How to Organize Your Goals Using Day Design

How to Organize Your Goals Using Day Design

Do you want to know how to organize your goals so that you can be happier?

Many people want to be more productive. They want to increase their income, have better relationships, and contribute to their community. 

I’ve learned from launching many projects, some successes, and many crash-and-burn failures that what you think you want might turn out to be completely wrong. One of the biggest wastes is not finding out the truth of your goals.

In this article, you’ll learn some tips from the Day Design personal productivity system that will help get more out of your time. After reading, you’ll understand how to organize your day and make progress towards your most important goals.

Using Day Design to Organize Your Goals

To be a Day Designer, we have to become intentional with how much time we invest in ALL our goals. Each day we ask, are we putting in too much or too little?

Be honest—how do you organize your goals now? If we want to know the truth, we have to look at what we do. Our actions tell us what we care about, not what we think we care about. 

If we examine how we typically operate, we’ll see that we’ve made Work our primary focus. We are result-driven, instead of process-driven

We plan to organize our goals after we complete a project or achieve a certain level of success, but how often does it happen? New work piles up, taking priority over areas that we claim are important. We’ll get to it later, we tell ourselves. Isn’t that ironic? 

We struggle to find balance, but it’s not hard to see why—we’ve made specific goals dominant over others. Organizing your life goals isn’t an existential question of happiness—it’s whether or not you’re taking actions towards particular goals or not. 

Want to become more decisive? Watch: How to Be Decisive—5 Steps to Imperfect Action 

Another element that we have to face is knowing what we want. How can we make meaningful progress or do something important if we’re unclear on what we’re after? 

We have to make our goals explicit in each area of our lives—if we don’t, they will remain unclear, hidden, and meaningless. We can solve this dilemma by placing parameters on what we want to achieve, not just in Work but in other categories that are arguably more important to the quality of our lives.

Happiness Is a Reflection on Past Experiences

Our perspective on happiness is that it’s an ultimate end goal, and we think that if we work hard enough or do the right things, we’ll experience this profound state of completion. But that’s not how it works.

Happiness is a reflection on past experiences and has little to do with the present moment. We can be proactive and work hard, but we will never truly reach a “state of happiness” because it’s the result of our labors. 

We experience fulfillment in hindsight. In the present, we’re facing challenges and obstacles regularly that we think are taking away from our happiness. The truth is that they create it.

Are you not feeling motivated? Watch: Top 3 Things to Do When You Don’t Feel Motivated

The big and important things that we need to do right now are not enjoyable. We have a lot of crazy shit going on and a lot to accomplish. It will require more effort than we can anticipate. It will be hard. And it will suck in the moment, but we’ll thank ourselves later. 

We’ll look back later and be proud that we ran ourselves through the gauntlet and came out on the other side with a golden trophy to show the world. It’s proof that we were focused, committed, and will not be taken lightly. If we’ve done it before, then we can do it again. In this way, fulfilling our goals are the building blocks of stronger beliefs. 

If we’re proactive at defining our goals using 360 Productivity mentioned next, we have a shot at generating more opportunities for fulfillment on a daily, weekly, yearly basis. This clarity allows us to quantify fulfillment with specific activities assigned to each goal.

Organize Your Goals Using Five Categories

As a generator, we create and send energy out into the world. We’re at the center, deciding what and for how long we send out a charge. Similar to strengthening neural pathways through practice, we reinforce the connection of our goal channels through repetition. Our actions create flow, allowing higher energy potential across each circuit. 

Consider 360 Productivity: Health, Work, Relationships, Community, and Spiritual. We’re going to assign a timed interval to each of these categories. Get the most popular chapter from my book about using timed intervals. By taking time to categorize our goals in distinct areas, we’ll see the gaps in our actions.  

Each goal channel can have many sub-channels under it: Business, finances, or a side-hustle can fall under Work. Friends, family, and kids can fall under Relationships. Learning, hobbies, and mediation can fall under Spiritual. There’s room for plenty of interpretation. 

