Essays

On Goal Setting

Every productivity guru on the internet eventually gets around to SMART goals. Specific. Measurable. Achievable. Relevant. Time-bound. They say it with such confidence, such earnest helpfulness, as though they've handed you the skeleton key to your own potential.

It's never worked for me worth a shit.

And it's not just that it doesn't work, it's that it's never even sat right. There's something in the architecture of the system that grates. It took me a while to figure out why, but here it is: SMART goals were designed for organizations, not individuals. Not all individuals, anyway. Certainly not the kind of brain that runs on top-shelf processing power, bargain-bin RAM, and a curiosity that will absolutely follow the shiny thing into the woods while the rest of you is still trying to remember what you came into the room for.

Let me tell you why the system breaks down, and what I do instead.

The Time Limit Problem

This is the first thing I wanna kick in the shins: Time-bound. The idea is to give your goal a deadline. Study German for 30 minutes a day. Finish the webpage by Friday. Structure! Accountability!

Ugh.

I know what you're thinking: but ADHD brains work best under pressure, right?

Yes and no. Under the right conditions, a hard deadline can function like a rocket ignition. The panic monster awakens and suddenly you discover the monumental motivation to write a ten page essay in the spen of three hours. We've all been in this situation, I'm sure. But this is not sustainable, and even in healthier doses, that's assuming you have working memory to spare. If you're someone who needs every scrap of available RAM just to focus on the task itself, a ticking clock becomes interference. Imagine on one hand you've got a buddy with a stopwatch timing you racing through a task and cheering you on. On the other hand, imagine you have your annoying cousin Billy over and all he does is poke you in the head and ask 'are you done yet' while listing off everything that can go wrong if you don't finish in time.

That's the difference. Attention splits. Instead of doing the work, I'm monitoring the time, worrying about the time, catastrophizing about the time. The work suffers, mistakes accumulate. Eventually I stop giving a shit, and the goal goes up in flames not because I lacked discipline, but because I burned out.

And yes, I'm aware that external deadlines exist. Clients, workplaces, school. I remember those are real. But their existence doesn't make the pressure any less of a pain in the ass, and it's no justification for building your personal goal-setting practice around a mechanism that feeds the burnout cycle.

So do yourself a favor: kick the time limit in the face. Don't study German for 30 minutes every day. Study it when your interest is piqued and you actually have the energy to invest. You'll learn a lot more by letting interest do the heavy lifting and saving short drills for off-days.

But won't that just enable procrastination? I hear you protest. We'll get there. Sit tight.

The Curriculum Problem

My second issue here is long term goal setting vs short term. The idea is to set an achievable long term goal with stepping stone goal in between. Sounds great in theory, but in practice has some bugs. For instance, the inclination here is to set a path for yourself out of the gate and just... walk up the stairs. That's easy, right?

Ohhhh, boy... if only learning and production actually worked that way.

Let's not kid ourselves: the public education system is absolute trash. It's a dumpster fire of shit and corruption and corrupted shit. One thing it taught us was that this was the quintessential learning method: the curriculum. Just follow the predetermined path, my child, and you shall find prosperity in the Promise Land of Diplomas and Career Goals.

Again, maybe for some, this works fine. For me, it's mindless credential chasing that forces you through hoops and slaps you in the shins with a big ruler for wandering off the pathway. You start off bright eyed and full of hope and wonder, then end up memorizing a long stream of facts and 'correct' methodology. You see something shiny in the woods. What's that? You wonder. Stay on track! Demands the curriculum. There will be time for nonsense later. Right now, you need to focus on this!

And so one of two things happens: you stick with it, learn to stifle your natural curiosity, and follow the path set out for you by someone else, or... you abandon it altogether out of sheer boredom and disinterest and then the curriculum becomes a place to store accumulating guilt for being unable to 'stick with it.' You can replace the word 'curriculum' with 'career path' or 'goal path' and it'll yeild the same result. A grind. And not the fun kind you find in video games. The kind that turns you into a weepy pile of depression and neurotic anxiety.

