Aadil Mamujee

December 2018

I wanted to share my personal process for goal setting and living more deliberately, that I’ve been doing for the last 8 years. I always do it around this time of the year so thought it was a timely moment to share 🙂

My objective in life is to maximise both long term happiness and purpose which, although is a generic statement, is a common objective for most people in the world. This objective is very hard to achieve without breaking it down into small, actionable pieces, much like personal OKRs.

I break this objective into 5 ‘pillars’:

1. Family/Friends
2. Partner and Kids
3. Health
4. Career
5. Hobbies/Leisure

For the last 8 years, I’ve gone through this process at the same time each year (between Christmas and the New Year) and conduct a half-year and end-of-year check in where I rate myself from 1–3 on each goal (1 is good and 3 is bad).

Here is a screenshot from the google doc template that I use:

Please feel free to use the template for yourself (by creating a copy), and do share any feedback.

When I first started this process, I realized that I was bad at both setting the right goals, and having an actionable process to be able to hit my goals. Over the years I’ve improved at setting goals (mostly by setting more achievable goals) and now have a system to make sure that I am focused on 3–5 things each month/week/day that allow me to make progress towards each goal. Very practically, I have a persistent to-do list and a set of monthly goals in Evernote and before I go to sleep I slot tasks/reminders for the following day into my calendar to make sure I get them done.

For example, if I have an objective to be more informed about the world, and I’ve set the goal to read the Economist weekly I will create a recurring weekly meeting in my calendar at the same time (Sunday at 8pm) to sit down and read it.

Overall, I find it’s really helped me improve the quality of my life and be more deliberate about how I live on a day to day basis, and I’d highly recommend you try it!