Tag: Goals

Why You Need to Celebrate Accomplishing Your Goals

What will you do when you accomplish one of your goals for the year?1

Should you cross it off your list and move straight to the next thing without missing a beat?

No, you need to pause to celebrate.

What Celebration Means

Celebration doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t need to involve a party. It doesn’t even need to involve spending money or “rewarding” yourself for all your hard work on that goal.2

Maybe the terminological difference between “rewards” and “celebrations” is largely semantic.3 But to me, emphasizing the language of “celebration” has two material upsides.

First, it relates more readily to gratitude than does “reward.” Second, “celebration” suffers less from the possibly consumerist or entitlement connotations in language about “reward.”

What counts as a “celebration” for you can be something comparatively small. It might mean

  • Telling someone close to you that you finished that article and got it submitted to a journal,
  • Having a special dinner with your spouse,
  • Taking an extra few hours away from your academic work to spend with your kids, or
  • Doing any of a host of other things that might, yes, also sometimes even include having a party. 🙂

Celebration Is about Thankfulness

The point is that celebration is about thankfulness. It’s about gratitude. It’s about being intentional in noticing that where you are isn’t where you were.

You can plunge straight ahead from accomplishing one goal into the next. But doing so ignores that you haven’t gotten from where you were to where you are on your own.

And especially over the long haul, it will be good for both you and those around you if you intentionally find ways to celebrate progress that reflect that gratitude.

Conclusion

So, if you don’t already have plans for how you’ll celebrate when you accomplish the various goals you have for this year, take a few moments to start thinking about that.

You might even make some notes alongside your goals. That way, you can have some prompts about how you’ve decided to pause to celebrate and give thanks as you complete your goals through the year.

As you do, remember that the point isn’t to do anything fancy. It’s simply to be intentional about how you choose to mark, celebrate, and be grateful for the progress you’re making.

  1. Header image provided by Erwan Hesry. ↩

  2. For pressing the value of commemorating goal accomplishment, I’m particularly grateful to Michael S. Hyatt, Your Best Year Ever: A Five-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2018); Michael S. Hyatt, Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2019). ↩

  3. For example, Hyatt tends to discuss commemoration in the language of “reward.” But he does sometimes talk explicitly in terms of “celebration.” So, the semantics for him may simply connote something a bit different than they do for me. ↩

Why You Need to Identify Your Motivations for Your Goals

You need to know where you’re going with your time and attention.1 So, it’s important to identify where you want to be at the end of the year, which will help you your days toward that end.

But it’s also important to know why you want to be there. With anything that’s challenging enough to become a goal, you’ll benefit from having some clear reasons for seeing it through.2

Clear motivations can be especially helpful when you get into the challenging middle of a goal. At that point, the finish line will still look quite far off. So, knowing why you’re pursuing a goal can help you

  1. answer your own questions about why you’re continuing to pursue it,
  2. focus on achieving your goal amid possible distractions, and
  3. take the next non-overwhelming next action.

1. Answer Your Own Questions

Maybe you’re in the middle of the large, multi-year project called “doing a PhD.” Or maybe it’s something else.

Whatever it is, the scope of your goal may well mean that, at some point, the steam of your initial enthusiasm for the project will peter out. When it does, you might still find yourself too far from the finish line to get much motivation from how close it is.

At points like this, it’s useful to have some clear notes about why your project was important in the first place. These notes don’t need to be lengthy or fancy. But it does help if you have them written down.

That way, if you find yourself thinking about throwing in the towel, you can easily remind yourself of all the reasons you’re forgetting for why you want to see your project through.

2. Focus on Achieving Your Goal

Alternatively, you might have plenty of motivation for the goal you’re pursuing. You just have plenty of motivation for other things too. Whatever’s new and “shiny”—either physically or cognitively—might distract you from where your attention really needs to be.

At some point, your larger goal probably won’t provide the immediate dopamine rush of something easier to tackle. But allowing your focus to drift simply for the satisfaction of completing something—no matter how fleeting—won’t produce the sustained results you’re after.3

Being able to review why your more demanding goal is worth a lack of immediate dopamine can help you resist the urge to digress into busywork. Confronting yourself with why your goal is important clarifies exactly what the cost of that busywork will be. You’ll be trading progress on your important goal that you adopted for definite reasons for what? Reminding yourself of your reasons for your goal can help you see why trade isn’t one you actually want to make.4

3. Take the Next Non-overwhelming Next Action

According to G. K. Chesterton, “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”5 That’s not because it wouldn’t be nice if it were done better. But it’s because having it done in any degree is better than leaving it undone.

