More Info About Goals

[c.k. lester]

I would like to see more information about managing "Goals." I have a general idea of how they might work, but I'd like to see a tutorial of them in practice. Anybody have articles or videos in this regard?

Thanks!

[James D]

No articles or tuturials I can think of aside from the ones in MLO help files, but here are some ideas to try out.

For the longest time, I kept my goals and supporting tasks in my task outline view (Outline/All Tasks) also by time period, e.g., a tree for Week, Month, Year.  Bad idea.  Just mark them as goals for whatever they are, and don't try too hard to organize your project/task outline chronologically.  Then use the "Goals" view to work with your goals, and make sure everything you intend to have as a goal and work and track via MLO is shown in that view, for the appropriate time period.

(I'm assuming you know to use the task/folder properties window to mark tasks/folders as "goal for" Week/Month/Year.)

I like to use folders as goals, that is, title the folder in terms of the outcome or positive statement of the accomplished goal, and then set the priority at that level.  So if I have a goal for the year of something like "I am under 180lbs, run 10K under 55m, feel strong, can do vigorous hikes, bike fast, play full 90 minute game of soccer", then I would create that as a folder and mark it as "goal for"/Year.  Then, under that, I might have additional sub-folders like "I Include a well-researched weight training program as part of my regular weekly fitness habits" and mark that as a goal for the month.  Then, under that, I might have another folder like "Draft and trial an initial weight training program for a few weeks".  Under that folder, I might have specific tasks like "Research what programs would be appropriate for my goals" and "Choose an initial weight training program and try it for two weeks" as tasks.  FWIW, I would typically mark the folder above those two tasks with the "Complete subtasks in order" checkmark, so that only the "next" actionable task shows in the outline, rather than having to see and deal with overwhelming tons of tasks, only a few of which are currently relevant and actionable.

One thing I suggest is to edit the settings for the default "Goals" view to sort by "Importance" descending, at least if you use the Steven-Covey-popularized Important/Urgent Quadrants I-IV approach.  Otherwise, the order in which things appear in your list of goals makes no sense.

Hope this helps.  Feel free to ask any follow-up questions and with any luck you'll get lots of great responses.

[John . Smith]

IMHO, it's very very messy whatever you do.

If I'm correct, the core problem is that although MLO does have an underlying database field for Goal (with possible values of Week, Month, Year or None), there is no way of allocating any such goal to a task.

Yes you can use folders, but that only works of you're not using folders for something else.

Yes you can use Context Tags but that clutters up you contexts and becomes messy. 

MLO is already said by many to already be "too complicated" and "too bloated" but to my way of thinking there needs to be a way of very easily allocating goals to task. Like with a paint brush. This would be a very powerful feature. 

- Any takers?

J

[Stéph]

I do the opposite to John. Rather than trying to assign goals to tasks, assign tasks and projects to the goal they will achieve (or the role they come under).

 

My outline is structured so that I group things into Roles and Goals (as per Stephen Covey's system). So my task outline is grouped into the following hierarchy:

• Areas of Life at the top level (those areas being four quadrants: Personal, Home, Work and Community)
• Level 2 is for my Roles (under the Home quadrant, my Roles might include husband, father, home maintenance, finances. Under the Work quadrant, I have things like Line Manager, Discipline Lead, Control Systems Specialist, Technical Reviewer, etc). It's amazing how many different roles a person ends up performing, for one employment.
• Level 3 is for my Goals and Projects. For example, in my Role as a Control Systems Specialist, I may have a Goal to "develop a team of SCADA specialists" and I may have several projects on which I'm responsible for delivering the design of the industrial control system.
• Level 4 onwards - Each project and Goal will have several tasks under it. Some Goals might have tasks grouped into small projects grouped under them.

 

For my purposes, I don't need to split my Goals into Yearly, Monthly and Weekly, because I don't spend time viewing or reviewing them separately at these different levels. I just make them all Yearly Goals and assign the appropriate due date to each of them.

I find it helps to group my tasks and projects under roles and goals in my outline, because that helps me to make sure I prioritise those projects and tasks which align with my goals and ignore or delegate those tasks which don't really fit into my current roles.

Hope that's helpful.

Stéphane

[c.k. lester]

Thank you for the replies, folks! I'm not sure how I would implement "goal tracking" in MLO, or even if it's necessary (isn't a project a goal?!!?), but let me explain what I'm wanting to do, and maybe that could help steer the conversation.

