Ask HN: What do you use to align your daily todos with your long term goals?

Stop focusing on long-term goals (outcomes) and focus on daily habits (process). For example, rather than focusing on learning French, do 15 minutes of Duolingo every day.

Not sure if this will help but one way I have helped map my todos with my long term goal is: - Get a large white board or sheet of paper, the key here is a lot of space to write/draw. - Draw a circle and write one of your goals. - Now think of everything you need to do to accomplish that goal and create circles with those things written in then and draw a line to the main goal. - Now repeat the same process for each of the smaller circles and keep going till you have a feeling that everything is in bite sized chunks. (These are essentially your todos) - Now create a timeline and add milestones (eg: Monthly milestones) figure out how many circles you need to get done before each milestone. - Now you should have a good idea of what you need to have done and by when to be on track.

it doesn't work very well for goals that are hard to measure but it can be applied in a lot of situations. Good luck tackling all your goals :)

Google calendar and an hour each morning to move actions related to long-term goals into your short term todo list (notebook in your case).

However, bear in mind that plans are rarely followed to execution perfectly. You may meet someone who wants you to stay, or you may get a really good offer. You might experience financial hardship and need to settle down for a while.

When I go on a hike, I spend a good hour or two studying maps (topographical, orthophoto, etc) before picking a trail. It means that I can decide on a whim to follow another trail halfway through if conditions call for it (mud, rain, wild animals, etc). Planning is about mapping out all possible outcomes, and not so much about following one plan to the letter.

> moleskine notebook

Ok. That's a weird detail to bother hipsterbragging about.

Anyway, I have a post it on my monitor that says. "Just do the fucking thing and stop doing busywork". I have a second one that says "Successful people have better things to do than arguing on reddit/hn"

Tldr; constant visible progress, cut distractions

For my personal life I don't write down long term goals, because I want to live in the now and not in the future.

Professionally, I use outlook's todos with three priority classes: some time (low, where long term goals go), soon (normal), and today (high). Each list is organized like a backlog with most important first. I also color-code them by type (coding, process improvement, personal, and delegated). I scan the list regularly, and promote, split, join, add, remove or move down items as needed.

Beeminder. Everything from exercise to posture to meditation to work. It's one of the most clever pieces of software I've used, in terms of domain-ideas embedded in it.

A frequent-ish review. About once a month, I get a nice coffee and cake and spend a couple of hours thinking about the last month, my current todo list and my long term goals. I try to remove anything that doesn't contribute to the goals, and intentionally put tasks which will move me toward my goals.

I also pray quite frequently (I'm Christian, but I believe some types of meditation are just as effective here). I look at my principles and ask myself whether I'm genuinely living up to them, and ask myself how I can improve.

I have tried using OmniFocus and MyLifeOrganised, but I found both tools got in the way of my thought process. Now I just use paper and coloured pens.

Have you looked into Getting Things Done? It's a methodology for managing your tasks based on dumping everything in one place (I made a Google sheet) and then prioitizing. Part of it is that you make lists of your goals for different time frames (e.g. 1 year, 3-5 years) and revisit them regularly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done

Interesting because I looked at goal setting some time ago. If you Google "goal setting doesn't work", you'll find as much against it.

Having a rough idea of where you want to go and setting yourself a number of small wins in the right direction could help you. Get into the habit of daily small wins that you know is moving you towards your true north.

As another point, I see systems and habits referenced below. Interesting because I'm midway through Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. Here is what he did:

He worked out a set of virtues that he thought he ought to have, such as temperance, industry, silence, etc.

Using that, he then used the calender method that's proposed a lot on each virtue to instill​ them as habits!

I'm inclined to say he was an early self-help author but also one that has something other than success in self-help as a justification for his methods.

Anybody using todoist/rememberthemilk with success? Whenever I try I can not get my self to update it regulary so I stop at some moment.

You can apply the concept of OKRs [0] for this. Think Objectives as your long term goals and Key Results as your routine tasks. When you pick a daily task you should be able to point to the objective it'd satisfy.

I've been ignoring it thinking it's corporate BS and doesn't really apply to personal life. But I tried it in last year (where I quit my day job to bootstrap my own startup) and felt having a systematic thinking is actually productive.

[0] https://library.gv.com/how-google-sets-goals-okrs-a1f69b0b72...

I use remember the milk https://www.rememberthemilk.com.

I have one list called Goals. These are my major long term goals that are very rarely termed complete and I use more the notes functionality to mention progress.

Then I have other lists for work, life, and personal projects.

It works pretty well though I imagine you could do the same thing with a notebook.

I've found OneNote to be very good for journaling and plans. I have a tab for daily journaling for each year, and I have a tab for my current long term goal with steps broken down.

