I Consider Period-Based Goal Setting Harmful

Goals. Productivity mandates them, and I think we’re doing it wrong.

Knowledge work is the type of work that primarily happens in the mind. It produces ideas, concepts and insights: Engineering, decision-making, organisation and process design, strategy work, problem-solving, research, art, etc.

Most office workers, but others as well, engage in knowledge work in some form. Maybe not every day or all day long, but at least occasionally. Often times, knowledge work is what brings organisations and individuals forward.

Read up on productivity, and you’ll quickly find injunctions all over the place to begin a given calendar period, whether the week, month, quarter or year, by setting goals for that period. I call this period-based goal setting.

I’ve come to conclude, based on my own experience and observing it in organisations I’ve worked in, that this practice is harmful. It leads to small, meaningless goals and makes us give ourselves too much work.

Two negative effects

The argument for period-based goal setting is that without committing to achieving something within a given period, we won’t use our time well. The practice is supposed to keep us motivated, focused and on track.

I think the practice achieves the opposite for many people most of the time.

I’m not against binding goals to a point in time. Some goals have natural deadlines, like preparing a Black Friday campaign. Sometimes, we may also benefit from settings ourselves our own deadlines, although I must add that I don’t believe this to be true for everyone.

The issue with period-based goal setting is two-fold:

• When we practice it, we subject ourselves to social pressure and cognitive biases, which invariably push us towards setting too many goals (I call this goal stuffing).
• By mandating to break down big goals to fit into arbitrary periods, it leads us to produce uninspiring goals that no longer work as sources of motivation.

The mechanisms that hurt us

We humans have quirks. Proponents of period-based goal setting ignore them and then blame our failures on character flaws. That’s not how we should treat ourselves.

Period-based goal setting pits us against two such quirks that are hard to overcome.

First, there’s social pressure. If you set out to plan your week, and you are paid to work 40 hours a week, it feels very awkward to tell your manager you’re only planning 10 productive hours of work besides emails, meetings and other work not generally related to those all-important goals. (never mind that your manager, like most managers, rarely gets 10 productive hours per week!)

Moreover, if your workplace is anything like mine, most people are really, really busy. In such a setting, it takes real guts to plan anything less than “a lot” of work. The pressure to plan for full capacity is huge.

This is further compounded by a cognitive bias around estimation. While it is said that we often underestimate how much we can achieve in the long run, we simultaneously overestimate, very consistently, how much we can get done in the short term. In other words, when we plan short-term, we’re actively engaging in something we’re very bad at. This is called the Planning Fallacy.

Thus, giving in to the social pressure described above, and underestimating the time and effort things will take, we stuff our goals list.

Overworked, we lose our ability to innovate

There is nothing more fatal to our ability to innovate and create new, extraordinary things than feeling stuck in a grind of endless, tiny, seemingly pointless goals and the myriad To-dos they bring.

Knowledge work requires us to let the brain do its thing: learn new concepts, connect dots, generate insights. To do this, it needs an appropriate balance between input, active work and free space. Give it too little input, and there are no new dots to connect. Submerge it with input and activity, and creativity is mostly lost.

When Leonardo was summoned by the duke, they ended up having a discussion of how creativity occurs. Sometimes it requires going slowly, pausing, even procrastinating. That allows ideas to marinate, Leonardo explained. Intuition needs nurturing. “[People] of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he told the duke, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci

Now, I’m not a “person of lofty genius” by any stretch of the imagination, and yet even I felt this very clearly back when I was running my business. Eventually, stuck in the grind of weekly goals and To-dos, I lost the ability to come up with new marketing ideas. I literally didn’t know what else to blog about, despite whisky being such a rich source of material.

Breaking down goals from extraordinary to dreadful

For individuals, the primary function of most goals, I argue, is motivation.

Work is hard, and in order to overcome the many obstacles in our way without giving up, we need the emotional drive that exciting, bold, magnificent goals spark. Simply put, we give our best when we’re motivated, and good goals create the conditions for this.

But exciting, bold, magnificent goals rarely fit into arbitrary calendar periods. Period-based goal setting therefore mandates that we break those goals down into smaller ones that will fit.

A CEO of a startup may set a rather exciting overall goal for themselves of “No more interviews, except for executive positions”. After months and months of interviewing new hires, that sounds amazing! It rids them from draining work and frees up their talents and energy to work on more strategic topics.

That goal, however, can hardly be achieved in a quarter. So for their next quarterly goal setting session, this turns into “Hire a head of HR in Q1”. This, in the end, gets broken down to “Contact 5 recruiting agencies this week”.

The latter, however, is no longer the sort of extraordinary result that gets anyone up in the morning. While we understand how we got from the particular big goal to this particular small one, the troubles start when this break-down activity becomes regular. If we repeat this process enough times, we get used to small, uninspiring goals. Eventually, “Making X calls per week” or “Fixing the top 10 bugs this month” becomes our new scale of thinking.

We’ve now turned an activity supposed to spark drive and inspiration into the mere generation of uninspiring To-dos. And because we stuff our schedules with those, we’re now drowning in them, losing our creativity and ability to innovate in the process.

Breaking free of the period-based tyranny

The key for me was remembering that I can review goals regularly without feeling the need to set new ones.

There is simply no reason to define goals every quarter. In organisations, I believe this practice originated from conflating alignment, resource allocation and reporting into a single set of slightly overworked cascading rituals. That habit then trickled down to individuals through the blogs and YouTube channels of well-meaning, but, in my opinion, misguided, productivity gurus.

Goals have their own timelines. The overarching ones often entail multi-year endeavours and, crucially, maintain their value over long periods of time. If our imaginary CEO doesn’t manage to remove themselves from recruiting this year, it’s still a good outcome if they manage to do it next year.

Very big goals should absolutely be broken down, just not arbitrarily. Most of the time, there is a natural way to break them down into intermediary steps that don’t disconnect them from the grand vision. I like to break down my goals as long as it helps me better understand the path to reaching them, but I stop and backtrack as soon as I reach a level where the inspiration and the motivation no longer transpire. When the emotional connection becomes too thin, I stop and discard the lowest level. Thus, even sub-goals maintain their function of sparking drive and inspiration.

When the time comes to figure out how much capacity can be allocated to which goal, one or more goals will have to wait. That, however, doesn’t invalidate them! Persistence in keeping an eye on the goal is a virtue. If a goal is still valuable after a forced hiatus, that’s a sign it was a good goal to begin with.

I rarely feel the need to give myself arbitrary deadlines, since they don’t work for me. I trust that either the goal’s natural deadline is clear enough, or that the goal is powerful enough for me to do my best anyway.

How goals can align in an organisation

In an organisation, alignment between the various levels is important. An individual’s goals need to align with those of their team, which need to align with those of its unit, and so forth all the way up to the top. You can’t have the CEO pushing towards being a boutique operation and the Sales Manager shooting for world leadership.

This alignment cannot be achieved by sitting down every quarter and writing goals that fit those of the level above. That’s simply not how good goals are born. People, including leaders, can formulate goals at any time. By having the goals of the levels above firmly planted in their minds, they become more likely to formulate fitting goals for themselves. Therefore, common goals should be highlighted at every possible occasion.

Why not try it?

Next time you catch yourself writing down “10 blog posts this month”, take a minute to remember the exciting, bold, magnificent goal you are really trying to achieve. Then try writing it down again and leaving it at that.

And then go to work.