I'm coming from Simpleology, in which you can describe "focuses" (goals?) for your life: Short-term, Mid-term, and Long-term. In "Short-term," I currently have "Develop life schedule." You can see a screenshot here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7784LEEgFoWaFZ3clB4ZFFiOEk

I have similar things filled in for the Mid- and Long-term categories. In Simpleology, you review these bits every morning, and they help form your daily tasks. How can I do something similar in MLO, or should I go outside the system for that kind of tracking?

(I'm moving from Simpleology because MLO has a better task interface, IMHO. And I don't need two managers in my life right now. :D)

Thank you!

[c.k. lester]

And, again, I want to emphasize: How is a project not a goal?!!? ha!

[John . Smith]

My take is that a Goal is a higher level Project. 

i.e. A Goal may in a sense contain a number of Projects.

(Aside: A confusing factor is that a project may be relevant to more than one goal but let's not go there!)

The problem is that MLO has no obvious way of allocating one Project to another Project, other then dependency which is a completely different concept and not useful here. 

Step - is your solution to use a MLO Folder for each GTD Level?

If so, I am slightly confused about how you appear to be conflating Goals with Projects?

If I understand you you have the following level of folder:

1. Areas of Life in your MLO root (Personal, Home, Work and Community)

2. Roles within each area (e.g. husband, father, home maintenance, finances etc) 

So far so good...

But what happens in level 3? Surely any goal would have projects within it, no?
If so any project within a goal would be in level 4, no?

... which would put your tasks within any project at level 5 (not level 4)??

Also what do you do about goals within goals?

I believe David Allen (of GTD fame) has the following layers:

50K - Purpose & principles

40K - Vision, finished within multi-years

30K - Goals & Objectives, finished within 1-2 years

20K - Responsibilities (x10 to x15 categories)

10K - Projects that can be finished within 1 year

Runway - immediate, physical, single tasks

The problem is that I I'm not sure that this lends itself into a simple tree structure! Or do you just ignore 40K and 50K levels?

Steph you structure is nonetheless interesting and does make reasonable sense. However you do you then handle priority? I have found that if you specify priority (be it importance or urgency) explicity that this gets you into trouble because it takes too long to enter for every task. And worse they keep changing over time and need to be re-tweaked a lot. 

For now I am using the sort order as a form of relative priority which works quite well, (plus I mark a small number of urgent things using colour and/or bold). The problem is that what I am doing ignore goals completely. 

OK I'm at the limits of my knowledge on all this and don't have any real answers for how to do this in MLO. 

- Can anyone else shed light?

J

[Dwight Arthur]

I I use MLO's Goals field in a different way because I find it helpful - I'll share it in case it helps you find a new perspective but I am not necessarily suggesting that this approach is better than any other or that it will work for anyone besides me.

One of my highest objectives in task management is to spend less time doing it (and more time on task execution). One of the most effective steps in achieving this objective is to avoid scheduling tasks that don't need to be scheduled, thereby taking back all of the time that I used to spend on rescheduling tasks that remained open after they were scheduled to be completed. But task management often involves taling an open task and saying "not now, come back later" to it. The challenge is to do so without ending up inadvertently scheduling the task. I use the "Goals" field to make this happen.

My purpose in using goals is to control when and whether a task shows up on my daily to-do list. If something is a weekly goal, that means that I have a goal to get this thing done in no more that approximately a week. If something is a monthly goal, that means that I have a goal to get this thing done in no more that approximately a month. I use the star to mean "daily goal". And I don't have any yearly goals, so I use the Yearly Goal value to actually mean Quarterly.

My daily to-do list includes any active task with a star, any task with a weekly goal whose date of last modification is more than 7 days old, any task with a monthly goal whose date of last modification is more than  30 days old, or any task with a yearly (i.e. quarterly) goal whose date of last modification is more than 90 days old. If a goal task pops up in my daily to-do list it means that this task is not getting done in the time I set for it. Ideally, I will get the task done when it shows up. If I cannot allocate the time to get it dome then I must have been mistaken in thinking that it needed to be finished in a day/week/month/quarter. In that case I should lower the goal, for example by changing a starred task to one that has a weekly goal. If something has a quarterly goal and has to be lowered it goes to "someday" with an annual review. Once in a while I am not ready to postpone a task so seriously but I also cannot get to it today. In this case I make some tiny edit to the task, usually adding or deleting a space from the caption or note, which resets the modification date and gives me another week/month/quarter. If I find myself doing this a second time to a task I try to have the discipline to drop the goal level at that time.

