Microgoals

I started working on a long-term project this morning.

Interestingly, the idea of someday completing it doesn’t feel even remotely motivating at this point. It’s simply too far into the future to feel meaningful.

What got me through the morning’s two-hour work session was the idea of completing a narrowly defined set of goals that I’d identified before beginning to work.

The entire project might require me to work through 100 questions, the goal of the session was to just answer the first 2 — and I did which felt great.

Instead of framing what I’m working on as one massive project filled with 100 questions, I think it’s much more encouraging to view it as 50 mini projects with 2 questions each.

In general, I think we benefit from breaking large initiatives into smaller, more attainable units. And any time we’re working on these initiatives, we should be thinking about how many of these units we can check off within the day, the hour, etc.

This framing sprinkles little wins throughout the journey and ends up being a far more potent source of motivation as a result.