How to translate personal goals into weekly habits
Go for a run every single day in the year
New Year’s resolutions are a very humbling exercise. We sit down at the end of the year and often come to the same conclusion — they didn’t work out. At these times, I always remember this one friend of mine from school who would make fun of New Year’s resolutions by announcing that he will go running every single day in the next year. Then, he normally would post on the 1st of January and the following days a picture of him during his running exercise with the title — “I went running every single day of the year”. For sure this “habit” only lasted for the first days, maybe even a week and then he dropped it because he made his point. New Year’s resolutions often come from great intent but rarely turn into something lasting.
But how can you turn your goals into something lasting? The answer is for sure quite personal but in the following post, I describe how I translate my personal goals into weekly habits.
Rest in structure
To translate my goals into actionable to-dos and weekly habits, I made use of three agile methods that I know from my work as a Product Manager.
- Time-boxed iterations
Generally speaking, time-boxed iterations are a pre-defined time interval for which you set and lock a specific amount of work that you want to get done. In the Scrum methodology, they are often referred to as Sprints. - Iteration goals
Iteration goals build on top of iterations and define a goal reachable with some but not all of the work locked into the iteration. The purpose is to set a focus for the team or person and increase the probability to get the most important part of the work done. - Retrospective
The last method is a combination of three Scrum ceremonies (review & retrospective & sprint planning) where the team or person reviews what was achieved in the last iteration and reflects on the learning of the last iteration by drawing insights and action items for the next one.
All three agile methods are the building blocks to continuously work on my personal goals. They are recurring and the structure I can rest in. Resting in structure means I use the same methods for all my goals and remove with it the mental load of how to approach the different goals. So let’s dive into some personal examples of how I work with these methods on a weekly basis.
I won’t cover setting personal goals as a part of the post. But you can find inspiration in my previous blog post on “How to use OKRs to set tangible personal goals”.
Time-boxed Iterations
As written above, you want to have recurring time-boxed iterations to work on your personal goals. A fixed time frame allows you to repeatedly review your progress and change your approach if needed. Picking a fitting time interval is the first thing to do when setting up your iterations. In the end, I went for weekly iterations but the decision is really contextual and I would suggest starting with a time interval that fits best into your current way of living. A good reference point is the 2-week sprints in product development. It reduces the time spent on the methods to 30–45 mins every two weeks which is more manageable.
The iteration documentation looks super similar to any other to-do list except that it is only filled with action items that I gathered in the previous retrospective. The list contains mostly action items focused on my current personal OKRs. The list is collected and reviewed at the end of the previous iteration in the retrospective ceremony (more details in the retrospective section below).
Iteration goals
The idea behind setting sprint goals in product development is to give the team one single focus point to push for. The main objective of the team is to reach the sprint goal and fulfill the main tasks related to it, even if other non-goal related but planned tasks don’t get completed. The iteration goal follows the exact same logic by highlighting the most important action items to fulfill for the next iteration.
From my experience, you don’t want to pick more than 2 different action items as the iteration goal. More action items take away the advantage of focus and make it less likely to achieve the goal. Achieving your iteration goal is important to boost your motivation and move you closer to fulfilling your personal goals iteration after iteration.
Retrospective
The retrospective is the most important part of translating your goals into weekly habits. Normally it takes me 30 to 45 mins a week to run this ceremony and is divided into 3 parts.
Goal progress check-in
First of all, I review the progress on my 3 goals in the last week. As most of the goals are measured by different key results, I collect the updated numbers and get an overview of my overall progress on each of the goals. Afterward, I review the iteration goal and mark it as achieved or not. Both exercises trigger first reflections and give me the first data points to consider in the main retrospective.
Retrospective
For the retrospective, I normally use Miro and pre-defined templates. You can find 3 examples and more sources in this Miro template that I created for everybody interested. The whole retrospective is divided into 5 parts:
- Check-in
A short exercise to reflect on the last iteration, often triggered by a question or game. It will set up the stage for the next part. - Action-Items from the previous retrospective
Here I line up all action items of the last iteration and reflect on what I learned or how it helped me to progress. For unfinished action items, I decide on moving them to the next iteration or discard them completely. - Main stage
I prefer to use different themes from retrospective to retrospective to spice it up and look at my personal growth from different angles. The themes can vary from the well-known “Start, Stop, Continue” reflection to more future-oriented themes like “Three Horizons”. The goal of this stage is to collect data first, then draw insights out of the data and translate these insights into new action items for the next iteration. It is the perfect moment to take into consideration the insights from the goal progress and iteration goal check-in. - Action-Items for the next iteration
In this column, I collect all moved action items from the last iteration and the new action items excerpt from the main stage. These action items are my to-do list for the next iteration. - Check-out
Similar to the check-in, it closes the retrospective with a funny, insightful, or entertaining small exercise.
As there are several stages and a lot of information, I recorded a short video guiding everybody interested through the process of running the retro:
New iteration setup
Equipped with the list of action items for the next iteration, I quickly document the outcomes of the retrospective in the current iteration (by taking a screenshot of the retrospective and adding the list of action items).
Then I open another iteration card on Notion and paste the collected action items into the new iteration. I decide on the new iteration goal and I am ready to go for another cycle.
Take it easy and start simple
After all, my process can look quite excessive and tailored to my personal way of working. Nevertheless, working in time-boxed iterations, defining clear goals, and reflecting on the outcomes can help you to continuously invest and work on your own growth path.
Maybe you saw that I failed to achieve my iteration goals from time to time. And I think that is fine. Working on your personal growth path can be challenging but it is the continuous investment that will help you to reach your goals in the end. So take it easy and try to go the path step by step.
In the case you are looking for an easier way to track your goals and action items than me, I can recommend Wonderpath — a tool that helps with setting goals and action plans.
