Life is Short; Chase Your Goals

Ever since my father passed, all I can think is that life is short, and I have so much I want to accomplish. To do this, I first had to figure out what my goals were, what goals I’ve accomplished, and what goals remained open. When I followed this process, I found a list of more unachieved goals than I could hope to ever accomplish. It turns out that I have a lot of interests and large goals. The list needed a massive reduction. Here’s how I pared down my list of goals to what is truly important in my life. Life is short; chase your goals.

Prioritize

The first step was to determine what mattered to me. I enjoy board games, writing, video games, watching movies and TV, reading, exercising, martial arts, craft beer, philosophy, math, physics, and many more. There’s not enough time in the week to do each of these things. At least, to do them well with any sort of attention. Some activities take more time than others. Some can be combined. For example, I can enjoy craft beer while playing board games with friends. Others cannot. Enjoying a craft beer while learning martial arts isn’t safe. I ranked each of my pastimes by enjoyment and frequency. While I love playing board games, I don’t make much time to do it. On the other hand, I read every day. Not all the books, comics, articles, and blog posts that I read are enjoyable or the best, but I still read every day. So, I added frequency to the ranking as well. When I had a good idea of what was important to me, I could then determine which goals mattered. Life is short; chase your goals.

Sort

Now that I knew which pursuits were most important to me, I grouped goals by time needed to accomplish. If a short term goal was to meditate for five minutes one Saturday, then that was a goal that I could quickly accomplish. Life is short; chase your goals means accomplishing what you can. I group my goals by in categories: interest and duration. Interest ranks are low, medium, and high; while duration is short, medium, and long term. This results in nine groupings.

Discard

After prioritizing and sorting, I first cut the long term, low priority first. My goal to work from the easiest to the most difficult setting in the game Civilization V involved a lot of time and not much interest. Life is short; chase your goals. Discard the most difficult to accomplish that isn’t something you love. Once that’s done, do two more passes discarding the short and medium term low interest items. You will be left with six categories: medium interest medium term, medium interest long term, medium interest short term, high interest long term, high interest medium term, and high interest short term.

Optimize

Now that you have an idea of your goals in terms of priority and duration, you’ll have to make hard choices. This is very personal. Are two short term medium interest goals worth one medium term high interest goal? As you go through this process, you’ll find goals that are important but not as important as others. This happened more in my long and medium term goals than any other. I really wanted to learn a foreign language, but I want to write a novel more. So, instead of learning German, I practice my writing. However, with a little creativity, you can combine certain goals. For example, reading was high priority, short term. Writing was high priority, long term. With book reviews on this blog, I could combine those two goals. Optimize to accomplish your goals.