Similarly, if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing piecemeal. So, if you’re grinding to a halt because your goal seems too big, knowing why you’re committed to seeing it through can help motivate you to find the next small step that will set you moving again.

Conclusion

Goals can be daunting. They can also be draining. But you have them because you’ve intentionally decided they’re worth doing.

At some point, you might question why you’re pursuing them, you might be tempted to dilute your focus into other areas, or you might be paralyzed by how much remains to be done.

But when any of that happens, reminding yourself of why you’re pursuing a particular goal in the first place can help keep you on track and see that goal through to the end.

  1. Header image provided by Annie Spratt. ↩

  2. On the importance of clear motivations, see Michael S. Hyatt, Your Best Year Ever: A Five-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2018), 151–66. ↩

  3. See Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2019); Cal Newport, A World without Email: Find Focus and Transform the Way You Work Forever (New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2021). ↩

  4. For more on avoiding distractions, see also Michael S. Hyatt, Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2019), 205–21. ↩

  5. G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1910), 320. ↩

How to Make Your Goals Even More Actionable

Good goal statements are already actionable.1 They’re specific enough to focus on things that you can accomplish, even if those things themselves contribute to something bigger.

For instance, you can’t do “being in shape.” But you can “Bike for 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week.” And over time, that practice can lead to “being in shape.”

But when it comes to accomplishing even an actionable goal, you can almost never directly do a goal itself. This might seem odd, but it derives from how goals naturally have larger scopes and, therefore, constitute projects rather than one-off actions.

Goals and Actions

Not all projects are goals. But all goals are, by definition, projects. That is, achieving a goal is a result that requires more than one action to complete.2

So, accomplishing even an actionable goal is never the direct result of simply taking the action that the goal describes. You can’t do a goal itself because a goal is a project. And “you can’t do a project … [y]ou can only do an action related to it.”3

The project, or goal, itself is too large and complex for you to accomplish it in one fell swoop. That’s true even if the goal itself is actionable, meaning that it has in view a well-defined action.

To say this, though, isn’t simply to voice a semantic quibble. This observation serves an important function in how you make your goals doable, even when they’re challenging or “big,” “hairy,” and “audacious.”4

Next Actions

The only thing you can ever do is a “next action.”5 A next action should always be small enough to be something you can easily do and large enough to move you toward completing a larger goal or project.6

So, for instance, accomplishing a goal to successfully complete a textual criticism seminar becomes a series of next actions like

  • Obtain the syllabus.
  • Read the syllabus.
  • Obtain the required resources.
  • Put all reading and assignment due dates in my task manager (or onto my calendar or both).

And so your list could go on. These are the things that then you can make time to do and that will move you forward to your ultimate goal of successfully completing the seminar.

Conclusion

As you have a larger and more complex goal or set of goals,

  • The more you’ll find it helpful to be clear about the very next action(s) you need to take to accomplish a given goal. Without that next action, the goal just sits there, staring you in the face like an impenetrable block of intimidation. But also,
  • The less you need to be able to identify all of the next actions you’ll need to do to complete a given goal. There’s no use planning 16 steps ahead when all that matters right now is the first and second step. And as you take those, you might well realize that something needs to change in how you previously conceived of the 16-step plan.

So, the main thing to keep in front of you is the very next action you need to take to accomplish a given goal. Once you’ve finished that, you should clearly see the very next action after it until, one small step at a time, you arrive at your destination. And if that next action’s ever unclear, your next action becomes to identify what the next action toward completing your goal should be.7

  1. Header image provided by Annie Spratt. ↩

  2. I’ve adapted this definition from David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2015), 41. ↩

  3. Allen, Getting Things Done, 21. ↩

  4. For more on this terminology, see Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper Business, 1994), 91–114. ↩

  5. On the concept of “next actions,” see especially Allen, Getting Things Done, 253–65. ↩

  6. On the smallness of next actions, see especially Michael S. Hyatt, Your Best Year Ever: A Five-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2018); Michael S. Hyatt, Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2019). ↩

  7. Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 220–21. ↩

What Do You Really Want to Accomplish in 2023?

