The Immense Power of Vaguely Stated Goals

Imagine you've just finished school and want to become a millionaire. You know that you need a plan. You even use a task manager, which helps you depict your tasks. Also, you've learned SMART criteria and are familiar with the way to state objectives correctly.

You set an objective to earn $1,000,000 in a year:

☐ Earn $1,000,000 by the 30th of June 2022.

This goal corresponds to almost all SMART criteria. It's specific: you know the exact number and can measure it. It is also relevant and time-bounded: earning a million makes you a millionaire, and setting the date of the 30th of June 2022 provides quite a concrete time limit. The problem is with the "A" — achievable. How do you achieve it? Let's say by decomposing the goal into smaller ones!

☐ Earn $1,000,000 by the 30th of June 2022.
├ ☐ Earn $83,334 by the 30th of June 2022.
├ ☐ Earn $83,334 by the 30th of May 2022.
├ ☐ ...
└ ☐ Earn $83,334 by the 30th of July 2021.

Now we feel much better — our primary goal is fully SMART! We have only 12 small objectives that are not achievable. We are young and furious, and they will not stand our pressure.

Let's start with the first intermediate goal on this road and bring it down to tinier activities.

☐ Earn $1,000,000 by the 30th of June 2022.
├ ☐ Earn $83,334 by the 30th of June 2022.
├ ☐ Earn $83,334 by the 30th of May 2022.
├ ☐ ...
└ ☐ Earn $83,334 by the 30th of July 2021.
  ├ ☐ Get 1,000 paying customers by the 30th of July 2021.
  └ ☐ Create a web application for scheduling mountain bike travels by the 15th of July 2021.

At this point, we've written enough to show how fragile this list is. Let's say that you are a programmer and can implement a web application. But what about paying customers? Do you have people sitting and waiting to pay you $84 per person per month? Possibly, no.

After three months of sleepless nights, you have a raw web application dedicated to scheduling mountain bike travels. Now it's the 25th of September. You still believe that customers will come soon, and you want to update your list to reflect reality.

☐ Earn $1,000,000 by the 30th of June 2022.
├ ☐ Earn $100,000 by the 30th of June 2022.
├ ☐ Earn $100,000 by the 30th of May 2022.
├ ☐ ...
└ ☐ Earn $100,000 by the 30th of September 2021.
  ├ ☐ Get 1,000 paying customers by the 30th of September 2021.
  └ ☑ Create a web application for scheduling mountain bike travels by the 25th of September 2021.

The goal is even more challenging now, and you still have no guarantee. From the documentary perspective, you had to delete two tasks because they are no longer valid. Furthermore, you had to go through every item except the primary goal and update it to be more aggressive. Another sight of fragility here is that even the objectives on the lowest level are too huge to be completed at a single step. Thus you need to utilize your memory or other sources to remember where you are and where you are heading. If you try to depict an even more specific plan, you'll introduce even more places requiring updates when something goes wrong.

At some point, you'll begin to hate your task manager for bringing chaos and stress. Then you'll possibly decide to abandon it.

So, once again, we've just seen that precise and detailed task lists are fragile because:

We regularly do not meet our deadlines.
The consequent tasks do usually depend on the previous ones and need an update if something changes.
You can't see everything from the start because of the new information regularly appearing along the way. Because of this, you'll have to throw away the majority of your anticipations.

I hope you felt the drama. In the rest of the article, let's see how vague goals can save our nerves and reflect the road to the unknown in harmony with its nature.

What Are Vague Goals?

Sometimes we want something that we cannot clearly express. Let's investigate an unclear but very desired phenomenon: staying healthy lifelong. There is no specificity — you have to define its meaning. Measurement, in the end, is no better than "do I feel well"? Achieving it looks possible but not definite. Relevance is quite good. Time-boundness is in place, not very helpful, but still rather strict: the whole life.

I don't know how to state the wish to be healthy in any stricter way without losing some meaning. We can try to decompose it into a detailed list of health-related measurements like heart rate, blood pressure, and so on.

"During my whole life, I want to have heart rate 50 as a medium value and variance equal to 12 as well as..."