So, what do I do about visions, principles, objectives and all of that? The first thing, in line with the need to spend less time managing tasks, is that if I find myself spending actual time debating with myself as to how to categorize something I will try to change my process to make the question moot. So I reject any process that calls for me to treat an objective differently from a goal or a vision. I don't track stuff like "be a good father" or "save for retirement" because they are not actionable and there is no danger that I will forget to do them. If a thought crosses my mind like "hey, it would be cool if I could speak the Twi language" I will create an uncategorized task called "learn Twi". Tasks can only stay uncategorized for at most two or three days, so it will get a context, probably Someday. In my next quarterly review I will see whether I can identify a next step, like chose classroom versus online training, which will probably get defined as a project with no subtasks, or maybe there will be a few subtasks for getting started like a task with >Online context to find and evaluate Twi classes. There may be sub projects within this project. If I find myself taking Twi classes and having Twi-speaking friends over for dinner and conversation I will probably check the parent "learn Twi" task as completed, which does *not* mean that I speak the language perfectly but does mean that it's not something I need to track any more.

[John . Smith]

Dwight 

Interesting...

1. 

> My daily to-do list includes any active task with a star,
> any task with a weekly goal whose date of last

> modification is more than 7 days old...

So do you have a special view set up to just show stars and weekly goes less than 7 days old etc?

2. Also how do you allocate Projects to Goals?

3. 

> Tasks can only stay uncategorized for at most two or 

> three days, so it will get a context, probably Someday.

Are you using context tags to control both actual context and actionable status (Someday, Waiting, etc)

Cheers

J

[Dwight]

1. I have a special view called "daily to-do list" which includes all
active tasks that are starred, active tasks with a completion goal whose
time since last modification exceeds the goal, active tasks with
importance=200, calls with importance over 100 but only during the hours
when the calls context is open, tasks with a "waiting" context whose
start date, if any, has arrived or passed, and lots of other
dwight-specific conditions. It's kind on an active actions list with
everything that I can predict I won't want to do today removed. It's
rare that a month passes without one or two tweaks to the daily to-do
list filter.

2. The way that I am using goals it would have very limited use for a
project. Completion Goals are only functional for a task that is active.
The project parent for an active project is almost always not considered
an active task because it has uncompleted children. At most, if some
project has a next action that has made it to my daily to-do list that I
do not want to allocate time to right now, I might give it a weekly
completion goal and remove whatever's pushing it into the Daily list.
Somehow I doubt that this has anything to do with your question. I
suspect that you are asking how I would assign a project like "Learn to
speak Twi" to a goal like "Stay well-read and knowledgable". The short
answer is that for me, tracking stuff like "Stay well read" costs more
time than it saves so I don't do it. It's good to have goals like that,
just not a good use of time to track them.

3. I'm not sure what an "actual context" is. To me, all of my contexts
are actual, whether they represent a time, a place, a person, a needed
tool, actionability or a mood. Most of my Someday tasks are in a hidden
Someday folder that's flagged for quarterly review. Sometimes if I don't
have time to move a task right now I will leave it in place and assign a
Someday context to keep it off the to-do list until I get around to
moving it. Some someday tasks cannot be moved because they are in a
project, perhaps with other tasks dependent on them. These retain the
someday context. (The Build a Shed project has a Someday task to go file
for a certificate of occupancy. The project's not really done till I
take care of it, but I am not in any rush and if I never get to it then
when my heirs sell my house their real estate agent will take care of
it.) Waiting is a context, most often used if I have something that
cannot be done until a future date but then should be done as soon as
possible, like checking if a package I sent was delivered.Tasks like
this generally do not have any other "actual" context. If some larger or
more complex undertaking includes a waiting component it will often have
a task for the waiting and other tasks with other contexts for what's to
happen when the waiting's over. A quick way to set that up is to create
a subtask for the wait. Suppose that I have a task with Yardwork context
(Yardwork has open and close times set to approx current sunrise and
sunset) to trim a bush and it is hanging around on my to-do list but I
can't trim it because it's still blooming. So I would have a task to
trim the bush with Yardwork context, and a subtask, check if the bush is
done blooming with Waiting context repeating every week on Sundays and
Tuesdays. When I see the "bush done" task on my list and its still
blooming, check complete (i.e. yes, I checked). If the bush id finished
blooming, delete the task (ie, don't need to check that any more) and
the "trim bush" task immediately pops onto the to-do list.

-Dwight

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