The key is to develop a habit with your ToDo system. I use Todoist but in order to be successful with it, you have to consistently schedule your tasks as well as postpone any that you didn't complete that day. I also have a recurring task in Todoist scheduled every Monday that reminds me go to through all my projects and prune/schedule/unschedule/delegate.

So I use 3 trello boards and break my goals/todos into cards. My long & short term todo boards are sorted by icebox, work in progress and done. My daily agenda is sorted into 3 lists, morning, afternoon and evening. I've been using this for almost 6 months and it's pretty simple to manage.

For me, it involved making the big picture big, vivid, specific, and tangible.

I was introduced to the idea of a Painted Picture. It is a goal setting methodology that involves heavy visualization. This particular incarnation was developed by Cameron Harold, as part of his coaching activities.

It made a big impact on my life.

The gist is that you write down, in narrative form, what your day will look like exactly 3 years from now. You write in the first person form, diving into various areas of your life. It should involve as much detail as possible. Ideally, these should be very optimistic goals which you dream of, rather than safe ones you are very likely to hit. It's OK if all of them don't materialize.

Example:

On March 13, 2020, I will be sitting in my comfortable arm chair in my living room. A fire will be roaring in the fireplace, and I will be looking over my emails. The kids just left to school. My wife drove them in our BMW VJ850. She is currently at work at MegaCorp, giving a presentation to the board about the XYZ initiative, which has a huge chance of success and will give her a real chance at the CXO position.

You continue on for two pages or so, going into minute details. Talk about your kids, your home, your relationship with your friends, the kind of food you want to be eating, professional activities, health, hobbies, charitable activities, political activism, and whatever else you want to affect positively. To keep it interesting, you can talk about what just happened ("We recently returned from a two week cruise in the Bahamas") or what is coming up ("I will be spending a week with a new client doing KJI advising. This is the biggest deal I've landed thus far. They have agreed to my $2,000 per diem rate. I'm confident they will be happy with the value I provide for them.")

Dream big. Share it with your significant other, if they're in it. Encourage them to write one of their own.

How does this help with the day to day goal setting and decision making?

It's uncanny! The imagery is so vivid that it permeates my daily life. My wife and I talk about it regularly. Whenever daily decisions need to be made, the painted picture comes to mind and guides me towards my goals. When I need decide what to do today, this week, or this month, and choose between the infinite possible activities I could be doing, having this powerful visualization in the back of my mind aligns me with my goals.

In terms of higher-level concepts, I've recently been thinking​ a lot about identity-based motivation. This is basically the theory that we should expect, even welcome, difficulties encountered when engaging in activities that are relevant to our ideal future self. The initial step is to elucidate who we want to be, and then bring that identity to mind when we encounter failure. This reframing might be more effective than, say, believing I am dopamine deficient, that I'm lazy or that I'm not talented enough to complete the task at hand, etc. If I know the path to who I want to be (a well-traveled explorer, to use OP's example) will be difficult and I suddenly encounter a difficulty, instead of feeling dejected, the difficulty will motivate me instead, as it is a signpost that I am becoming who I want to be.

Some of this may seem obvious, especially to people who are already super achievers, but I've been finding it a worthwhile way to think about my behavior.

Here are some links if this sparks any interest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_based_motivation

https://youtu.be/0bwvP-Zk_wM

The research conclusion so far is a bit convoluted. I don't know if any popular writers have run with the idea yet.

To sum up:

1. Pick who you want to be in the future (ex: a good friend),

2. Expect to encounter difficulty on the path (ex: my friend needs help moving, it's gonna suck and I'm not gonna be able to work on my project today, but I know sustaining close friendships will be hard),

3. Take actions that will be congruent with your future identity (ex: I went out of my to help my friend move to his new apartment, I did it because every day I try to take advantage of my opportunities to be a better friend)

I draw on my window a dashboard with a kind of life's game. I needed 1 million of points to get a price (allow myself to startup another company). I can earn points and bonuses doing things like workout, travel, launch with my family, rock climbing, party with friends, develop small projects,... I had some additional rules. All mornings I spent a minute puting strikes near the icons of the things I did past day. Everyday I look the picture of how well I was doing on my life's game and once in a while y added the number of strikes to totals and got bonuses, etc. It worked for me for a while and it was funny but I stopped my count when I moved to other place where my window is smaller than the previous one.

On one side you are apparently in full control of your life and on the other side you pray?

To whom? Why? For what?

A critical factor of success in achieving long term goals is to schedule corresponding daily todos on a calendar. Because if something isn't either obviously urgent or scheduled on a calendar, it never gets done.

For this reason, I sorely miss the Timeful app (bought and shut down by Google) which nailed the process perfectly, integrating one-off todos, habits (e.g. 3 runs/week) and calendar management in a single system. AI-based suggestions for scheduling todos was the icing on the cake.

