Editor’s Note: Every year at this time, Mark scales back his work. He spends some time every day reflecting on the past year… looking over the goals he set at the year’s start… reviewing his journals… and thinking about the big picture. Then he puts pen to paper and begins mapping out his goals for the upcoming year.
In this classic essay, Mark shares exactly how his goal-setting program works… and how we can follow it. Here’s to growing healthier, wealthier, and wiser—together!
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From Mark Ford, founder, Palm Beach Research Group: For most people, the time between Christmas and New Year’s is a frenzied rush of social activity mixed with nagging business obligations.
They come back to work feeling exhausted… barely able to remember what happened.
That’s crazy. Those seven days should be wonderful days—days that clear your mind, energize you, and get you ready for a fantastic year ahead.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve developed a protocol for making this week happy and productive. If you’d like to make 2017 your best year ever, consider incorporating some of what I do into your routine.
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Here are a few steps:
1. Create the possibility of tranquility that can last for seven days.
For me, that means clearing my schedule of any work that’s unimportant, stressful, and/or open to surprises.
You want a calendar that’s open… so you can spend most of your “work time” doing three things: reflecting on the past, contemplating the present, and setting goals for the future.
2. Schedule an hour or two every day for these three tranquil activities.
Don’t just promise yourself you’ll find the time. Block it out in your calendar. Find a quiet place. Turn off your cellphone. Shut off the Wi-Fi signal. Put on some tranquil music. Put a “do not disturb” sign on the door.
Your first few hours should be devoted to reflection—looking back at this past year and assessing how it went for you—in terms of what you accomplished, what you did not accomplish, and how you felt about those achievements and failures.
To get the most from this effort, I look at four things: my calendar, my daily journal, the goal sheet I wrote the year before, and the record I keep of the monthly and weekly objectives I set to achieve those yearly goals.
When I first began this process, this exercise in reflection often left me frustrated. I was forced to realize how little I actually did the things I most wanted to do. But as time passed, I improved the way I set and pursued goals. Nowadays, this is mostly a very good experience—feeling proud of what I’ve done and, sometimes, even amazed.
3. Contemplate.
Think about what you want from life. You just reviewed your goals and accomplishments of the prior 12 months. Now spend some time asking yourself how you feel about them. Are you happy with that book you wrote? Was it worth the time you put into it? Would you want to write another one?
Give yourself the chance to rethink your long-term life goals. There’s no law saying you can’t change them. If you want to make changes, do so.
4. Plan your future.
Based on the reflecting and contemplating you’ve done, set goals for next year (2017).
Here’s how to do it…
First, I set goals in what I see as the four primary areas of life:
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Health (mental and physical)
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Wealth (business and investments)
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Personal (hobbies and interests)
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Social (family, friends, community)
To avoid biting off more than I can chew, I limit myself to no more than a half-dozen goals in each area.
For example, my health goals for 2016 are the following:
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Spend more of my time feeling happy.
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Develop a stronger cardiovascular system.
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Stay under 200 pounds.
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Get my neck back to full flexibility.
Then I might break those big goals down into parts.
For example, under the first goal (spend more time feeling happy), I might write:
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Get at least seven hours of sleep per day.
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Spend more time thinking about others… and less time thinking about myself.
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Make smiling a habit.
Take some time right now to think about what you’ve done—and what you haven’t done—in 2015. Start writing it all down. Pledge to make a change.
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Longtime Daily readers know PBRG harbors a relentless drive to provide greater value for our subscribers. Over the holidays, we’re pleased to roll out a special feature… PBRG founder Mark Ford has agreed to provide unscripted answers to some of your most pressing questions. It’s unvarnished and straight from the source. In the four-minute video below, Mark shares how he prioritizes his goals in the four most important areas in life: health, wealth, personal, and social. It’s a must-see for anyone setting their goals for the new year. |
Adopt a productivity system that works
Most ambitious and successful people set goals and use task lists. I’ve seen those task lists. They’re usually handwritten on lined paper. Pages and pages of “things to do” with no way to sort out what’s important.
I used to do that. But I was never able to accomplish my important long-term goals that way.
I doubt those people do, either.
The time-management system I use now is more detailed. When you see it, you might think it’s obsessive-compulsive and nerdy—definitely not something truly bright and cool people would do.
But it works.
Since starting, I’ve accomplished a number of things I would never, ever have done otherwise. I:
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Wrote and had 24 books published—mostly non-fiction. But several books were on culture and poetry. (Two of those books were New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-sellers.)
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Wrote four screenplays. Three were made into movies.
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Produced three movies… one of which may not be terrible.
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Earned a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I won three first-place belts in the master’s division of one regional and two national competitions.
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Started a family charity that funded—and is running—a $2 million-plus community development center in Nicaragua.
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Relearned the French horn.
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Developed several financial products and services (such as Creating Wealth, the Legacy Portfolio, and the Palm Beach Wealth Builders Club) I’m very proud of.