There are at least these problems with the nuanced goal:

You can't understand it at a glance, and you have to synthesize the desired direction. And you synthesize it wrong! Have you just deeply experienced the usefulness of good abstractions?😉
It is not flexible enough to reflect natural aging changes in your body or the medicine evolvement. At some point, you may discover that this goal do you harm.

The initial goal gives us room for maneuver, and we can firmer come up with what's good for our health at a particular time.

I hope now we no longer need to look at different examples and agree that vague goals are an unavoidable part of our life and sometimes even the welcomed part. However, accepting something as unavoidable doesn't mean that we can't handle it better. We can.

At this point, I need to pause and say that there are two types of vague goals:

The one we can indeed call as achieved once something happens;
The one we can call reached only retrospectively.

The "stay healthy lifelong" goal is of the second type. You can increase the chance of achieving it by sticking to a particular lifestyle, but you can never mark it as completed. However, you can check some of the same types of tasks as completed: "be a good boss in this position." Once you leave, it's time to make conclusions on this.

In this post, I won't cover the second type based on lifestyles.

What (Predictable!) Tool Do I Suggest and Why?

Let's look at this relatively famous picture. I guess you've seen its variant.

From https://leanb2bbook.com/blog/the-real-odds-of-success-for-b2b-entrepreneurs/

Here we see that a path to become a successful person is not straightforward and even hard to understand when fully depicted. But what if we can create visual aid even when we haven't yet made a single step?

If you've read my previous post, you might have noticed that I like checklists. No wonder that I've come up with another one here! It will be even more fluid than the one I use to structure my work on technical tasks.

The next reasonable question is, why am I so keen on visualization? My view nurtured on self-examination and ideas I've discovered in several books:

The "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" book by Andy Hunt seeded into my mind the idea of utilizing the right side of the brain usually neglected in activities where we talk about logic and precision. The right side of the brain is responsible for the synthesis and the perception of integral images.
The "Big Book About You and Your Child" (Russian) by Lyudmila Petranovskaya taught me that children react to environmental visual aid like beautiful pictures with reminders.
The "Nudge" book by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein made me convinced that a helpful environment aids not only children but all of us.
The "Thinking, Fast and Slow" book by Daniel Kahneman assured that thinking is hard and painful for our brain, so let's keep it for creative activities, not administrative ones.

Great, we've discovered some evidence of visualization usefulness. However, won't the amazingness of the goal we want to achieve motivate and focus us so we won't need any external help? Yes, it will for a limited period. The road to the vague goal is unpredictably long, and it's pretty easy to lose excitement at some point and abandon it. Guiding light can prevent us from doing so.

In the following parts of this text, we'll go through the characteristics of the required checklist tooling, the abstract, and specific examples of checklist utilization. Then we'll formulate the logic of building a journey-guiding set of tasks.

What Tools Are Required?

A checklist is not an exact tool to fulfill our needs here. We need few more things:

Iterative tasks.
Commenting on tasks.
Tasks' reformulating.
Tasks hierarchy.

This fluid checklist with enhancements is not a thing that should always be visible as the one for meticulous coding. Nevertheless, it should be regularly visible. The regularity depends on the rhythm you want to keep.

Now we are good to go to the abstract example.

How Can We Structure a Journey of Reaching Success?

Let's start simple:

☐ Reach success

Very good, we are on track and close to finishing! Just kidding, we have a long way to go. The issue with the stated task is that you do not know what it means to you. Or you want to become famous, or you want to have enough money for living, or you want your family to live closer together so that you see each other more often than once a year.

You see no date placed here. We do not want to have a pressure that big that it will bring panic. Also, the stated above goal will remain relevant for an extended period, and saying precise dates doesn't seem to make it more useful.

The lack of understanding inspires us to create another task:

☐ Reach success
└ ☐ Understand what success means to me

The overall path becomes more visible, excellent. But we cannot achieve understanding in the same sense as we achieve the finish line. On the other hand, wisdom can come to us. So what do we do?

Earlier I wrote that we don't plan to cover tasks reaching retrospectively, and now we face one of this type. To complete it, we need to introduce a temporary lifestyle that will help us by indirection.

