Hey,<\/p>\n
One of the big ideas of this course is the weekly\/daily goals system
\nfor productivity.<\/p>\n
An idea that trips people up is the daily list. Namely, some people
\nbeat themselves up if they don’t finish their daily goals list.<\/p>\n
Just for the record, let me make a point:<\/p>\n
THE PURPOSE OF DAILY GOALS ISN’T TO FINISH THEM<\/p>\n
I type this in all caps because people often get it confused. Used
\nto familiar to-do list systems, students assume that the major goal
\nof the daily goals is to ensure you finish them.<\/p>\n
Of course, finishing them is great, and I recommend trying to set
\ndaily goals lists that are achievable so that most of the time you
\ncan finish everything on the list.<\/p>\n
However, finishing all your tasks isn’t the point.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
The purpose of having a daily goals list isn’t the tasks “to-do” but
\nall the tasks you’re not going to focus on by necessity.<\/p>\n
Not finishing your daily goals is disappointing, but hardly the end
\nof the world. I often get overly ambitious and am unable to complete
\neverything I wanted to do on a list. That’s okay.<\/p>\n
The problem is when you start adding more work to your list after
\nyou’ve finished everything.<\/p>\n
The power of the system isn’t that it tells you what to do, but that
\nit tells you what NOT TO DO, forcing you to focus on a limited set.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
The inspiration for the weekly\/daily goals system (and the original
\nsystem that it evolved from) was based on a quote from Zig Ziglar.
\nIn it, he spoke of a consultant who offered an idea to a major
\nindustrialist. The idea was this:<\/p>\n
Every day, when you wake up, write down a list of six things in
\norder of importance, for you to work on tomorrow. Then, when you
\nwake up, work on TASK #1 until it is complete. Even if you never
\nstart TASK #2, you will sleep knowing you worked your hardest on
\nwhat was most important and you couldn’t have been more productive
\nusing any other method.<\/p>\n
After sharing this idea, the consultant asked him to try it out and
\nif he found it helpful, to send him a cheque for whatever he felt
\nthe idea was worth.<\/p>\n
A few weeks later the industrialist mailed him a cheque for ten
\nthousand dollars. [this was in the early 20th century]<\/p>\n
As you can see from the origins, the point of the daily goals list
\nisn’t to finish everything. Rather it’s to focus you on what is most
\nimportant so that you don’t get distracted and procrastinate.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
The big reason I suggest trying to finish your daily goals is that
\nit forces you to make reasonable daily goals lists. If you make ones
\nthat contain an impossible amount of work that you never finish,
\nthen the system doesn’t do it’s job of focusing you.<\/p>\n
You should definitely aim to finish your lists, and the first step
\nin that is making an achievable amount of work. However, like the
\nindustrialist, if you end up spending your entire day working on
\njust the top item from your daily list, you’ll know you’ve been as
\nproductive as possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hey, One of the big ideas of this course is the weekly\/daily goals system for productivity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":596,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions\/596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/members\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}