KD^3C^3 - 20260118 I like modern jazz
Alrighty, we’re a couple weeks into the year. Let’s talk about goals.
I set some goals last year, and I did not meet many of them. But it’s not all bad, because I tried. Sometimes I wonder if the winter months are the wrong time to set goals, and that maybe things go better re: the new year in the southern hemisphere, where January 1 is a time of brightness and heat instead of cold and dark. But I’m probably romanticizing it all. It’s never a bad time to look at your goals and see what worked and what didn’t.
I think I first learned about the SMART goals acronym in the year 2000. By some metrics, that was a while ago now. But I still see people talking about SMART Goals. The actual meaning of the acronym isn’t as important as the fact that it spells out “smart” and that makes people feel intelligent for using/talking about them. (let’s put aside that intelligence as a concept is pretty broken and has historically been used to further marginalize others, we don’t have time for that now). If they were called FOOLS Goals people would probably hold them in lower regard.
F - Focused; goals should be narrowly defined. If you set your goals too broadly you’l just end up tuning around trying a bunch of different things and be slow to make progress.
O - Optimized; goals should focus on the biggest impact; where can a small change make a big difference?
O - Ordered; Goals should be broken down into a series of accomplishable steps, one after another. With only one thing to focus on at a time you don’t get distracted.
L - Length; you should decide how long is reasonable to accomplish the goal. Having an expected length can let you easily check in on if yyou are proceeding at the correct pace.
S - Succeed-able; How do you know if you accomplished your goal or not? Is there a point when it can be finished, if not it’s not a goal, but rather a behavior or practice. Focus on success and failure instead of more ambiguous metrics.
Is that better than a SMART Goal? I don’t know, but it’s not significantly worse to my eyes. And considering I made it up at 5AM while still kind of asleep I think it proves my point that what works the acronym spells out is probably more important than the content itself.
I’ve set SMART goals before on different projects and things in my life, and I cannot point to a time where making sure that I got all five parts of the goal written down were instrumental in me accomplishing the goal. Some of the goals that I have set for myself and then successfully achieved were pretty vague to begin with. Many of the more structured goals I have set have felt restrictive and in those cases I feel like that becomes a reason for me to quit, or at least modify them mid way through.
But hey, if SMART goals have revolutionized your life, that’s great. I’ve been talks about them for more than 25 years now and I can’t say the concept has ever really helped me accomplish anything. Use the tools that work for you.
Do I have any goals for the upcoming year? Not really. I have some thing I’d like to try, and I hope my focus on them lasts long enough for me to make some significant progress. But I also know my interests and attention wander pretty easily. So outside of the big things like “Stay employed, don’t die, bathe regularly” I’m going to instead try to pick some directions to go. I’ll follow my interests and see where they lead me. Here are some examples.
Digital sovereignty - That sounds a lot more regal that I mean it to. But after some shenanigans with my managed hosting provider last year, where I had to scramble to make sure my social media server continued to exist (thanks Riley, for your help!), I want to keep exploring self-hosting. I want to control my data and in some cases I mean that very literally. I want a server in my living room (or wherever) that I can touch directly. Where I can plug in a keyboard and mouse and make the computer do the things I want it to, and nobody else has any control over it. And if it can be accessible via the public internet, that’s even cooler. Fun side note: When I first tried to post this, the website I host my newsletter on was broken. If you’re reading this it got fixed, but I think self-hosting my newsletter might be my next project.
Reading - after a few years of bouncing off books over and over again, I’ve food myself reading more in the last few months and I’m going to try to keep enjoying that. It started with a reread of Anathem, which held up about as well as it did on my first read through back when it was published (cool ideas, wandering plot, shrug of an ending). I’ve since made it through the latest Murderbot book, and devoured the first 60% of the first Dungeon Crawler Carl book in like a week. Whatever mental blocks I had up around reading seem to be falling away and I hope I can keep that momentum up for a little while.
Watching - I keep buying things to watch! My Backlog still sits at around 168 movies, but I’ve also had a lot of luck in (re)watching TV shows I like. In particular I’ve had fun watching One Season Weirdos, those shows that had an interesting premise, but got cancelled after not finding a huge audience. I fully admit to having a broad definition of show that fit the category, because I included the First season of Glee (the only season I acknowledge) Power Rangers RPM (it’s a one and done story, like all the later seasons of Power Rangers) and Season 4 of House (It’s like a standalone season, with a complete arc, something the rest of the show never really matched). But I am also planning to include more obvious examples like Tremors: The TV Series, Cop Rock, Wonderfalls, Other Space, Kingdom Hospital, and others as I think of them. Having a single season of a show to watch is nice because it gives me a manageable scope and a default to put on when I catch myself flipping between all the available options.