Boundaries Creates Clarity and Freedom 

Everyone will interpret their channels differently, but defining that interpretation is integral to Day Design

One might place learning a language to Spiritual, and another might put it in Relationships. Creating clear boundaries between goals helps to understand the connection between them. 

Are you having trouble with managing life and work? Read: How to Reclaim Work Life Balance With Personal Productivity

We unlock the power of our productivity by defining our goal channels and subchannels. We often think that creating boundaries takes away our power, viewing it as a limitation on what should be left open-ended. The opposite is true—naming is what gives things their power. 

Put differently, what’s a Spiritual goal for you? How about a Relationship goal? They’ll be completely different from person to person. Take the time to define your goals and assign them a label. 

The areas of our lives that we claim are essential have lost their force because of our unwillingness to classify them. Putting a definitive box around our goal channels may seem counterintuitive, but it creates freedom, not limitation.

Managing Time Effectively by Being Intentional

We’re going to create time. We do this by becoming intentional and assigning an interval and a frequency to each channel. Taking this step will help us improve our relationship with time

For Work, we assign an interval and a frequency to work on business activities. When it’s time to work, we focus on the most important action that we can take to move us closer to our deep goals. We complete the interval then move on.

For Relationships, it could be a 30-minute catch-up call with a friend. “Book it” into your calendar as a relationship goal, then complete the action on a specific day or during the week.

Want some tips on managing your time? Read: 4 Remarkably Simple Time Management Steps to Achieve Your Goals 

We build time into our schedule for people who are important to us. We plan time, not leave it as an afterthought when we’re tired and irritable because we’ve been working all day. We’re going to install them into our day and week. 

Now do the same for Health, Community, and Spiritual—create a weekly schedule and include timed intervals for each of the five channels. 

When the week is over, you’ll have taken a specific action for a set amount of time towards a particular goal in each 360 Productivity channel. The amount of time you devote to each is irrelevant, as long as you take action. 

Consistent micro-wins are what create big wins, not one grand action. 

Go Deeper With Day Design Personal Productivity System

Anything worth doing doesn’t come easily. Remember, the things we want to achieve are called goals, not givens. 

If we look back at anything that we’ve accomplished, we weren’t all that happy when we were going through it. We’re not aware of how events will contribute to our fulfillment until after they happen. 

The level of integration between our goal categories is what drives our fulfillment. Whether it’s work or personal, our fulfillment is an accumulation of actions that we, at a later time, reflect on positively. 

If you want to get more in-depth with personal productivity, sign up for the free Day Design video course. Thanks for reading! 

How to Reclaim Work Life Balance With Personal Productivity

How to Reclaim Work Life Balance With Personal Productivity

How can we increase personal productivity? Is it hustling and grinding 24/7? Is it balancing work and life so that you can hit the covers peacefully after a job well done? Working hard is core to achievement, but how do you know if you’re working hard on what truly matters? 

We’ve got excellent tools to make our lives more productive, like digital apps, the internet, and access to free education. But with all the power of the digital world, we are becoming fragmented like splintered glass. 

Many successful business folks wonder if balancing work and life is even possible. We want to build our relationships and business, raise great kids, make a difference, be healthy and have fun, but we’re constantly substituting one thing for another. 

In this article, we’ll address the shortcomings of work-life balance and why adopting a personal productivity system, like Day Design, can help you balance the critical areas of your life beyond work. 

Why We Suck at Work Life Balance 

If you’ve ever read a book about productivity, you were likely hoping to achieve a sweet spot between work and life. The issue is that most ideas presented are tactics that don’t address what you’re working on in the first place. 

Is it a laundry list of tasks that we need to complete by the end of the day? If we manage to scratch everything off before midnight, then we feel successful? We’re busy, but is our life any different than last year? What about that trip that we planned, new side-hustle, project, or dancing class?

