#21: Let's talk about lists, plans, and goals
Would you rather boil your head than start the day by making a task list? Does the idea of identifying your core values make you feel faint? Are you terrified to make plans because - what if you get them wrong? You're not alone. Your anxiety about writing down what you need to do and what's important to you is understandable, but misplaced. Join The Academic Imperfectionist for the low-down on all the things you have to gain from embracing imperfect planning.
Find the 'Identify Your Core Values' exercise on the Resources page of The Academic Imperfectionist website.
Here are a some other list-based resources I find useful:
The One Thing website has some really useful exercises for long-term planning and prioritisation - I especially like the 411 and the GPS.
Try the bullet journal method for making effective task lists. You don't need a special journal to do it (although if you really want one, you can buy one). Find instructions about it here.
And of course, for getting clear about exactly what sort of life you want to be living, and working out how to get there, go listen to #5: Bitch, do you even dream? and #6: Live the dream! You can find the exercises mentioned in those episodes - the Wheel of Life and the Ideal Life Instruction Manual - on the Resources page.
Episode transcript:
Does the idea of writing a task list or a list of long-term goals make you feel anxious? Let’s talk about it, shall we?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
How do you feel about writing to-do lists, making plans, identifying your values and priorities, setting goals?
For a long time, I would avoid all this like the plague, and I’ve found that many of my clients are similar. They have thoughts like: ‘I have so much to do - I don’t have time to stop and make a list’; ‘I’m afraid to set goals - what if things change and they turn out not to be relevant?’; ‘What if I get my values wrong?’; ‘I don’t want to write down the things I need to do because I’ll just feel bad if I fail to do them’; ‘I don’t know enough about myself or my goals or how to get there - if I try to write it all down, I’ll just get it wrong’.
These concerns fall roughly into the following three categories. First, ‘I don’t have time to make plans or lists’. Second: ‘What if what I write down is wrong?’ And third: ‘Setting goals is just creating another way to fail.’ I’ve felt all these things and I know many of you do too. Let’s look at them one by one.
So first, ‘I don’t have time to make plans or lists’. I know what this feels like. A couple of years ago my mornings used to be stressful and rushed from the moment I woke up. I’d tear around getting the children ready and getting them to school, all the while painfully aware of all the other things - work things - that needed to get done, and then when I finally did get to sit down at my desk, I’d feel that I was already behind. I needed to get started straight away. The clock was ticking, and had been for some time. I certainly wasn’t going to sit there writing a list of all the things I needed to do: for one thing, there was too much to do and I didn’t have time, and also - why on earth would I want to give myself yet another thing to get done, voluntarily, when I already so behind on everything?
There are two things wrong with this way of looking at things. One is that it’s often a false economy. Telling myself that I didn’t have time caused me to start the day feeling hurried and anxious, and the result was that my productivity anxiety kicked in and I’d avoid the things I needed to do and instead get stuck down some internet rabbithole or other. Lunch time would come around and I’d made almost no progress - although I’d acquired a new knowledge of how dry cleaning works, or how to tell the difference between crocodiles and alligators. Fascinating as those things were, they didn’t help me make any progress in the tasks that I felt so anxious about, and it just stoked my sense of needing to hurry up.
Now, this is not to say that having a sense of time running out is never effective in helping us get things done. Many of us need a deadline to get motivated. Perhaps most of your productivity happens while you’re in a wild panic about not having enough time. The problem is that not all of our work is like this. If you’re writing a thesis or a book, or working towards some other longer-term goal, you can’t leave it until the last minute - you need to be working on it consistently before it becomes pressingly urgent. Not everything important is urgent (and vice versa, of course). Relying on deadline panic to get stuff done is just firefighting. It’s disaster management. If you want to give space to important projects that aren’t currently urgent, you need to stop telling yourself that you don’t have time. This is an example of scarcity thinking - and that causes us all manner of problems, which I talked about in episode #12: Delete your scarcity mindset.
And in fact, spending a few minutes at the start of the day reflecting on your priorities for the day can be a nice way of slowing down and becoming calm before starting work. You can even turn it into something enjoyable and almost indulgent: get the kettle on, and curl up with a cuppa and a biscuit, and a notepad. Yes, writing down what you need to do takes time - but so does not writing down what you need to do. Diving into your work without pausing to plan out what you should be doing because you don’t have time to make plans is a bit like jumping into the car and setting off on a drive to a place you’ve never been before because you don’t have time to set the sat nav. Taking 30 seconds to put your destination into Google Maps is going to eat into your journey time - but it’s 30 seconds well spent, because it will make your journey much more efficient than it would have been otherwise - you’ll know you’re going in the right direction. In the same way, spending a few minutes writing down your goals for the day is time well spent and will help you direct your time and attention in the right way - can you afford not to do it?