What do you really want to accomplish this year?1

If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, hopefully one of the things was that we really don’t know what’s coming down the pike. There’s no way to tell what might happen over the next 12 months. Similarly, there’s no way to know what adjustments or pivots they might require you to make, however large or small.

Yet that’s no knock on the value of setting clear intentions for the year. In fact, quite the opposite is the case.

Why You Need to Think about What You Want to Accomplish

Without clear intentions, you’re liable to get to the end of it having done plenty of things except give enough attention to what you’d otherwise select as most important. And that likelihood only grows as a given day, week, month, or year requires more and larger pivots due to unforeseeable circumstances.

Sure, such circumstances might require changes in your intentions. But to change an intention implies both that you had a prior intention that you’re departing from and another intention that you’re adopting instead. That “adopted instead” intention could even be reducing the number of things you’re trying to fit into a given time frame.

So, in all likelihood, plans made will need to change more as the period of time they’re intended to encompass grows. But that’s not a reason not to plan—it’s just a confession that humans aren’t omniscient.

If you want to avoid being swept along by the “tyranny of the urgent” and look back on this coming year (or your whole life) and see that you’ve done what’s important, it’s key that you take some time to identify what exactly that is.

How to Think about What You Want to Accomplish

How you do that will likely look a bit different from how someone else does it. But if you’re looking for a place to start, I’d like to suggest 5 steps to get you going:2

  1. Reflect on your experience.
  2. Brainstorm what you’d most like to accomplish this year.
  3. Turn your brainstorm results into goal statements.
  4. Assign each goal to a particular part of the year.
  5. Each week, ask how you can move toward one or more of your goals.

1. Reflect on your experience.

At least for me, when I take the time to reflect on what I’ve learned from a prior year, I inevitably pull out some things that help me plan better for the future.

So, before you start planning the year, it might help to try some similar reflection. You’ll have your own lessons that you’ve learned, but let me share an example of my own to help get your wheels turning.

1.1. A Professional Example

I’ve sometimes found myself with one or more goals that’s too large to accomplish in any one time period. (I structure my year into quarters. Semesters work great too, but more on that below.)

That meant larger—but possibly more important—items could get lost in the shuffle (e.g., finishing monograph). So, in response, I’ve tried to be more mindful about chunking down larger projects into smaller units that can fit into single quarters (e.g., finishing a monograph chapter).

This naturally means a larger project will have more discrete goals that lead up to its completion. But that’s part of the point. Larger projects are larger and take more time and effort to complete.

So, having any given quarterly goal be achievable within that quarter has been helpful. It gives me a better sense of just how committed the year and its quarters are. It also helps me see better throughout the year how I’m progressing on larger-scale projects.

1.2. A Personal Example

This is true whether that larger project is professional or personal. For instance, if I have a goal to take a certain number of days out of the office with my family by the end of the year, it does some good just to plop that goal down into the fourth quarter.

But if that goal is requires meaningful chunks of time in other quarters too, might be more helpful again is to segment that larger goal down into those major per-quarter chunks.

2. Brainstorm what you’d most like to accomplish this year.

You’ll certainly accomplish many more things this year than you can count. But what are the most important things for you to accomplish?

2.1. Make a list.

Make a list of what you think of. Be sure to think both personally and professionally.

As you do so, it can be easy to think about professional goals and ignore personal ones. But biblical scholarship isn’t about being an academic automaton.

So, it’s important to have a mix of both personal and professional goals that you’re working toward.

Do you want to write an article? Spend more time focused on your family? Take a class? (As a hint, if you’re a student taking a class, completing that class successfully should be one of your goals. 🙂 )

It might take a few minutes for you to get going. But once you do, your list is liable to grow pretty quickly.

Keep brainstorming until you have at least 10 items on your list.

2.2. Subdivide your list.

Once you get to this point, carefully review your list. As you do so, you’re asking one question: What items on your list need to be subdivided?

Don’t worry about making these subdivisions too detailed. All you’re trying to get a handle on are the major component pieces of any larger goals on your plate that are too large to fit into a single part of the year (e.g., a quarter, a semester).

As an example, you might have on your list “Write my dissertation.” That’s not something you’ll finish all at once. So, you’ll want to subdivide this project. As you do, you’ll start to see your list better reflect the complexity of what writing your dissertation requires.

