Busy or Effective?

I’ve come to the conclusion that there is something inherently ineffective about making short-term plans.

I’ve tried (and often failed) to maintain a routine of planning weekly, monthly and quarterly over the past few years, trying to juggle business, job and family. The one thing that didn’t happen as a result was achieving extraordinary results.

The more diligent I was about setting such short-term goals, the less satisfying the results seemed to be. Not that I didn’t deliver: blog posts galore (Must: 1 post per week), webshop makeovers (Goal July: New webshop design implemented), cold calls until my ear glowed (Key Result: 30 customers called by 20th of the month), etc.

My plans kept me busy, for sure, but didn’t seem to make me more effective.

Surely, I must be doing it wrong, I thought, so I doubled down. I created a template for my weekly planning that, at its most comprehensive, was a three-column A4-sized checklist of things to check on and written goals for the quarter, the month and the week. I would email it to myself automatically every week, print it out and diligently get planning.

I was making small plans and achieving small results. Busier than ever, with every hour of the week allocated, I seemed to be headed nowhere.

On the other hand, there are extraordinary things I can look back on with pride and satisfaction. But they were never recorded as measurable outcomes through a deliberate planning process.

• I started a whisky business because I got obsessed with the idea, and the whisky turned out superb.
• My wife and I founded our family because we wanted to and felt it was time. Our kids are everything to be proud of (and also have quite a few things to get mad about…)
• I followed my friend Yann Rocher’s invitation to work on his sound installation Gramophonies back in 2006, with spectacular results and good friendship added to my life.
• I wrote, recorded and produced 6 tracks as a wedding gift for friends. The music’s got all sorts of things wrong with it, but I still listen to it with incredible pleasure.

What has led to these results, that feel significant to me, wasn’t breaking them down into smaller piece-meal goals that fit into arbitrary calendar periods and filling my weeks with busywork. It was dedication: allowing myself to work on these things, at the expense of other things.

In my experience, extraordinary results happen by saying “no” to other shiny things and well-intentioned requests, not by breaking them down into goals on various time horizons.

In fact, those goal-setting exercises have seemed counter-productive more often than not. By giving me the illusion that I was spending my time well when I would fill the week with various important-looking tasks, these planning activities seemed to detract me from the actual, persistent pursuit of truly worthwhile things.

Small goals lead to small outcomes.

Also, by keeping me busy, busy, busy, they nearly burned me out.

I’m fairly certain Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein never sat down every Sunday evening to write down things like “Weekly goal: Paint enigmatic smile” or “Monthly goal: Gain one deep insight into how the universe works”.

I now look much more sceptically on those calendar-based goal-setting exercises. I still try to write down every week what I want to achieve, but nowadays, I take it with a generous grain of salt. It is an exercise for focusing, rather than for planning or for motivation.

In choosing what I want to achieve next in my life or in my career, I try to be as intentional as I can. Choosing what to do is more important to me than choosing how to go about it. Because it’s the things that are exciting to me that generate enough emotional drive to help me push through the many challenges and setbacks worthwhile endeavours tend to come with.

With the right emotional drive, I don’t need plans to keep me on track. I naturally make the best progress I can.

I accept that not everything will get worked on with equal or constant attention. I accept that I’ll have slow weeks, months and quarters. I accept that the path may not be linear. That’s how I work best, it seems.

This is, for me, the path to extraordinary results that I can look back upon with pride.