The next worry is: What if what I write down is wrong? There are a couple of things to unpack here. One is: What counts as ‘wrong’ in this context? When it comes to writing down your goals, your values, your priorities, it’s not as if there’s an answer sheet somewhere and what you write down either matches or doesn’t match the answers written on the sheet. Think of things like goals, values, priorities as 95% created and only 5% discovered. You get to choose what they are, informed by what you know about who you are - they’re not lying fully formed and hidden in the archeological dig of your unconscious, waiting for you to unearth them and dust them off. And not only that: who you are changes as you decide upon and work towards your goals. So, your goals, values, and priorities are moving targets: articulating them creates them and also changes them. In fact, articulating them is less like writing down the answers in a pub quiz and more like writing a shopping list for your next grocery shop. In a pub quiz, your answers are right if they match the ones on the answer sheet, otherwise they’re wrong. With the shopping list for groceries, it barely even makes sense to worry about writing the wrong things down. Whether they’re the right things depends on what you want to cook for dinner tonight, what you want to wash your hair with, whether your cats have changed their mind about what kind of cat litter they are willing to tolerate, and so on. And while you can end up writing something on the list that it turns out you don’t need, or forget to write down something that you need, it’s no big deal. If you buy something you don’t need, you can keep hold of it until you do, or give it away. If you forget to write down something that you need, so what? You’ll be going shopping again in a couple of days, you can pick it up then. But more importantly, perhaps, is this: who cares enough about shopping lists to worry about whether they’re ‘right’ or ‘wrong’? Treat articulating your goals, values, and priorities like a shopping list. Who cares if it’s perfect? It’s just a list, you can add to it or remove things from it. And like a shopping list, it’s a tool - an imperfect tool - to create some sort of order in your life. Use it, but don’t overthink it.
Finally, let’s look at the worry that setting goals is just creating another way to fail. This is the idea that goals are your enemies: creating them is like planting tripwires or landmines in your future. They lie there waiting to bring you down. Writing down ‘Be a full professor by the time I’m 40’ or ‘Pay off my mortgage by 2025’ in big red letters and sticking them to the fridge might seem harmless things to do now, but what if your 40th birthday comes and goes and you’re still on the job market, or what if you end up in even more debt by 2025? Those goals are just going to make you feel bad. You may as well have stuck a note saying ‘Lol, you’re a failure’ to the fridge. Better not to create goals at all, right? Well, no. This will sound strange, but: the point of formulating goals is not actually to achieve the goals. The point, rather, is to cut through the fire-fighting urgency of keeping up with emails, paying the bills, and working out what to have for dinner tonight, and to check in with your longer-term goals. If you want to start a family a year from now, buy a home two years from now, or retire in ten years, what does that entail about what you need to be doing this month, this week, and today? What do you need to be doing to make space for these priorities in your daily life? The changes you make as a result are important even if you don’t attain the goals you’ve identified, in exactly the way you conceived them. For example, you might start saving a certain amount of money each month so that you’ll have enough for a deposit on a home two years from now, but perhaps two years from now you’ll find that you don’t have enough yet, after all, or that you actually need a larger, more expensive home than you initially thought you would. Even so, your saving habit will mean that you’re more likely to be able to afford to buy a home three, four, or five years from now. And, more generally, the fact that you’ve been thinking about your longer-term goals will mean that you have a better grasp of where you want your life to be heading than you would if you’d spent your whole time thinking no further ahead than clearing your inbox by the end of the week. The lesson here is that when we make goals, it’s not just the goals that are important, the process of thinking about our values and priorities long-term is valuable too. Dwight D. Eisenhower went even further: famously, he claimed that ‘plans are nothing, but planning is everything’.
There’s another reason why your imperfect attempts to list your tasks, plans, priorities, and so on are useful. As a number of philosophers have observed in the past--so many, in fact, that I’m not sure who was first--we are not transparent to ourselves. We have motivations, fears, values, and beliefs that we’re completely unaware of. Sometimes we go to therapy to try to find out what they are. These things can be hard, or even impossible, to express with words. Sometimes we get close but without fully grasping them--we might find a mood, or a colour, but not a word for what we feel. By attempting to document what we want, what we value, and what is important to us, we learn things about ourselves--even when we’re using nothing more sophisticated than a notepad, a smartphone, or the back of an envelope to do it. Through documenting and repeatedly revisiting a list of long-term goals, you can begin to spot certain themes. If you keep adding things like ‘buy a home’, ‘get a permanent job’, ‘build up savings equivalent to 3 months’ salary’, then it looks like security is very important to you--and you may or may not have been aware of that. If your daily task list tends to include a lot of activities that involve pleasing people--answering emails on time, or doing things that are not important to you but which you know to be important to other people--then clearly you care a lot about approval. And so on. Perhaps you approve of your own values, and perhaps not. But it’s better to know what they are.
I’m going to include in the notes to this episode some of my favourite resources for getting organised and getting clear about what my priorities are. I hope you’ll find them useful. One of these things is an exercise to help you identify your core values--it’s one that my coach had me do about 18 months ago, which I found incredibly useful, and which I’ve been recommending to my own clients ever since. I haven’t found it anywhere online, so I’ve created my own version and put it on the ‘Resources’ page of my website. I’ve called it ‘Identify Your Core Values’.
Get listing, imperfectionists!
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use, and please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful - you can take a screenshot on your phone and send it over to them. For more information and updates about me, the podcast, and my coaching, or just to get in touch and say hi, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com - or follow me on Twitter @AcademicImp or on Facebook @AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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