Don't do this to yourself. I beg you. It's not worth the quarterlife crisis. Use the cirriculum or whatever as a guide to figure out what your starting point is and what topics are relevant, if you must use one, but don't let it beat you over the head into conformity. If you wanna get somewhere, there's way better ways to get there.

What to Do Instead

So if not SMART goals and curriculum staircases, then what?

First: make your goal nebulous.

Not "build five HTML pages in three hours before my boss puts his shoe in my rectum." Just "build a website." Vague? Yes. Intentionally. A nebulous goal is flexible. It opens multiple valid paths to the same destination, which means you can wander, adapt, and still arrive. Ambiguity isn't a weakness in a goal, believe it or not, because it allows freedom of movement. You can wander off the path, poke things with a stick, fall in a hole, scrabble to climb out of the hole, learn to use your shoelaces to tie a rope to climb out of the hole, then see an apple tree and realize you can use your sweet shoelace rope skills to lasso an apple down. Then meander back on track with an apple in one hand and a shoelace lasso in the other.

Second: break it into micro-steps. Genuinely micro.

As small as you need. Want to build that site?

• Step 1: Create an HTML document.
• Step 2: Add a header.
• Step 3: Put the header in a container.
• Step 4: Style the container with CSS.

That's it. You're moving. You're building. Doesn't matter if it's shitty, it's there and it's yours. It'll get less shitty as you learn and work on it. You're allowed to be a walking disaster. And here's what happens naturally: those micro-steps consolidate over time. "Add a header" eventually becomes "build the full page banner" ie text, images, links, CSS, all bundled together, because you've learned enough that it flows as a single gesture. Your project starts to reveal its own needs. Building a static site that's getting unwieldy? Look into a static site generator. CSS becoming a mess? Time to try Sass.

You're still heading toward the goal. You're just letting the path be organic, letting things be messy, and actually learning something.

I know. Amazing right? Here you are, making a mess of an HTML document and it's shaping up into something glorious, even if it's just a site to showcase your collection of bird photos.

But What About My JOB? I Have Bills to Pay!

Worry not. If you've got a case of the procrastination bug and the Motivation Fairy is out of her coffee break while your neurotic manage or client is threatening to sack you to second deadline hits if you don't do the thing, here's a trick: micro steps become nano steps. Break it down as tiny as you need.

• Step 1: Put hand on mouse.
• Step 2: Move cursor to icon.
• Step 3: Click icon.
• Step 4: Add one html element, even if it's just the word 'boobs' in < p > tags.
• Step 5: create empty css element for boobs html
• Step 6: add font type, color, border, whatever.

See what's happening? Tiny movements are adding up. Work is happening. Even if the to-do list is full of insultingly simple tasks. With any luck, you'll just keep the momentum going and before you know it, you're Employee of the Month again. If you get a few steps in and it's still not clicking... well, trying to force it will only do more harm than good. Take a break, breathe some air, take a nap, come back fresher and try again. But do NOT, DO NOT beat yourself up. Letting projects and unfinished work turn into dumping grounds for guilt and self loathing will do nothing for you but wear you down, and ain't nobody got time for that.

If anything, that's just further proves the need for the microsteps. If your nervous system is at the point of hitting the breaks when you so much as think about doing work, it's because it's been trained to see work as a threat. To undo that, you need to start accumulating small victories, successfully completed steps, to prove to it and yourself that you are capable and doing things if you just get out of your own way. The more victories you rack up, the easier it will get to start and keep going. But that's a whole other can of worms that we don't have time to pen now.

The point here isn't to abandon structure entirely. It's to stop outsourcing the natural flow of productivity to beancounters and online goofballs and reclaim agency over it. Set a direction, make the steps small enough to be workable, and let curiosity do the heavy lifting. Just remember: when you're at the edge of your capabilities and in that struggle zone, it's frustrating and uncomfortable, but that's the zone where growth happens.