My framework for goals & efficient delivery

What keeps you up at night? Staying productive is challenging when we are missing the purpose. But everyone gets a bit lost once in a while. Here's my approach to seamless work ethics and delivery.

Dear Reader 👋
This is the first article in the mindset 🧠 series, available in full for paid Tech•sistence subscribers. It's an in-depth study of my own motivations and ways of thinking that helps me stay productive. The memories from this series will contribute to a bigger publication I aim to release at some point. Please, keep fingers crossed for it. It would mean the world to me if you share your thoughts — comments are open!

One of the questions I most frequently receive from people who’ve just met me and have been observing me for a while is:

How come you handle so much?

Firstly: I handle as much as I handle. To determine whether that’s a lot or a little, one would need to know everything I’m doing at a given moment, and only I know that. Therefore, we should reconcile with the fact that it’s purely subjective perceptions of other people and only we know how much we actually deliver.

However, the key is not how much we deliver, but how we feel about it. While everyone claims that I deliver for 10 people, I myself may be unhappy, feeling that I’m doing too little.

As long as we’re okay with what we’re accomplishing, everything is fine. The problem is that few people are okay with it. At least I am: even though everyone claims that I do a lot, I still demand more from myself. This affects many things I do outside of work. Sometimes I catch myself multitasking and trying to solve a work problem while playing with my kids. I know it’s wrong. But it’s part of who I am. I can work on it, but I can’t and don’t want to deny that it’s part of me. What I’m getting at is that being in harmony with ourselves should be our constant endeavor and it’s what matters most, and along the way we need to accept that not everything always goes perfectly.

This acceptance must come from us and not from others, because only you know exactly what’s going on in your head and whether the tasks you’re carrying out align with your goals. This is also good evidence that we should abandon all that others think about this topic, because they never have a complete view of our goals, methods, and degree of their realization.

You could say it’s a kind of harmony of goals. I usually find out how important it is to respect it when I fail to achieve it. For example, going on vacation when I have unfinished business makes me feel simply bad about myself and I can’t relax. As a result, I come back even more tired than I was, just to finally finish what I previously failed to do. Understanding this phenomenon has allowed me to plan my free time much better and accept that to rest, you have to prepare with proper, conscious action.

I used to think that I could find peace by resolving all the accumulated issues. However, the number of issues is infinite. The only way is to find inner peace by rejecting the concept that all external matters must be resolved.

How to define goals

Realizing that the struggle with goal achievement and the associated feelings occur internally and should be detached from the opinions of others is only half the battle. Equally important is defining goals in such a way that they come from us, not from how we want others to perceive us. This may be obvious to you, but it wasn't to me. A good example of this is the fact that I completed law studies because the external message suggested that it was a good idea. Maybe if I had known earlier about how to properly select goals in line with my values, I could have saved a lot of time.

The lack of proper goal selection results in a pattern that I've repeated for years. It involves getting caught up in a whirlwind of work to achieve something. Then I feel burned out, take a moment to recover, and throw myself into the next whirlwind. Despite everything, with the right dose of motivation and self-discipline, I can move mountains. However, this method turns out to be suboptimal in the context of my health and overall well-being, as well as relationships with loved ones. Over the years, I found it very difficult to enjoy successes or even recognize them. Something that others perceived as a great result, for me at best provided temporary relief that I finally managed to achieve it and could move on to the next thing that had been on my mind for a long time.

I haven't found a perfect cure for this problem and we have to accept that sometimes it's just like that. In this light, the perspective of work-life balance is not attractive to me at all. I often managed to work almost non-stop for 2 weeks to achieve one important goal and I (and my environment) learned to feel good about it. It's important to me to be able to appreciate what I've done at the end, not just jump to the next task. From personal experience, I also understood that despite everything, rest during the process is beneficial, which I will write about below.

Authenticity

I also realized that this state of affairs can be significantly improved by choosing goals that are authentic, and then methods of their execution that allow me to enjoy the process itself, not just the result.

What are these authentic goals? They come from asking a few important questions:

• What exactly does success mean to me?

• What do I value in life - what are my values?

• How do I want to feel every day - what gives me satisfaction?

These may seem lofty and existential questions. However, having such a moral code allows me to manage goals and time more effectively and plan what is truly important to me. The answers to these questions helped me understand what is AUTHENTIC for me.

Contrary to appearances, it is not obvious.

There are things that others may judge negatively (e.g., divorce), while in a person's life it may be the best thing that could happen (e.g., breaking free from a toxic relationship). It took me a long time to understand that certain social norms, even guidelines from our loved ones and parents (e.g., the best course of study) are wrong, as are the harmful values they uphold (e.g., the work ethic as a value in itself, that nothing in life comes easily, that failures always result from mistakes made). I was a person who was constantly busy for years. This constant busyness is like a badge we pin on ourselves and wear proudly, the alternative cost of which is our health - physical and mental, and relationships.

A good test of whether I should really set a particular goal is to ask myself: would I do it if I couldn't tell anyone about it?

At some point in my life, I simply understood that I should pursue goals that are authentic to me and completely stop worrying about the opinion of others, their criticism of my failures as well as praising my successes. This may not have helped me deliver better, but deliver what actually matters.

Let's get back to these important questions - based on my answers, you might better understand what I mean.

1. What does success mean to me exactly?

   As much as me and my close family are happy.

   Just that. Underneath it hides a lot of things, such as that I am healthy, safe, fulfilled. Underneath feeling safe hides financial security, so maybe the goal will also be the results of my projects. As you can see, digging deeper it's easy to extract individual goals from such a general statement and then prioritize them over time. It's possible that once I'm financially free permanently, I'll be able to cross out the goal of feeling safe. And that's the point.

   However, even such a broadly defined definition of success does a good job for a simple reason: every goal I set in the short term can be checked by reverse engineering with the question: "will delivering it bring me and my loved ones closer to happiness?"

   The answer is not always obvious, but getting to it allows me to understand why I do what I do. And this in turn has a huge impact on motivation.

2. What do I value in life - what are my values?

   There are many, but let's take the most important one: freedom.

   To narrow it down to the current context: it's very easy to filter assumed goals through the prism of whether they meet my definition of freedom, or rather whether the realization of such a goal will be in line with my values.

   Some time ago I went to San Francisco to pitch one of my projects. Then I had several meetings with investors and potentially secured high funding. However, the requirement was to move to California. This might be the pinnacle of many entrepreneurs' dreams. However, for me, it disrupted the foundation of my values: the sense of freedom, and for this reason, I rejected the offer.

   If I know that a given goal will bring me closer to my understanding of success, and is also in line with my values, I have even more rational, internal reasons why I should achieve it, especially when I encounter adversity.