We’ve become skilled at being busy but lack the skills to assess what is essential. We can’t balance because it’s never been our goal. We jump to handle the most urgent tasks, mainly work, and leave the rest for later. The expectation is to react at break-kneck speeds. Critical thinking comes later. 

Our Personal Productivity Isn’t Very Personal 

Maybe you’re looking for a new position, starting your own business, or already have a great role at a company with exceptional benefits. 

Here’s the thing—we’ve become great at being productive, but instead of being balanced, our productivity is an uneven landscape. One area is a tower of high achievement, and another is a desert.  

We see it with the wealthy financial managers on Wall Street making millions. They’re productive with their work, but they go home alone to their penthouse in Manhattan. They see their colleagues getting more, so they rush to do the same. It’s a game of king of the mountain, and they do it very well too. But what about health? Relationships? Community? 

Being great at our work and getting paid well is important, but it’s only one element of productivity. The reason why it’s such a powerful force is that the things that money can buy are readily observable. 

Why do you think we talk about money so much? 

As Jonah Berger points out in Contagious, “Observable things are also more likely to be discussed.” On the flip side, seeing if someone is happy, a leader in their community, or a great spouse is more difficult because it’s harder to see. These areas of productivity are more private but just as vital. 

Work is important, but it’s not the only thing that sustains us. It’s only one aspect of 360 Productivity, albeit the one we think about most. 

Learning the Hard Way from a Failed Business

Years ago, I started a business with two other partners who were much older (and wiser, I thought) than me. We had some solid deals in place, and we could see the dollars pouring into our bank accounts. 

In a few months, we brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars, which was a new experience for one of my projects. For the first time, I felt like a badass able to not only have a great idea but turn it into a business that generated cash. My belief in my abilities soared. 

We were hired to create assets for a new startup, including long-term web and media projects. We also started developing an application for the medical field. We hired a small staff, and after a few months, we were sitting across the table from wealthy investors who could turn our app into a multi-million dollar blockbuster. Our business was looking very promising.   

I thought it was where I was supposed to be. Then challenges arose between my partners and me, as is common when an idea starts to take off—relationships change. The money we were making and the potential colored the tone of our meetings. What began as collaborative and supportive turned into coercive and accusatory. 

The mission and values we spent weeks defining at the beginning were overshadowed by fear and entitlement. We talked about how much money we would make or were owed instead of the difference we could make. The shift in conversations marked the beginning of the end. 

This shift in my team affected my work. My motivation evaporated. I wasn’t excited. I didn’t want to take calls from my partners. This business was a vehicle that could make all my financial goals a reality. What was my problem? 

Cloaked in clever ideas and modern technology, I realized the truth—the purpose of our business was to be a money-generating machine. There was no deeper meaning or purpose, even if we claimed there was. It was all about money and always was. 

I realized that I’m not driven by the pursuit of money as much as I thought. If that was the case, since we’re making a decent amount, my satisfaction with our productivity should have been on fire. That wasn’t the case. 

It was a dark time where my partners turned into combative enemies. In the end, after a partner drained our entire bank account without saying a word, it was clear that this was a fast sinking ship. 

At times, we felt productive, but we were not balanced. We were looking at productivity through the lens of work, specifically money, which can lead to blindsides, hence a failed business.

Let’s look at how we open up our field of vision to a broader perspective of 360 Productivity

Creating a Balance Between Our Goals

Remember Robin Williams? Arguably, one of the most talented and successful actors of all time. He was loved unanimously by the entire world, yet he committed suicide? As far as the world goes, he was massively productive. He’s won many awards and is a household name who has influenced generations of people. But yet he didn’t love himself? 

What about Ernest Hemingway? President Kennedy said that not many people has affected the American people the way that he had. Even that level of productivity at work wasn’t enough to keep him alive. How does that happen? 

