From Life Goals to Project Success: What If We Worked This Way?

I have 4 life goals. Things that I want to accomplish in my lifetime. They don’t necessarily stay static. Experiences change my perception of what’s important and what I’d like to accomplish in my life. As I get older, they stay more static.

At the start of a financial year, I ask myself what I can accomplish, in the year ahead, for each of these goals. These become my goals for the year.

At the start of each quarter, I look at my yearly goals and ask myself what I can accomplish in the quarter ahead, that will move me towards achieving my yearly goals.

At the start of each month, I look at my quarterly goals and ask myself what I can accomplish in the month ahead, that will move me towards achieving my quarterly goals.

At the start of each week, I look at my monthly goals and ask myself what I can accomplish this week, that will move me towards achieving my monthly goals.

And at the start of each day, I look at my weekly goal and ask myself what I can accomplish today that will move me towards achieving my weekly goal.

No plan, just next best action

For someone who spends a lot of his life planning and thinking of and shaping the future, my goal setting strategy is quite different than how I spend a lot of my time.

There are several things about it that I like.

On the days when I have a lot on, or wake up with low energy, I’m not beholden to a series of deliverables that I set previously when I was firing on all cylinders. If today, the most I can get done is to find a YouTube video to watch later, then that’s my target for the day.

It might only be a small step forward, but it’s still a step forward.

I match my energy and my motivation to the work each day. Some days, I just want to sit and read or research. Other days, I can’t think of anything worse and I want to be creative. My goal setting technique gives me the ability to match my work each day to my energy and motivation that day.

No goal is set in stone. Next week, I can decide that the monthly goal I set myself is no longer important to me and I can change it. I allow my environment and my experience to provide a quick feedback loop and give myself the ability to change my focus constantly.

I get more done that I thought I would. Each week when I look back, I can see demonstrable progress towards my goals. It’s often not what I thought it would be. But the progress is obvious and often more than I thought I would achieve.

What would happen if we ran a project like this?

Instead of starting with life goals, we’d start with outcomes. What are the outcomes that are necessary to achieve with this project? We’d work on them as a team, we’d document them and we’d have our north star.

Each quarter, month, week and day, we then plan the single next best action for the time period ahead. We could do this as a team in a daily meeting. Each member of the team discusses what they can accomplish today in pursuit of the weekly, monthly, quarterly and outcome goals.

And then we go do it.

Each day, we review our performance. How did we do? If we didn’t do well, what stopped us? What do we need to change to improve next time? Are our goals still the right goals? Does something need to change?

The project would be different

Governance might need to change to be as responsive as the team.

Sponsors might need to change how and when they were available to the project team.

Planning and forecasting would be different, at different levels of fidelity and with a different level of confidence.

There would be more room for creativity.

The experience of the members of the project team would be different than in a traditional project.

Trust would be an important conversation.

I can’t convince myself that running a project this way would deliver lower quality outcomes. Obviously, it's project-dependent and it's more likely to succeed in some projects versus others. What do you think?