There is a productivity concept that that’s been around since the 80s that you need to set SMART goals. In other words, goals that are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time Bound

Sounds great, doesn’t it? It’s bullshit.

I’ll concede that it may be a good idea for a company that needs to motivate its employees and measure results, but I think it’s a really shitty way to set personal goals. The concept comes from a guy in corporate explaining how to set goals for your employees (here’s the original article if you’re interested). It has bled into the self-help-o-sphere (I just invented that term. You’re welcome) and touted as a way to set and achieve personal goals.

But there are two main problems with goals setting:

1. You don’t achieve your goal.
   This deflates you and make you feel like a failure because, well, you failed. This can happen when you set a goal that’s too high.
   
   Or even worse:
   
2. You achieve your goal.
   Now you feel great, because you’ve won. Woo hoo! Kudos to you, you’re an achiever. Feels great, doesn’t it? Now what? I guess the only thing to do now is set another goal. Welcome to the goal treadmill.

I have an alternative way of setting goals that I find more useful:

Don’t

I’m serious. Don’t set goals. Unless you’re that crazy goal-minded individual who has a all the money they need and is happy with their life. If you are, you probably aren’t reading my blog because you’re too busy captaining industry or winning gold medals. But for the rest of us, this is what works for me:

Point in a direction and go

I like to focus on areas that interest me. For example, one thing I like to do is fiddle with technology. So I get involved in makerspaces, take things apart in my spare time, and if I have a little extra cash, spend it on some interesting bit of technology and maybe take it apart after I’ve used it for a while. This has lead to achieving a lot of things like learning to program, building electronics, living in China, teaching classes in 3 different continents, and best of all, hanging out with some really interesting and creative people. But the goal? No goal. I just like doing interesting stuff.

Make a done list

I have an ongoing big list of things to do. I check items as I do them. When I do something that’s not on the list, I will add it to the list and immediately check it done. At the end of the day, I move all the stuff I did onto a different list. Periodically, I’ll go through and remove stuff that I didn’t do off the main list because I realize that I didn’t really need to do it anyway. Once in a while, I’ll just get rid of the list entirely and start over. The list of done items becomes my diary.

The next section goes into more detail on my way of implementing a done list for those who really want to geek out it like I do. Skip this and you’ve still got the general idea.

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I use plain text files; one called todo.txt and one called done.txt. If my todo.txt list gets too big, I archive it and start a new list. Stuff that’s important will find it’s way back on to the new todo.txt list anyway. If I really feel like I’m missing something then I can go look in the archive. I almost never look at it, but it gives me peace of mind to know that it’s there.

At the end of the year, I’ll add the year to the name of the the done.txt file and archive it. I have these lists dating back to 2007done.txt. Since the diary is plain text, my whole life fits in less than 800K and it can be read on any device. Whenever I need to feel accomplished, I’ll take a look a these lists and see all the amazing stuff I’ve done over the years and it motivates me to keep going. When I need to brag about myself for a conference or to polish my resume, I’ll go through these lists and pull stuff out.

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Now you are empowered to go out and achieve amazing success through the power of not making any goals, pointing yourself in a direction, and making a done list. I hope it helps.