To this day, sadly I still haven't found a decent replacement.

Google Calendar took the automatic habits scheduling engine from it but is otherwise inadequate for todos, and well-established todo managers like Things / Wunderlist stubbornly refuse to allow something as simple as drag+dropping todos onto a calendar at a specific time of the day (which is the critical bit), and they don't support habits ("tick this box n times a week")

Plan (getplan.co) seemed promising but is too alpha for daily use and development seems to have stalled. SkedPal nails it in theory but is over-engineered and bloated, its UI asks too many questions and cognitive load is high, it needs "Apple-ification".

Any other recommendations very welcome ! Even happy to beta test or collaborate on something new (I know the world already has too many productivity apps, but it lost the "right" one with Timeful IMHO)

I started looking at GTD and then just thought, some of these ideas are good, others I don't need, so I just made my own version of it.

So I have the following Cards in a Trello Board;

1. Inbox -> Things I can reasonably expect to complete in a day or less 2. In Progress -> Limited to 5 per day 3. Projects -> Working on an app? Put details in here 4. Reminders/Waiting -> I've sent a form in, waiting a response before next action 5. Some Day -> Things I would like to tackle some day (Good for reviewing long term goals) 6. Complete / Split into smaller tasks

BulletJournal.com and the companion app that reminds you to reflect and to Think(tm) once in a while.

> I'm trying to figure out how a better way to stay on track with my long term (1 year) goals...Does anyone have any recommendations/tools for keeping these daily goals todo list goals in alignment with the big picture?

Here's my approach: Define the goal, measure progress, complete todos.

Define the goal: I use Onenote. It's so freedom enabling (click anywhere, type) that it's perfect for jotting down all parts of your long term goals. At this stage a todo list is too rigid to record something this abstract. A mindmap is also good but the Ctrl + E search in Onenote is the best. You'll visit this once a week or so.

Measuring progress: Again Onenote, list the months and add new checkboxes (Ctrl + 1) under each month for each subgoal you want to get accomplished. You'll visit this a couple of times a week.

Completing todos: This is where your todo app comes into play. Map your subgoals to todos and record how much time you spend on them. At the end of each week all your completed todos should see you tick some of the checkboxes in Onenote. You'll visit this as often as you're working on the goal.

For me, this is a simple but visual method of progress spread across just two pieces of software.

May I opportunistically suggest https://lanes.io as that second piece of software. It's a todo app I've built to help support this approach - timer, charts etc.

I agree with the others here that constant reflection is critical. But for me, keeping track of resolutions with a calendar to do is a recipe for disaster; good for the first two weeks then eventually it gets neglected.

So for this year, I started thinking about a tracking and recording method that is personalised to my needs, and that includes taking account of good and bad habits. I set up a personal website which is basically a learning log/folio, where the front page displays my five learning projects in arty thumbnails. Aesthetics is really important to me so a good design that I'm proud of is one way to keep me visiting the website.

Let's say that one project is French. Now it's really important to clarify your goals further. It's completely unrealistic for me to be fluent in French by the end of this year so I set a couple of goals, such as studying Candide to the point that I can understand and internalise the meaning without looking at the English parallel text. I emphasise that this goal is only for this year, which means I can still keep going with French next year - so no need to kick myself why I can't be as good as those polyglots.

OK, so far so good, I've got some fancy projects that show to the world that I'm a keen generalist, and goals to clarify their scope. But how do you keep track of them?

Because I've come to like writing, and it's one goal to keep practicing it, I decided to link every goal to my blog. Meaning, I need to write about my findings, achievements etc and tag the post to a goal.

I created a category hashtag and placed it under each goal. So say that one project is Blender 3D and one goal is to get used to the different modelling techniques - my hashtag would be something like #blender3dmodelling. This means that I must write something about blender modelling, which means I must study it and practice it. Otherwise if someone clicks on the hashtag, it will display no posts ... and that looks a bit bad. (That 'someone' is usually me haha.)

So far this little technique has kept me more focused on my resolutions aka learning projects. But it's not enough because there's still the danger of gradual neglect - and I've reflected enough to realise why this happens. What if I have absolutely no time to study Blender 3D because of other commitments? I can see myself paralysed by guilt by July. So, for balance, I decided that every month, I will write a post that reflects the previous month, and realistically set targets for the current month. The reflective part is particularly important as it not only keeps you true to your desire to learn, you're also being honest about yourself and your current situation.

So, that's the gist of it. It's not really scientific, the way I keep tracking and motivating myself with writing and showcasing, but it works for me. But this is an example; you may find it too much or too little or just completely unsuitable. That's OK. For yourself, you need your own method, and this means a great deal of introspection to understand your needs and habits. Good luck :)

Design documents.