Here is an imperfect productivity method which I think is interesting and could be worth trying for many people. The method is for helping you achieve your main goals. Please read the whole essay before trying to use (or criticize) this method because there are clarifications and extra details later.
The Method
Write down your goals. Include at least 10 goals, maybe around 25, but don't worry about writing down every little goal. Try to include all your potentially important goals.
Then order your goal list from most to least important. Write the date and save the document.
Do it again a month later.
Then do it again a month later.
Repeat until your top five goals are the same for three months in a row.
Then focus on your top five goals. And stop doing everything else on your lists. Avoid those things. Don’t do a little of them. They are what will stop you from working on your top five goals.
Picking five goals to focus on long term only works well if your goals are stable. You can’t pursue goals in a longterm way until you’re confident you’ll have the same goals in the future.
This method is an improvement on a method that was falsely attributed to Warren Buffet. It said to write down your top 25 goals, then do the top five and avoid the other 20. The other 20 take away energy from the top goals.
Details
However, that advice didn’t consider people who keep changing their goals. Frequently changing goals is a common problem. People often come up with some new short term goal, but while they’re doing it they think it’s important and will last. And they do that over and over. If you make a list every month, and you’re changing goals often, at least you’ll see that you’re changing goals. You’ll have written data to show you that you haven’t yet figured out some goals you care about in a stable way over time.
My method doesn't offer a quick win. It'll take at least two months to get started (you can do your third list two months after you start because the first list is done after zero months). If you don't have stable goals, then my method becomes a journaling method instead of a productivity method. That's OK. It's useful track your goals and see how stable or unstable they are. Being aware of what's going on may help contribute to you coming up with a good idea about what to do.
This advice requires writing down major goals, not “eat meals so I don’t starve to death”. If you write everything important in life, you’ll need to pursue more than five things. Just write down substantial achievements you’re aiming for or whole topics to work on. In other words, write down aspirational goals not background goals nor micro goals.
For example, you might have a photography hobby. Is that in your top five? If not, maybe you should recognize that you’re never going to be great at photography. That means you shouldn’t spend significant money on equipment, shouldn’t read books to try to get good at it, shouldn’t try to pursue making money from it, shouldn’t research new photography techniques. Sure you can take a few pictures with your phone sometimes but don’t let it distract you from your main goals in life.
Trying to work towards being great at twenty things is a way to never be great at anything.
Don’t spend a month on something – and be so busy you don’t make progress on your main goals – and then next month switch to a new thing that gets its own month, and repeat. People can keep that up for years and never make much progress on anything. Often, they think whatever they’re doing this month is in their top five goals. And next month they have a different top five goals that includes a new thing but not the thing from last month.
Also, people commonly decide to do their top goals later instead of first. This happens on a one day timeframe because they want to be at their best when working on their best goals. They want to read about the most important topics when they’re fully awake, practice those topics when in a good mood with no distractions, etc. They try to take their top goals seriously by allocating their best most productive time to those goals. But they don’t have enough of their best time, so their top goals get neglected. To make progress and become great, you need to take imperfect time, when you’re tired or distracted, and use it on your top goals.
People also commonly put off top goals until later on a large timescale. They plan to do university first, or get their career going and get several promotions, or get married and have kids, or all of those things. Then they're 40 and they have new goals and they never try for their old goals or just do them a little as a hobby.
The point of the top five goals method is to admit to yourself that some things are less important to you and stop using significant resources (including time, energy, attention and money) on them. The point is to do some prioritizing: to make some intentional decisions not to pursue some things which will cut down on distractions and help you achieve your top goals better. Try to work on one of your top goals every day that you work on anything (rest days, sick days, holidays, vacations, etc. are allowed). Or at least work on a top goal on any day where you work on anything that isn't for paid work.
You can rest. You can be busy with your job. You don’t have to try to make progress all the time. But don’t go try to make progress on something else that’s less important. Don’t practice a minor hobby because you’re too tired to practice something important. Either rest or do the important thing. Figure out some ways to work on your top goals that are fun and easy enough to do when you're tired, distracted, unfocused, not in a great mood, etc.
Five Year Projects
It can be useful to think in terms of accomplishments that take five years. What are some projects you'd like to do that you could finish in five years? After high school, you can plan to do five of those big projects over the next 25 years. You might get to do ten or more projects but you can’t plan that far ahead and shouldn’t count on being healthy and productive for that long. You can work on multiple projects at the same time, but then they take longer so you still get to finish five big projects in the next 25 years. Undergraduate and graduate degrees at school are each projects. Getting established in a career is a project. Getting a spouse is a project.
If I recall correctly, long ago I read something from Steve Yegge about thinking of your life as having a very limited number of five-year projects that you can do.
Some projects, like my philosophy work, are big enough to count as more than one five-year project.
Conscious and Subconscious Goals
This final section is somewhat tangential from the productivity method above but is relevant to pursuing goals.
Valuing a goal in a long term way often requires thinking about what’s important and why, not just trying things until you happen to stick with some of them. Hoping something sticks long term, and you really like it on an ongoing basis, requires luck because it doesn’t work well for the majority of people. And it’s hard to plan around because you don’t know if you might quit next month or next year. You don’t have explicit reasons for doing it, so if your intuition changes to not want to do it, you’ll have no counter-arguments. Often, when people stick with something for a while, they get pretty good at it, but they never get great. Sometimes they keep doing it without quitting but stop improving. Actually getting great requires luck or conscious reasons for valuing what you’re doing. (Only having conscious reasons won’t work either. You need to intuitively like your goals. You need your conscious and subconscious to be in agreement.)
A common way people show they’re bad with long term goals is cheating on their spouse. Some people are unhappy for a long time and purposefully go looking for someone else. But others are happy enough in their marriage and cheat with someone they just met, just for short term fun, because they’re short-sighted, and then they quickly regret it. They didn’t ever effectively integrate the value of their marriage into their thinking and decision making. It never became intuitive to them. They’d have to stop and think to remember it matters. They’d have to remind themselves about upsides of their marriage. But sometimes they don’t stop, think and remind themselves.
If you want to have stable goals, they need to be automatic and intuitive. If they just seem like good goals intellectually, then they aren’t yet your goals. They’re candidate goals. For them to become your own goals in a serious way, you must make them an intuitive, automatic part of your thinking. Turn them into habits. Get them into your subconscious. Become the kind of person who has immediate emotional responses to them. If you haven’t done that yet, don’t pretend to yourself that the goal matters much to you. Don’t expect to get great at it. Until it’s part of your subconscious, you shouldn’t expect to get very far with it, and you shouldn’t try to use willpower to force yourself.
Instead, if you don’t have automatized goals, you need to introspect about what you already like and value, and why (or, if necessary, first improve your introspection skills). You need to figure out what will actually work for who you are. You can also try to make some changes to your thinking when there are clear problems. But in general you shouldn’t try to change just because something else sounds nice. Changing is hard and needs to be to fix important errors where you can clearly identify what the error is, why it’s bad, and a solution.
For more information about how I think about intuition, see:
Messages