You might subdivide this project into

  • completing your prospectus,
  • completing each of the individual chapters, and finally
  • editing, proofreading, and submitting your project.

So, for instance, if you have five chapters, “Write my dissertation” could immediately become seven discrete activities (one for each of the chapters, one for the prospectus, and one for final editing).

2.3. Focus your list.

Now, out of your subdivided list, you only get to pick 12 items at most to really work on.

If you only have 10–12 items, that’s great. But what happens if you find yourself with more than 12 items in your brainstormed list (like I usually have)?

It’s tempting to think you can do it all or fit everything that you want into the scope of a year. But that’s rarely realistic, and if it is, your goals probably weren’t really stretching you to begin with.

The beauty of limiting yourself to no more than 12 major objectives over the coming 12 months is that it helps you feel at the planning stage the strain that these goals will put on your time, attention, and resources as the year moves along.

Anything on this list ultimately means something else can’t be on it. So, to come down to your most important objectives for the coming year, you might need to reflect, write down, scratch out, reorder, and otherwise hash and rehash your list over a few days until you’re satisfied with it.

That’s okay. Whatever doesn’t make the cut for this year you can save for another time in a list of possible future goals. The important thing is to intentionally commit to no more than 12 major objectives to focus on for this year.

3. Turn your brainstorm results into goal statements.

Having these objectives, however, will do little good if they’re fuzzy or just going to be aspirational expressions. So, once you’ve identified the essential core of what each one will be, take a few minutes to turn them into SCHOLARLY goals that are

Doing so will help you crystalize for yourself exactly what you’re committing to accomplishing by when.

Specific

“Write an article” or “spend more time with my family” are too general. Aiming at them is much like trying to hit anywhere in a target rather than in the bullseye.

“Write an article about the land promise to Abraham” or “Be home by 5:30, and give my full attention to my family each weekday evening” are much more specific targets to try to hit.

Challenging

A good goal should be doable but stretching. For instance, you might have been comfortably writing academic papers at 200 words per hour.

But how would things be different if you tried to stretch that to 300 words per hour? That 50% increase sounds stretching. But what kind of time would that free up? Or what additional writing would you be able to do?

Holistic

As you made your initial goal list, hopefully, you took the opportunity to include both academic and personal items. Because you’re a whole person with a multifaceted life, it’s important that your goals are holistic.

Goals like “Write my paper for SBL” and “Take X days off by the end of the year” are both worth including. So, survey the 10–12 prospective goals you’re working on, and ask whether the balance of academic and personal looks appropriate. (If you’re married, you might also want to ask your spouse for his or her input on this mixture.)

On Your Calendar

When do you want to have this goal complete? Or how often do you want to do it?

For example, do you want to “Spend two hours a day, five days a week writing my dissertation”? Or do you want to “Finish drafting my last dissertation chapter by 30 June”?

If you’re using a recurring activity schedule, you’ll want to make an appointment with yourself by blocking that corresponding time off on your calendar. If you’re using a “due by” schedule, you’ll naturally match that time to the part of the year to which you assign that goal.

Linked to Each Other

Your goals shouldn’t pull against each other and make life harder for you. Instead, they should mesh well with and support each other.

For instance, dropping in only one goal to “Finish my dissertation” and then having 9–11 other goals for other projects or other areas of life is bound to create problems. All those other goals don’t sufficiently support your aim of finishing your dissertation because they’re not linked closely enough.

“Draft the first chapter of my dissertation,” “draft the second chapter of my dissertation,” and so on do much better.

Actionable

To “be less distracted while reading” is a great idea, but what do you need to do in order to be this way?

Do you need to “Use Freedom to block online distractions during scheduled reading time”? Now, that’s something you can do as you cultivate the habit of deep work.

By clarifying exactly what action you need to take to achieve a given outcome, you’re that much more likely to make good forward progress on that goal.

Realistic

If you’re working full time in a non-faculty post outside Europe, have an active family life, and have ongoing commitments in your community, it still might be a lot of fun to “Spend the semester at INTF.”

But it might not be realistic to pull up stakes and start actively moving on this goal in your current circumstances. At the very least, you could back off this goal to something more preparatory like “Plan a semester abroad at INTF.”

Limited in extent

“Make progress on my dissertation” doesn’t cut it because “progress” is very vague. What counts? How do you know if you’ve successfully achieved the goal?