Examples like these point to a disconnect between our productivity in work and our lack of productivity in other areas like relationships, health, and spirituality. 

As a Day Designer, our goal is to integrate all our goal channels into a balanced whole. As we’re more consistently productive in each 360 category, the system rises together. 

That system is our happiness. 

We focus our time and actions to raise the level of fulfillment in each goal channel. Each day, we isolate our goal channels, giving them the attention that they deserve. We hold ourselves accountable by looking at our productivity as quantifiable information. 

The recipe for happiness is different for each one of us. We all have unique goals, which is why there’s not a textbook answer. We have to define it for ourselves. We get a clearer picture after we take action. It’s the synthesis across our goal channels that brings us closer to becoming fulfilled, complete, and worthy.

Being productive starts with asking what’s on our plate and why it’s there. 

When we run into trouble when we stop asking what combination of relationships, contributions to the community, career, health, and spiritual practices bring us happiness? 

We’ve been focusing on work exclusively, idolizing success in terms of money and popularity. We do this because it’s easily defined—we either have money, or we don’t. It’s a simplified metric to base our quality of life around. But there’s more to being productive than cash.

In the case of the actors and writers mentioned previously, how spiritually productive were they? Can we honestly say that they’re genuinely productive if they decided to end their life? The culmination of work successes ends with one significant failure that lets the world know they didn’t love themselves. 

Instead, let’s ask the difficult questions now. Waiting to dig deep doesn’t help us become more productive. When we procrastinate, we become more unsure of who we are. 

We become better when we ask what fulfillment is, not later, but today.

Why Is Productivity Important (and What to Do Differently)

Everything you want to achieve comes down to being productive. Whether at work or home, your productivity level will dictate the decisions you make, the people you associate with, how you handle setbacks, and how you view your potential. It is the ultimate output of...

How to Get Answers from Your Subconscious Mind

We need to learn how to use the subconscious mind to solve problems. In this article, you’ll learn how to give your brain space to tap into powerful insights.

What Streaming 29K Minutes of Music on Spotify Taught Me

It’s been a challenging year. I’ve done more than I ever have and also have been lazier than ever. The ebb and flow of my attention and focus has been like the dog from Up. Can you relate? Do you wonder which social media platform you should focus on? Where are your...

Rethinking Healthcare Corporate Learning

In this post, I share the challenges of traditional training and explore innovative tools that improve corporate learning for healthcare professionals…

Why Discovering Your Purpose Won’t Make Your Life Monumental

If only you could discover your purpose, then everything would be easier, right? We read books to discover where to direct our life. We look for answers from our friends, family, co-workers, articles, news stories, and watch videos. In a relationship, we wonder…

What’s the BEST Way to Spend Your Spare Time?

Learn something new. Read books. Go on an adventure. Take a walk. There are high-quality things we can do when we are not working, like activities for community, health, and spirituality, like meditation. When we have spare time, if all we want to do is relax, that...

How to Be Creative in Art

When you’re not as creative as you’d like to be, you’re likely comparing yourself to something or someone with the expectation of results. You don’t think you’re a real artist because so-and-so is so much better—they’ve done more pieces, more shows, and made more...

The biggest waste of time in your life

I remember when I was talking to this veteran guy. He’s been in the military for 20 over twenty years. He was about to get his pension but was distraught/upset because he didn’t appreciate how much time had passed since he served.  He never figured out what he cared...

Empowering Organizations with Custom Learning Solutions

Organizations looking for custom learning solutions will benefit from the approach outlined in this article to stay ahead and maximize their training budgets.

How to Unlock Effective Time Management That Makes You Happy

Does effective time management have to be a chore?  We have plenty of time when we get more specific with how we spend it and why. When we use our time to work, being busy with our business, how often do we put our health on the backburner?  What about developing our...

Blog

Join the Get Anything Done Newsletter

Productivity Strategies to Improve Your Daily Process