For many people (myself included), we tend to try and organize our lives around goals. When we think about what comes next (or what we hope comes next), what we want to achieve, the things we hope to accomplish, they tend to revolve around things we can check off a list. The goal might be to go to college, graduate from college, become a doctor, achieve a certain level of financial success, start a company, get a certain promotion, get married, have children– all the big stuff.
As I’ve been reflecting on what I hope comes next for me in my life, I have noticed myself slipping into this familiar thought pattern. I realized though, that while in many ways this is useful, it might not be the most useful mental framework to use. One of the challenges that comes with setting goals is that we achieve them. While this is satisfying, the satisfaction is almost always fairly short lived. Ask people who have had a lot of success in their lives how long the enjoyment from reaching a goal lasts, and the answer is almost always that it fades fairly quickly. In its place, a new goal will arise.
This cycle– set goal, achieve goal, set new goal– pretty quickly leads to the recognition that we must learn to live, derive meaning from, and find enjoyment in the process of achieving goals. This leads to understandings like the journey is the point, the enjoyment is in the struggle. But what we need to do in order to achieve goals may, or may not, be what is actually important to us. When we set a goal, and then organize our life and our processes around that goal, we are inherently optimizing for goal accomplishment. We might like the end result, but dislike the actual process of getting there. When we organize around the goal, we tend to discount our dislike of the process, because we understand it’s in service of a greater good. Maybe that makes sense, maybe it does not, maybe there’s another way.
What if, instead of thinking about and organizing around goals and accomplishments, we organized around how we actually like to spend our time? Suppose my goal is to make money so I can retire so I can spend my time hiking. What if instead of that, I inverted the question to say that my goal is to spend my time hiking, and then ask the question from there, how can I structure my life so that my time is spent hiking? In that scenario, when spending time hiking is the goal, perhaps the best way to do it is to make money and retire. Or perhaps, if the goal is to spend time on the trail, there are better ways of making that happen.
This shift has potentially profound implications. If the goal is to have kids, that’s great, but it says almost nothing about what happens after the child is born. Instead, my how-I-spend-my-time goal might be to spend time with my kids, or to spend my time parenting. There are many ways to raise a family, including making enough money to outsource the parenting to nannies. I’m not saying that is bad, but that may or may not be what we have in mind when we develop a mental image of having a family.
If we start by thinking about what is important to us, there is almost always a direct time-spending corollary. If community is important to me, a goal might be to spend my time in community with others. If I notice that I love to travel, my goal might be to spend my time traveling. Our typical approach to life is often to think about what unpleasant things we must do (say, work) in order to do the more enjoyable thing that we want to do (skiing), rather than starting from the end and working backwards. If what we want to do is ski, why do we put it second, and organize work around that?
Doing this requires thoughtfulness. It does not work if it's overly hedonistic, or if the way we think we want to spend our time does not really bring us joy. If I love vacation, so I want to spend all my time on vacation might not move the needle– on vacation from what? However, saying that I’d like to spend time traveling is different– there are probably ways of arranging life to travel if that’s really the priority.
Focusing on spending time doing the things that make us happy can really clarify what’s important. For example, I find taking care of people rewarding and satisfying, but prior authorizations and paperwork? Not so much. Making the care the focus though helps me think through how I want to spend my time. I want to find ways of spending my day using my medical knowledge to take care of people– so maybe that means more time at camp, structuring my day in the office differently (more tools to minimize paperwork?), or perhaps other things altogether.
Our life is only lived in the present moment. We can get lost in the past or preoccupied with the future, but the only time we ever have is the present. Thinking about how we spend our time, our present moment, is a powerful perspective adjustment to thinking about what we want to accomplish in our lives.
I’ll share my (partial) list that I came up with when I did this. I don’t pretend this is a final draft, a complete draft, or right for you, but maybe it helps you start to come up with what your list looks like: With my wife●outdoors●writing●skiing●traveling●in community●being of service●with my kids●making the world a better place● in nature● in the mountains● with friends●teaching. I do not yet know for sure how all this comes together, but I found it a helpful filter through which to look.
Cheers,
Doc
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