Going Beyond Setting Goals.

It's time to operationalize.

This post is a bit different than usual.

I have a problem: slipping weight, no making enough goal progress — and in this post I try to sort of go through the motions so you can see how I think about getting unstuck and making progress on this.

I have a problem: while I have many goals, and while I do make progress towards a lot of these goals on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, I’ve been noticing a very concerning trend.

Every day, I try to write a todo list for the next day. These lists include a lot of stuff that I do essentially every day — stretching, exercise, reading and the like, but also larger tasks and projects — update goals document, write code for software project, write a book section (writing a book is a project I’ve tried and failed at doing a few times now, and I hope to take you along for the third iteration where I hopefully actually do it).

Now, the concerning trend is that my todo list stays rather stagnant every day. I do the daily tasks — for the most part — and they are daily so they stay on the list, and I might manage to squash a few tasks that come up on a given day and thus go on the list for the next day like cleaning the bathroom or grabbing the mail. But the big tasks, often larger in scope or part of a large project, remain untouched. I’ve had “write code for software project” on my todo list for months and I still haven’t even run

cargo new

much less actually written any code, or even drawn up an architecture diagram.

It would be easy to chalk this up to being short on time: I have a young kid whom I spend a lot of time with every day, and yet I know I can and need to do more! How do I know this? Well, I often find myself between tasks for way too long, or sitting and thinking “I really could be doing something useful now”. Now, obviously I am aware that everyone needs a break from time to time, but there is some serious time wastage going on in my days that, should I unlock it, could be used to get some serious chunks of my bigger projects done.

And this motivates the topic of this post — operationalizing your goals.

I think for me this has not been something I’ve spent much time thinking about, because a lot of my goals are very straightforward: eat more of x, eat less of y, exercise z times per week, read every day. Goals like this don’t require a lot of thinking and mostly don’t interfere with, or even really interact with other goals, or at least it can feel that way.

But then I’ve been noticing something recently — I’m really... sore. I’ve actually been exercising a lot, and if you’ve followed Cinq Personnes for a while, that’s probably not a surprise to you, but seriously it’s taking up a lot of my time. I workout for three days, take a rest day, and then repeat. I do both a strength workout, and a cardio workout, and at least about 20 minutes of stretching every day I workout. This all means that the average week I’m probably spending well over 10 hours on “workouts” before we even get into things like stretching (whereas I’d probably be fine with around 2.5 hours of strength training — 4 45 minute sessions, and 3.5 hours of cardio training — 3 1-hour sesssions, 1 half hour session of intense cardio), walking about (I still do that!) and other physical activity that doesn’t qualify in my mind as serious exercise.

I should also add that extra exercise, and especially extra days spent exercising do not just eat the time spent doing the exercise. You’ve also got to shower (at least I do), and you’ve got dead time in between activities, so there is a real multiplicative effect.

To explain why I’m spending so much time exercising, I need to mention that one of my major goals (in the health vertical) is to get to a particular target weight. Over the last few years I lost a lot of weight, but after a few big weight loss drives I landed a bit above where I ultimately wanted to be — and if you’ve ever been in a situation like this, you’ll know it’s easy to get 70-90% of the way there, go “I’m pretty good now I guess” and just sort of stagnate.

So for the past 6 months, I’ve basically been exercising intensely (in part because making sure I’m exercising a lot is part of my goals) because I’m still not quite at my weight goal. But, instead of getting to the goal, I’ve offset things by just eating more. To be clear, I’m not hitting the Twinkies or even the rice chips — I’m just ingesting too many calories.

This is unfortunately a pretty easy rut to get stuck in. It’s actually pretty easy to eat a little more, and run or walk a little further to manage those extra calories, but this has a few major problems — it takes up a ton of time, it allows you to afford building up your willpower to eat in a more healthy way, and probably more importantly it strains your body, since you’re not exercising to exercise, but to burn calories that you’re immediately backfilling; this is exercise that with a healthy diet you really don’t need to do.

This has all culminated in me actually gaining like five pounds, which is pretty concerning after more or less maintaining my weight for the last six months. Now, to be fair, I think the problem is less that I have been hitting the snacks hard (though there is a little of that), but that I’ve been seeing a lot more friends, which means meals out (which are harder to keep a consistent size and calorie count), but probably more importantly — snacks! If you like your friends, and you like not spending money, and they bring you handmade ice cream sandwiches — it’s really really damn hard not to eat them!

One quarter of the sandwiches in question.

What’s clear to me is that I need to spend less of my free time exercising like a serious amateur athlete if I want to be able to have the time and latitude to achieve my other goals — particularly the big ones that, unlike something such as reading, can’t really be achieved 10 or 15 minutes at a time. I’m exercising because that’s going to get me to my weight goals, but actually the exercise is just me running to stand still because I’m eating too much.

Essentially, in some ways goals form dependencies with one another, but these aren’t always explicit — reaching my target weight has (on its face) zero to do with writing my book, or pushing commits to Github. The issue is that (because I probably rightly see health as kind of the most important goal) everything else is being blocked by me not getting my health goals squared away, because I’m allocating a ton of time to those goals (while essentially making no progress). Again, unlike with reading books, just doing exercise is not a guarantee of progress when it comes to weight loss — since it’s really the product of exercise and diet, and in some ways diet is the harder and more important element because it requires essentially no time but lots of willpower.

This is where operationalizing comes in. SMART is a good system for goals, but it doesn’t really talk about operationalizing — that, is creating systems or processes that will let you achieve your goals — at all; the closest it gets is I guess measurability.

For me, operationalizing means allocating time and also thinking about sequencing my goals, and considering how they influence one another. Something I don’t love the feeling of is spending most of my time in a given day on one goal, since I like the idea that I’m moving a little closer to all my goals at once. This doesn’t really factor in the real cost of task switching — the need for longer chunks of time to make serious progress and build momentum on some tasks, but as I’ve been talking about — dependencies from one goal to the next.

I may not like how it feels, but I think at the moment what I need to prioritize is getting my weight to its target level once and for all, which I should be able to do in 2-3 months at the most. Now, that does probably mean slowing progress on every other goal until we are midway through the year, but the upshot is that once I get to my target weight I should be able to seriously accelerate progress on all of those tasks, while also lightening the load on my body, by ramping back exercise — and hopefully with some healthier eating habits to boot.

The lightening the load thing is a big deal, as part of my strength workout I do 80 pushups in a row, and I seriously think I can feel the difference in my shoulder having gained a few pounds! It’s absolutely the case that those 80 would be quite a bit easier (as would running a faster 5K) if I got to my target weight.

Once I’ve gotten to my target weight (I guess you can check in in a few months to see how that’s gone), then I should be able to allocate my time roughly 30/30/30 to reading, programming, and writing my book. That being said, I need to keep in mind (and you should too) that simply allocating some percentage of your time to a task based on how many tasks or goals you are working on is not enough. You need to go further, considering how much time each “work session” should take up to maximize productivity. But, that is probably a topic for another day.