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Started a boutique publishing company. It’s produced books and records for unknown people I think deserve to be noticed.
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Developed a 10-acre palm tree botanical garden. I hope it will one day be open free to the public.
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Stayed healthy, kept my friends, enjoyed my family, and managed to increase my family’s wealth.
Before I developed this system, I never had time to write poetry or produce movies. I never had time to get involved with charitable endeavors.
I was very busy. And I made loads of money.
But my life was speeding by without any hope of being able to look back and think, “I did what I wanted to do.”
Have you done what you wanted to do? Really?
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Place a priority stake on your goals
To be more productive—and achieve more at work and in your personal life—you must place a “priority stake” in long-term goals that correspond to your core values.
Then work backward to establish yearly, monthly, and weekly objectives.
Let’s say a long-term goal of yours is to become conversational in Portuguese. You must first pick a day—sometime in the future—when you hope to meet your goal. Mark that date down. Then work backward.
Establish yearly objectives, then monthly objectives, then weekly objectives.
You might find you must learn five new verbs and 10 new nouns. You are, in effect, setting and keeping a pace.
Based on your weekly objectives, create daily task lists. And then here’s the key: You must make it a mission to complete each daily task.
But if you want to really change your life, you have to learn how to prioritize your long-term goals… relative to everything else in your life.
The most important lesson I learned came from author Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey presents a technique for prioritizing that impressed me… and became a central part of my planning process.
Divide your tasks, Covey says, into four categories:
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Non-important and non-urgent
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Non-important but urgent
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Important but non-urgent
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Important and urgent
In the “non-important and non-urgent” category, you’d put such things as:
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Catching up on office gossip
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Shopping online for personal items
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Answering unimportant phone calls
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Responding to unimportant emails
In the “non-important but urgent” category, you’d include:
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Returning phone calls from pesky salespeople
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Making last-minute preparations for an office party
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Attending a required meeting that doesn’t help your career
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Planning for a meeting that doesn’t matter
In the “important but non-urgent” category, you might include:
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Learning how to write better
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Learning how to speak better
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Learning how to think better
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Working on your novel
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Getting down to a healthy weight
And finally, in the “important and urgent” category, you might list:
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Making last-minute preparations for an important meeting with the boss
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Making last-minute sales calls to key clients
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Solving unexpected problems
When you break up tasks into these four categories, it’s easy to see you should give no priority at all to “non-important and non-urgent” tasks. These tasks should not be done at all. They’re a waste of time.
Yet many people spend a lot of time on them. That’s because they tend to be easy to do and enjoyable… in a mindless sort of way. People are afraid to get to work on important tasks because they’re afraid of failure.
Even worse than spending time on tasks that aren’t important and aren’t urgent is spending time on those that are non-important but urgent.
They should’ve been dealt with long before they reached the crisis stage.
Do the most important work first
When it comes to personal productivity, we all have the chance to have good days or bad days.
Good days are those that leave you feeling good… because you’ve accomplished your most important tasks. Bad days are those that leave you feeling bad… because you’ve failed to do anything to advance your most important goals.
If you want to have a better life, fill it with good days. The best way to do that is to organize your day according to your personal priorities—doing the most important things first.
It’s easy to do. Yet most people don’t.
Eighty percent of the people I know—and I’m including all the intelligent and hardworking people I work with—do exactly the opposite.
They organize their days around urgencies and emergencies. Taking care of last-minute issues that should’ve been addressed earlier. Or completing tasks that help other people achieve their goals—while ignoring their own.
Doing first things first is a very simple discipline. But its transformative power is immense. It can change your life—literally overnight.
It changed my life. Several times, in fact.
It’s the single best technique I know for change.
And it’s the fastest and easiest way to turn your life around if you’re not happy with the way it’s been going so far.
Doing first things first.
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In summary…
Here’s how your New Year’s pledges fit into the goal-setting system:
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At the beginning of each year (or the very end of the current year), contemplate your future by dreaming your best dreams… thinking about your responsibilities… and imagining what you hope people will say about you at your own funeral.
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Identify your life goals.
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Break down your life goals into five-year objectives.
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Break down your five-year objectives into New Year’s pledges.
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Now, here’s the trick: You absolutely, without question, must break down your pledges into daily or weekly task lists to make this work. Prioritize them according to importance and urgency. And devote your early-morning hours to important but non-urgent items first.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve worked with this year who couldn’t accomplish what they wanted… because they were using some modified, watered-down version of this system.
A simple “to-do” list will NOT work. You have to use my system—incorporating important but non-urgent life goals—into your daily tasks.
So today, I’d like you to spend the entire morning advancing further toward meeting your objectives.
Start by making a daily task list of only those objectives. Assign each one the amount of time you think you can devote to it. Then get to work.
Take no unnecessary phone calls. Keep your office door closed. Get at least 15 minutes of additional work done on each item. When you’re done, take a break. Reward yourself with a walk around the block, a cup of tea, a shot of booze.
Well… maybe you should hold off on the booze.
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