Overview
The Goal
Every time management method needs a clear goal. Without it, there can’t be a strategy, only shots in the dark. Also, without a goal, you don’t have a criterion to judge whether the method works and you can’t find weak spots to improve on.
Goaliath’s method aim is to make you proud of your actions (and to reach serenity, as ancient Stoics would say).
The Strategy
Stated the goal we can design a strategy, a plan of action:
- Clearly state our values and goals. Acting according to them is the best way to feel good about our everyday actions.
- Prioritize and defer the less important ones. Usually, we don’t have the time and energy to do all that we commit to. That leads to procrastination, which leads to guilty feelings. The cure to that is prioritization and intentional deferring (not discarding) of the less important goals.
- Focus on your actions, not the outcomes. Focusing on what we control is key to serenity. You don’t have full control over whether you’ll complete a specific task on a due date. But you do have almost complete control over what you dedicate time to. So our method completely opts out of outcome-focused task lists and only cares about the completion of recurrent activities.
- Remember what your values are, and how do you want to dedicate time to them. Having to decide what to do every day is hard, time and energy-consuming. Moreover, we human beings are inconsistent and tend to end up rowing in a different direction each day, leading to frustration in the long term. So instead of deciding each day, we’ll decide once in a while. The rest of the time we’ll just remember our previous decision and act according to it. This way we can feel out of responsibility and focus just on doing our best.
The next sections explain how the method executes this strategy to help us achieve our goal.