Your Life Goals Document

What is the big picture for the next 5 years of your life? 

Imagine that you time-travel 5 years forward to visit your Future Self. Imagine that you discover that Future Self has just been forced to quit doing the “fun stuff.” (You get to define what the “fun stuff” is, and nobody gets to criticize your choices.)

Now ask Future Self, “What do you most regret not having finished?”

You’re Guaranteed to Regret Something

Let’s be honest—this is a scary exercise. No matter how much you get done in the next 5 years, you’re guaranteed to regret something. That’s the nature of life. It’s fast-paced. We all put more on our plates than we can possibly eat. We all get side-tracked by stuff coming out of the blue. We can’t do it all.

So this is really an exercise in defining those pesky priorities. 

This all came home to me less than 2 months ago when suddenly my day job wasn’t there. I’ve been at the same job for 20 years. Doing cool sciencey kind of stuff. Don’t ask me what I was doing unless you’ve got about 3 hours, because I’ll talk your ear off. And you really don’t want to know. The point is that suddenly a big chunk of my “fun stuff” was off the table. Maybe permanently, maybe not. And that forced me to think about what other “fun stuff” I’d been sidelining because my day job was keeping me too busy. I got a rare chance to rethink my priorities.

To make it all crazier, just before my day job evaporated, I had spent about 3 weeks in bed recovering from a tough injury to my hamstrings/glutes that left my sciatic nerve irritated 24 hours a day. At the time, it felt like “this is never going to get better.” That was miserable. Would I ever get to work on the fun stuff again? Of course I did get better, and I’m back in the saddle doing the stuff I consider fun. 

But it forced me to think about what I’d regret most if I couldn’t do any more fun stuff, ever again. That’s a hard question. A scary question. A question we all will eventually have to face, because there will come a day when each one of us has to hang up the spurs. And we can’t predict when that’ll happen.

Here Are My Answers

My answers are not the same as your answers, because we’re different people, and we define the “fun stuff” differently. But I encourage you to think hard about this, because it might just change your life. 

To help jiggle your neurons a bit, I’ll tell you my own answers. Here are the things outside my day job that I’d regret not having done, if I had to quit right now:

1. Fiction writing. I am currently writing a novel. When it’s done, it’ll be my 9^th published novel. I have another 5 that I really, really, really want to write. I know the titles for most of these, and I know what they’ll be about. They’ll complete the two main series of novels that I’ve been working on for my entire writing career. This is right at the top of my list. I would be very sad not to finish them all. 
2. Marketing. All novelists hate marketing. But if you want to get your novels read, you need to market them effectively. There are things I could do to get my novels out there more. I’d like to do some of those things. I’d be quite sad if I didn’t do at least some of these. 
3. Project Chronologicus. This is a project that pulls together my love of history, math, and software development. I want to write code that can mine ancient historical documents for chronological information and then construct the best timeline of events. “Best” has a precise mathematical definition, accounting for the natural fuzziness in all historical documents, while also detecting possible outliers or errors in the data. This would be useful to me in writing my historical novels. It would also make a few thousand historians happy to have a tool like this. This is an unsolved problem, so it might fail. But I’d be sad if I didn’t at least try. We climb mountains because they’re there.

My Life Goals Document

I created what I call a “Life Goals Document” that has 5 Project Groups:

• Fiction Writing
• Marketing
• Chronologicus
• Learning 
• Software Development

As you can see, 3 of these Project Groups are the big 3 categories of things I would regret not doing. The other 2 Project Groups support them in some way.

I filled in below each of these Project Groups with small projects or milestone tasks that I could conceivably work on this year. It’s really enough to look ahead just one year. I can’t see beyond this year, and I don’t want to put too much on my lists, because that would get too overwhelming. 

These lists are what I call “quasi-sorted.” The first item on each list is the next logical project or task to tackle. I highlight it in blue to indicate that it’s the next thing. Everything below it is highlighted in green to indicate that it’s for “later.” But the green items aren’t sorted. I won’t know for sure what order to do these tasks until I get there. 

Once I finish a task, I change the highlighting on it to be yellow, to indicate that it’s done. So each Project Group list shows some tasks highlighted yellow that are completed. Then it shows one task highlighted blue that’s the current thing. And below that are all the tasks highlighted green that are for later this year.

Every day when I’m deciding what I’m going to work on today, I take a quick look at my Life Goals Document. It reminds me what’s important. Because I already know what’s urgent. The urgent stuff always gets done, because it’s urgent. The important stuff needs to get a little airtime too, or it’ll be forgotten. I don’t want to forget the important stuff. 

Now It’s Your Turn

Want to play? You can do the same thing I did. Here some steps that can help you put together your own personal Life Goals Document that will carry you through the rest of this year:

• Pretend for a moment that you will get absolutely nothing done in the next 5 years, and ask your Future Self what they regret not having done the most. Keep the list short. This should be Future Self’s biggest regrets, not all possible regrets. 
• Make a Life Goals Document. It should have a few main Project Groups for this year. Just for this year. Let next year take care of itself. Include any of the Project Groups on your Biggest Regrets list that you think you could actually work on this year. 
• Fill in some actionable tasks or projects on each of your Project Groups. Don’t go overboard here. Keep it reasonable. What could you get done this year, given the amount of time and energy you have right now? If color-coding helps you, then color-code your Life Goals Document. If it doesn’t help, then don’t. 
• Make time every day to look at your Life Goals Document. Not to make you feel guilty. Just to keep your neurons firing on what the “fun stuff” is. The important fun stuff. The stuff you don’t want to regret. 

Baseball players like to say, “keep your eye on the ball.” That’s good advice if you want to hit that thing flying toward you at 90 miles per hour. 

If you want to get the fun stuff done, then the analogous advice is, “keep your eye on the fun stuff.” Because real-life is flying at you at 90 miles per hour, every day of the week. A lot of it is urgent but not important, so you have to do it. But some of it is neither urgent nor important, and you can let it go by without any regret if you’re constantly keeping your eye on what the real fun stuff is.