I set some goals last year, and I did not meet many of them. But it’s not all bad, because I tried. Sometimes I wonder if the winter months are the wrong time to set goals, and that maybe things go better re: the new year in the southern hemisphere, where January 1 is a time of brightness and heat instead of cold and dark. But I’m probably romanticizing it all. It’s never a bad time to look at your goals and see what worked and what didn’t.
I think I first learned about the SMART goals acronym in the year 2000. By some metrics, that was a while ago now. But I still see people talking about SMART Goals. The actual meaning of the acronym isn’t as important as the fact that it spells out “smart” and that makes people feel intelligent for using/talking about them. (let’s put aside that intelligence as a concept is pretty broken and has historically been used to further marginalize others, we don’t have time for that now). If they were called FOOLS Goals people would probably hold them in lower regard.
F - Focused; goals should be narrowly defined. If you set your goals too broadly you’l just end up tuning around trying a bunch of different things and be slow to make progress.
O - Optimized; goals should focus on the biggest impact; where can a small change make a big difference?
O - Ordered; Goals should be broken down into a series of accomplishable steps, one after another. With only one thing to focus on at a time you don’t get distracted.
L - Length; you should decide how long is reasonable to accomplish the goal. Having an expected length can let you easily check in on if yyou are proceeding at the correct pace.
S - Succeed-able; How do you know if you accomplished your goal or not? Is there a point when it can be finished, if not it’s not a goal, but rather a behavior or practice. Focus on success and failure instead of more ambiguous metrics.
Is that better than a SMART Goal? I don’t know, but it’s not significantly worse to my eyes. And considering I made it up at 5AM while still kind of asleep I think it proves my point that what works the acronym spells out is probably more important than the content itself.
I’ve set SMART goals before on different projects and things in my life, and I cannot point to a time where making sure that I got all five parts of the goal written down were instrumental in me accomplishing the goal. Some of the goals that I have set for myself and then successfully achieved were pretty vague to begin with. Many of the more structured goals I have set have felt restrictive and in those cases I feel like that becomes a reason for me to quit, or at least modify them mid way through.
But hey, if SMART goals have revolutionized your life, that’s great. I’ve been talks about them for more than 25 years now and I can’t say the concept has ever really helped me accomplish anything. Use the tools that work for you.
Do I have any goals for the upcoming year? Not really. I have some thing I’d like to try, and I hope my focus on them lasts long enough for me to make some significant progress. But I also know my interests and attention wander pretty easily. So outside of the big things like “Stay employed, don’t die, bathe regularly” I’m going to instead try to pick some directions to go. I’ll follow my interests and see where they lead me. Here are some examples.
Digital sovereignty - That sounds a lot more regal that I mean it to. But after some shenanigans with my managed hosting provider last year, where I had to scramble to make sure my social media server continued to exist (thanks Riley, for your help!), I want to keep exploring self-hosting. I want to control my data and in some cases I mean that very literally. I want a server in my living room (or wherever) that I can touch directly. Where I can plug in a keyboard and mouse and make the computer do the things I want it to, and nobody else has any control over it. And if it can be accessible via the public internet, that’s even cooler. Fun side note: When I first tried to post this, the website I host my newsletter on was broken. If you’re reading this it got fixed, but I think self-hosting my newsletter might be my next project.
Reading - after a few years of bouncing off books over and over again, I’ve food myself reading more in the last few months and I’m going to try to keep enjoying that. It started with a reread of Anathem, which held up about as well as it did on my first read through back when it was published (cool ideas, wandering plot, shrug of an ending). I’ve since made it through the latest Murderbot book, and devoured the first 60% of the first Dungeon Crawler Carl book in like a week. Whatever mental blocks I had up around reading seem to be falling away and I hope I can keep that momentum up for a little while.
Watching - I keep buying things to watch! My Backlog still sits at around 168 movies, but I’ve also had a lot of luck in (re)watching TV shows I like. In particular I’ve had fun watching One Season Weirdos, those shows that had an interesting premise, but got cancelled after not finding a huge audience. I fully admit to having a broad definition of show that fit the category, because I included the First season of Glee (the only season I acknowledge) Power Rangers RPM (it’s a one and done story, like all the later seasons of Power Rangers) and Season 4 of House (It’s like a standalone season, with a complete arc, something the rest of the show never really matched). But I am also planning to include more obvious examples like Tremors: The TV Series, Cop Rock, Wonderfalls, Other Space, Kingdom Hospital, and others as I think of them. Having a single season of a show to watch is nice because it gives me a manageable scope and a default to put on when I catch myself flipping between all the available options.