This activity is a great fit for people who are starting with an existing list of goals, and want to update or iterate on them.
How it works:
- Write down each of your existing goals on a piece of paper (or digitally)
- For each goal ask yourself:
- Do I still feel connected with my sense of purpose and desire around this?
- Have I been making progress towards it?
- Is there something being missed?
- Is there something being over-focused on?
- Now assign a colour – green, yellow or red, to each goal
- Green means smooth sailing
- Yellow means something is a bit off track or could be better
- Red means something has gone far off course. The goal feels stuck, tangled, or dead in the water.
- Take a look at your overall ecosystem of goals
- Do your goals feel coherent and well-shaped?
- Is there any reshuffling needed? For example, are there any aspects of Goal A that would actually fit better as part of Goal B?
- For each goal, do one of the following:
- Keep it as it is
- Delete it
- Change it:
- Rename / reframe the goal so that it more directly represents the core of what you actually care about
- Merge the goal with another
- Move the goal up or down a level of abstraction (make it more general or more specific)
Resources
- See this related blogpost for more information: Try Thinking of Your Goals as Dimensions