In principle, one additional character in your dissertation file could count as “progress,” but at that rate, your project will outlive you and still not be finished.

“Submit my prospectus” is much better.

Yielding Important Outcomes

If you look over your goals list and you find something that makes you yawn, ask yourself why.

Should you remove it to concentrate on something more important? Or should you reframe it in a way highlights why it’s important?

“Spend less time on email” isn’t particularly inspiring. “Recover 30 minutes a day for writing by reducing how long I spend replying to email” clearly shows what the important end game is.

4. Assign each goal to a particular part of the year.

Academic life typically revolves around quarters or semesters. And that natural structure is something to consider when you think about how to segment your year—whether into 3 or 4 major parts.

Either should work. I’ve found the slightly shorter and more regular quarters to be more helpful. But they sometimes overlap in odd ways with academic semesters. So, choose whatever approach seems most natural and least likely to create friction for you.

4.1. Spreading Your Goals throughout the Year

In either case, avoid letting your goals slide in either planning or execution. The more of your important objectives get lumped into the very end of the year, the more likely they are to still be incomplete at the start of next year.

Instead, from your list of no more than 12 SCHOLARLY goals for the year, assign

  • No more than 4 to each semester (fall, spring, summer) or
  • No more than 3 to each quarter.

4.2. Two Options for Recurring Activity Goals

A possible exception is if you’re running a goal that’s a recurring activity throughout the year, like “Bike for 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week.”

In this case, you need to decide whether that goal—when recurring like you’re planning—is a big enough commitment to occupy one of your 3 quarterly or 4 semesterly goal slots. It is, you’ll schedule it in each of the year’s quarters or semesters. If not, you’ll at least want it to show up in the year’s last quarter or semester since it’s at that point that your commitment to that practice over the course of the year will be complete.

4.3. Benefits of Assigning Your Goals to Parts of the Year

Just like limiting yourself to 12 annual goals, limiting yourself to 3 per quarter or 4 per semester helps you feel the constraints of that time in your planning process.

Reckoning with those constraints ahead of time can be key to helping you avoid larger-scale scheduling crises. After all, your time actually is limited. So, you want to grapple with that limitation as best you can on the front end.

5. Each week, ask how you can move toward one or more of your goals.

If you only have 12–16 weeks to complete 3–4 major goals, you need to be intentional about what you do each week.

So, however works best for you, schedule time each week to review your goals for that quarter or semester. Then, ask yourself, “What do I need to do this week toward completing the goals I’ve set?”

You might not be able to work on everything for that quarter or semester in a given week. That’s fine.

The point is to make regular progress, even if it’s on only a small handful of meaningful tasks. Over time, those small handfuls add up to much larger results.

If you want some ideas about how to structure your time, and your goals in it, see my complimentary guide, How to Budget Your Time: A Guide for Regular, Irregular, and Mixed Schedules.

Conclusion

By the time December rolls around, the year will be too far spent to change much of what it involves. So, don’t wait.

Instead, “begin with the end in mind.”3 Intentionally decide what you’d like to have done this year once it’s at an end.

Then, you’ll be ready to start taking deliberate, well-defined steps toward that end.

  1. Header image provided by Annie Spratt. ↩

  2. In this post, I’m much indebted to the advice in Michael S. Hyatt, Your Best Year Ever: A Five-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2018). I’ve found this guidance hugely helpful for myself. And I’ve tried to supplement and apply it here in a way that addresses some of the specifics of life in biblical studies. ↩

  3. Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 102–53. ↩

Why You Need to Block Your Time

Time goes quickly.1 So, if you’re going to make the most of it for what really matters, you need to have a clear plan for it.

Where your schedule is pretty regular, one of the best methods for planning it is time blocking.

A Blank Calendar Is a Problem

If you’re at all accustomed to a knowledge work environment that involves meetings, you’re probably familiar with meeting requests that come to your calendar and take time out of your day.

When Blank Is Your Calendar’s Normal State …

In these environments, its easy to start with a day as a blank slate. In especially hectic periods, this blank slate might be pretty far into the future. But the normal state of your calendar is “empty” or “available.”

To this blank slate, you can then add meetings and other appointments. And in the white space that remains on a given day, you can try to make progress on your most important projects and goals or invest in key relationships.

If you take this approach, however, meetings, appointments, and urgent requests are likely to expand to fill the time allotted to them.2 And since your calendar is blank by default, you’re allotting all the time you have.

