.
First, we aim to paint a holistic view across life dimensions such as health, career, finance, family, hobbies, and spirituality, so we can draw synergies from each.
Next, we need a way to identify which goals to set. It's tempting to try and fix everything in our lives and set lofty goals around them. We need a guiding framework to "aim narrow and catch wide," allowing us to target a subset of goals, knowing it will positively impact other areas as well.
Finally, and most critically, we need a system that can connect our daily habits to these annual goals. Over the years, I've improved at building new habits. However, as my priorities have become increasingly complex and dynamic, having a guide to choose the right habits that align with my long-term goals and life aspirations has become paramount to my overall well-being.
In essence, we need a system that answers three crucial questions:
What annual goals should we set?
What habits should we build to make progress?
How do we assess and adjust our progress throughout the year?
These questions inspired me to experiment with this mind-mapping framework, and so far, I'm pleased with the outcomes.
Map Broad, Interconnected Life Areas
The challenge with goal setting is that if you set a narrow goal specific to one life area, such as career, your mind may not be fully committed because it's continuously thinking about other aspects of life that you've not addressed. On the other hand, if you set broad goals, there's a risk of spreading your effort too thin across all aspects of your life.
What I found effective is to start with a broad mind-map of all life areas. This way, you can take inventory of everything that matters in your life. I plotted areas that, if successful, would deliver a fulfilling 2024. These areas will vary based on who you are and where you are in your life journey. Below are my life areas. Notice that I set productivity as a meta-area because it's paramount to other areas, even though it's not really a life dimension. For you, it might be something else.
Choose Your Focus
Once I zoomed out, I could see the interrelation between different areas, which helped me prioritize the areas I wanted to focus on this year. My criterion was "which areas, if improved this year, will help everything else in my life." For these areas, I put extra effort into detailing the goal and picking habits that would make a desired impact.
For 2024, I chose spirituality, career, and productivity. Here's how I define these life areas and why I chose them as my focus:
Spirituality: Intuition-led decisions with an innate trust in the flow of life, a content heart filled with love and gratitude, and a deep state of well-being. Without this, nothing else matters. Conversely, even a fractional success here will make everything else smoother. For example, if I lead with comparison and envy, my career success will be fleeting and dependent on others. But if I am content and centered around my own goals, career success would be more meaningful.
Career: Lead a compelling product opportunity that will leapfrog my career while delivering satisfaction and financial returns. A strong career success would help me financially, motivate me to learn new skills, boost productivity, and enable overall fulfillment.
Productivity: Able to optimally utilize my time, energy, and focus throughout the day. Being productive is a force-multiplier for everything I will be doing.
What about the non-focus life areas?
For these areas, I chose to rely on the momentum of existing efforts and activities. For example, for music, I chose to continue with the daily music practice, weekly lessons, and perform when invited but not aggressively seek out new performance opportunities.
At this point, I almost product-portfolio-ed my life - grooming areas that need attention and offer the biggest upside.
Define Outcomes That Proxy a Desired State
For each of these life areas, I started defining an outcome that is energizing and semi-tangible.
For spirituality, I set "feeling centered on my own journey, with minimal comparison and envy most of the time."
For productivity, it was "feeling sharp, focused, and aligned each week."
For career, I set "getting promoted" and "driving an AI-centric product" as targets.
The key is striking the balance between being too specific and too vague.
Once I drafted the first two levels of the mind-map, I already started feeling grounded and excited for the year. I had clarity on how to spend my time, which opportunities to seek, whom to network with, and how to make better decisions.
In the next part, I will share how to determine and develop power habits to make progress towards these goals and identify levers that will expedite the progress.