I first met the explicit description of reaching goals by indirection in the "The Golden Rules" book by Bob Bowman and Charles Butler. Bob Bowman was the coach of Michael Phelps, the famous swimmer winning 28 Olympic medals. The idea is that you can't state a goal to win a swim — it has too many unknowns. But you can learn to swim so fast that you'll make a record. And this will make you a winner with a very high probability.

Not all lifestyles help us by indirection. If you have a goal to walk 30 minutes every day for one month, then walking for 30 minutes on the third day is quite a direct contribution.

I used the word "lifestyle" several times. What does it mean in terms of tasks? It represents an iterative task. Understanding what success means to you is tricky, so we'll develop two lifestyles: daily web surfing for what people think about success and daily walking around the place where you are. During walks, it's harder to fall into social media traps, especially when the road is unknown. And it is also easier to start reflecting — your brain needs some activity to occupy itself.

☐ Reach success
└ ☐ Understand what success means to me
    ├ ☐ Surf through the web for 30 minutes, looking at what people think of success [Every day at 7:00 am]
    └ ☐ Walk for 30 minutes around the town [Every day at 7:45 am]

You may notice that the two new activities are rather specific. Yes, in the approach I describe, we need a place where we act directly.

Now we've used two of the required tools: iterative tasks and tasks hierarchy.

It's time to act. You wake up, do some daily routine, have breakfast, and open a web browser. You don't know anything and start directly by typing:

what is success?

One piece of advice about success from one of the websites discovered with the mentioned search request.😄

You read through some articles and start getting the idea of success principles. However, you feel the need for live examples of people feeling successful. You navigate to the first iterative task comments and write your observations.

Surf through the web for 30 minutes, looking at what people think of success

[2021-06-27 7:34 am]
Today I've read about the principles, and they are somewhat different in different articles.
I feel a need to read about people who feel successful.

In 15 minutes you go for a walk. You decide to start with a known route but walk without a rush. You started thinking of the way you perceived success, noticed that you have to wait too long at a stoplight this time. After coming back home, you document your thoughts in comments dedicated to the second iterative task.

Walk for 30 minutes around the town

[2021-06-27 8:22 am]
I thought that wealthy and famous people are usually seen as successful.
On the other hand, I'm not fond of too much attention and am shy a little.
Also, I don't need millions or billions of dollars to feel well.
P.S. Cars are noisy, and waiting for the stoplight to switch takes too long.

The next day you wake up, reread your notes from yesterday and repeat everything one more time. Some day you might accidentally talk with someone outside and feel that this was very helpful. You add another iterative task.

☐ Reach success
└ ☐ Understand what success means to me
    ├ ☐ Surf through the web for 30 minutes, looking at what people think of success [Every day at 7:00 am]
      └ ☐ Optionally talk to someone during the walk [Every day at 7:15 am]
    └ ☐ Walk for 30 minutes around the town [Every day at 7:45 am]

You don't have to be insisting on this newly added task. If you had a chance to have a small talk, then great, mark it as checked for today. If not, then reschedule it for tomorrow. If you did the rescheduling for an extended period, then you might start feeling uncomfortable. Use this discomfort as a motivation to start talking again or delete this iterative task if you think it's no longer relevant.

I hope that after the example, you understand the mechanics. In one of the lifestyle tasks, I now have 47 comments, and we won't go that long. 😄 It's not necessary for getting the overall idea.

After many walks and diary filling, you discover that your hometown is not a good place for walking and talking. Too much noise and dust make walking uncomfortable. Also, you found while surfing through the internet that there is no widely accepted understanding of success. Hm, is there someone who makes walks in towns and cities better? Aha, there is a field of knowledge called Urban Studies.

Let's now imagine that after more thoughts and considerations, you decided that you are interested in Urban Studies. You choose to become an urban science expert and make your hometown better. Our list of tasks now experiences a colossal transformation, tasks' reformulating.

