A Simple Hack to Actually Meet My Goals

Look at the two paintings below.

Which one seems more expensive? Which one seems more human?

Now, read these two sentences:

• Work out at the gym
• Work out at the gym to become a healthier person

Which one makes you more excited to go to the gym?

For the past few weeks, I’d been slacking on the daily goals I’d set for myself. I would end my days completing only a handful of them and go to bed feeling guilty.

Sometimes, I’d toss in easy chores along with the goals, like doing laundry. That way, I could go to bed thinking that I crossed off at least a few items.

Soon, it became hard to distinguish between the goals and the chores. I’d even write them the same way.

1. “Pick up groceries”.
2. “Go to the gym”

A few days ago, I tried something different. I wrote all my goals following a template:

 `Do specific action X → to become a better Y`

For example, I changed “Revise Spanish flashcards” to "Revise 25 flashcards → to become a better Spanish speaker”.

I framed all the goals as actions that made me better off in some way. And wasn’t that why I set daily goals in the first place? To improve myself?

If an action still seemed like a chore, I eliminated it. Or, I rewrote it as:

`Spend less than X mins doing Y → to become more efficient at Z`

That way, I could reframe the goal from ‘doing something boring’ to ‘minimize the time taken to do it’.

Precision mattered. For each goal I wrote, I asked myself:

1. What is the exact action that is bettering me?
2. What exactly is it making me better at?

Here’s a snippet from the list I came up with:

• Revise 25 flashcards → to become a better Spanish speaker
• Spend no more than 20 mins releasing the next podcast episode → to become more efficient at publishing
• Follow a new recipe for cooking pork chops → to become a better cook

Writing goals this way made me impatient to check them off. I was lured by the prospect of becoming better at all these things.

Usually, I’d write down some goals in the morning and only revisit them at night.

This time, by checking off each goal as I completed it, I’d bubble the remaining ones back in my mind – over and over. They lingered in my subconscious the entire day, so I couldn’t blame my memory for its shortcomings.

This simple hack changed the way I looked at goal-setting. It made me shift my focus from the actions to their outcomes. And each day I used it, I met all the goals I set for myself.

Bottom line: sometimes the frame is more important than the picture.

Written by Aryan Bhasin