You’re Asking Other People to Plan Your Time

You’re liable to find yourself wishing you had more time for exactly these priority projects and relationships that you’re squeezing into the remaining white space. And your calendar largely becomes a record of other people’s priorities, which might fail to support or even conflict with your own.

As Greg McKeown observes,

When we don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to focus our energies and time, other people … will choose for us, and before long we’ll have lost sight of everything that is meaningful and important. We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas to control our lives.3

The problem with a blank calendar is that it doesn’t actually mean you’re free. Yes, it has whitespace. But you’re probably already needing to use that whitespace for different purposes.

The whitespace on your blank calendar is probably already spoken for. But a blank calendar makes it look like you’re free—both to others and to yourself.

If you receive a request that fits into whitespace on your calendar, you’re liable not to immediately call up everything you’d implicitly hoped to do during a given time slot.

Sometimes you might. But that probably won’t be before you’re so overwhelmed you know you can’t add anything else to your plate.

And that kind of overwhelm is clearly not a great place from which to live or to work on your most demanding projects.

Time Blocks Are Appointments

But you don’t have to succumb to the default of a blank calendar. Instead of letting your calendar fill and investing in your key projects and relationships with the time remaining, you can proactively block out time on your calendar.

You Can Make Appointments with Yourself

This “time blocking” adds to your calendar even appointments you make with yourself for particular activities. And it stands on its head the default “blank” calendar approach.

Rather than waiting to see what fills the calendar and making use of the time that remains, time blocking asks you to proactively schedule time to invest in your major projects and relationships. You then let other things filter in around that.

Once your time is gone, it’s gone. Less essential items have to be eliminated, roll forward until there’s time for them, or get handled some other way. Meanwhile, you’re being careful to devote your attention to what matters most.

Even if you’re the only one who sees your calendar, it’s still helpful for you to see that you’re busy. Time blocking removes whitespace from your calendar. By removing this whitespace, your calendar will reflect the demands on your time that your current commitments call for.

This reflection is particularly helpful when new opportunities present themselves. If your calendar is clear, you might agree quite easily. But a calendar that reflects a full plate can help you be more cautious about agreeing to new requests.

Knowing You’re Busy Can Help Others Schedule Meetings

If others look at your calendar to send you meeting requests, it can be helpful if your time blocked calendar shows you as “busy” during the times you’ve already set aside. That will help others know when they can connect with you in ways that won’t impinge on more important commitments.

Of course, blocking your calendar and showing yourself as busy will reduce the times you look like you’re available. But that’s the point—if your attention needs to be elsewhere, you’re already not available at that same time for something else.

(If you feel the least bit bad about this, remember that being “busy” means being “occupied,” and there are a whole host of other—often more productive—ways to be “occupied” than by being in a meeting.)

Conclusion

Like creating a financial budget by spending money on paper before a month begins, time blocking your calendar encourages you to spend time in your calendar before you actually get to it. This way, you set aside time to give attention to your most important projects and relationships.

Time blocking helps you avoid being driven along by whatever is most urgent and wondering where the time went. There are several strategies for effective time blocking, but there isn’t one “right” approach.

So, start somewhere, even if it’s small. Learn what works and what doesn’t for you. And from what you learn, you can better steward the time in your calendar and how it gets spent.

  1. Header image provided by Djim Loic. ↩

  2. This principle is sometimes, albeit slightly inaccurately, called “Parkinson’s Law.” ↩

  3. Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 16. ↩

Daily Gleanings: Finishing (23 December 2019)

In episode 14 of the Focus on This podcast, Courtney Baker and Blake Stratton discuss “how to finish goals that drag on forever.”

Using a quarter-by-quarter framework Courtney and Blake particularly define “dragging on” as a goal rolling from one quarter to another without completion.

In the episode, they primarily discuss different kinds of time keys (e.g., due dates, frequencies) and how clarity about these keys might help with completion.

It wasn’t so much discussed here, but another cause for the dragging on of goals (or the projects they represent) might be simply that the project is too big for the time frame allotted.

In that case, a given goal or project might need to be broken down into several and these several spread throughout the year.

Of course, doing this will use up a yearly goal budget faster. But that’s really just an admission of what it means to have the larger project on your plate in the first place—there’s less room on that plate for something else.