☐ Become an urban science expert
├ ☐ Make my lovely hometown better
├ ☐ Get a bachelor degree in Urban Studies
└ ☑ Understand what success means to me
    ├ ☑ Surf through the web for 30 minutes, looking at what people think of success [Every day at 7:00 am]
      └ ☑ Optionally talk to someone during the walk [Every day at 7:15 am]
    └ ☑ Walk for 30 minutes around the town [Every day at 7:45 am]

We no longer see an obscure "Reach success" task. It's now "Become an urban science expert," which is easier to understand. Furthermore, the "Understand what success means to me" concern has a checkmark before it. You did it! We no longer need to keep to the lifestyle described in iterative tasks below it. However, if you enjoyed walking and talking, there is no reason to stop doing so. We only do not treat this as the way to reach the desired goal anymore.

Two more goals you can see are also vague. But I guess you now know what to do with them. We didn't utilize precise non-iterative tasks on our journey, but they fit there perfectly.

☐ Become an urban science expert
├ ☐ Make my lovely hometown better
└ ☐ Get a bachelor degree in Urban Studies
  └ ☐ Read the presentation of the University of Urban Science [On the 2nd of October, 2021 at 7:45 am]

Programming-Related Specific Example of Vaguely Stated Goals

The abstract goal we just decomposed can take you years or even more than a half of your life to accomplish. Let's look at something not that big on the one hand and practical on the other. By saying practical, I mean that this is the goal I try to achieve for almost four months now. I will omit some sensitive information but leave the core idea.

This year I've read the "Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability" book by Daniel Vacanti. I became amused by the possibilities of its use and decided that I want to apply the knowledge from it to my team. I had few more things to consider.

First, there is already a working product based on the ideas from this book. However, I thought that proposing to buy an expensive software because I've read a book would be hasty. I decided to use what's available.

Second, our manager wants us to become experts in the monitoring system we build, and I thought that this was the ideal chance to utilize it.

Third, we use a not widely accepted task management system, and thus I need to understand how to get data from there.

Here we go:

☐ Use our monitoring system to build a dashboard displaying metrics from AAMfP
├ ☐ Discover the instruments we can utilize in our monitoring system
└ ☐ Discover a way to fetch data from our task management system
  └ ☐ Spend 30 minutes investigating task management system API [Every working day at 12:30 pm]

Spend 30 minutes investigating task management system API

[2021-04-01 12:57 pm]
Looked at the issues fetching method.
There is not enough data.

[2021-04-02 12:55 pm]
Discovered two similar issue data fetching methods; can't choose one.

[2021-04-05 1:01 pm]
Tryed to stick to the second one.
It appeared that I couldn't pass the issues query to it.

[2021-04-06 12:56 pm]
Looked at the way the user interface of an issue in the task tracker works.
It turned out they use the not documented API method.

[2021-04-07 1:00 pm]
...

The second goal I stated turned out to be the dead-end one. I couldn't use our application for the purpose I imagined initially. It's time to adjust the whole list.

☐ Build a dashboard displaying metrics from AAMfP
├ ☐ Build node.js application calculating the AAMfP metrics
│ └ ☐ Spend 30 minutes building node.js application calculating the AAMfP metrics [Every working day at 12:30 pm]
└ ☑ Discover a way to fetch data from our task management system
  └ ☑ Spend 30 minutes investigating task management system API [Every working day at 12:30 pm]

The dead-end task was the last part of the approach that I wanted to demonstrate to you.

So How the Distilled Approach Looks?

First, state your primary goal as precisely as possible and as vaguely as necessary to keep flexibility along the path to it.
Then do some decomposition into smaller goals, both precise and vague, whether you feel a need for them.
Use precise iterative tasks and keep a diary in comments to them. Use your previous notes to inspire your today's actions.
When you feel that your intermediate goal completes, mark it as done.
When you see that you've encountered the dead-end, drop your dead-end tasks and look for another path.
Adjust your list to reflect your findings. If you feel a need for rewording, do it at any moment.

We've gone through a long road to understanding the power that we get when we do not state our needs with excess details. We leave room for learning. Also, we eliminate some stress caused by two factors: the need to update the fragile task list whenever something changes and the need to keep in memory a parallel model of your activities when it diverges from your written tasks.

The documentation approach I described leaves room for chance and mistakes. And mistakes, as Gerald Weinberg wrote in his "Becoming a Technical Leader," are, in some sense, the only source for truly original ideas.

Thank you for reading! Please reach out on Twitter if you want to discuss the ideas I describe. I feel some feedback vacuum and need your thoughts.😉