Quarterly goal reviews

My wife is responsible for many good habits in my life, but today I want to write about just one of them - goal setting.

About 3 years ago (I think - she might have been doing it for longer), my wife and I started to put together our goals for the year at the beginning of every year, usually in November / December of the year before. We have consistently broken the goals down into 8 major categories:

• Hobbies
• Health
• Family
• Relationships
• Knowledge
• Community

Within each category, we put in 3-5 goals for the year ahead. Examples are:

1. Pray 5 times a day (Community)
2. Read 20 books (Knowledge)
3. Europe trip (Relationships)

…you get the point.

While this isn’t revolutionary by any means, it genuinely made a big difference to the way I approach my days, especially my free time. I am someone who has a lot of disparate interests - programming, reading, learning, piano, smart home tinkering, local AI tinkering, physical fitness, and so on. The problem is that I tend to lose depth in all this breadth - I’ll do 20% of one thing, then move to 10% of another, then move to the third thing, and so on, without really feeling like I ‘accomplished’ anything at all in the process since I’m doing everything half-baked.

What the yearly goals allowed me to do was (a) crystallize what I wanted to do in one place while actually thinking about it, and (b) keep that as a permanent, immutable reference that I could keep looking at throughout the year. On the second point, something we do that I think is disproportionately useful is stick our goals on our wardrobe doors - this is right in front of our bed and means that I see my goals every day, and technically they are right in front of me when I wake up (I’m half-blind without my glasses, so I won’t pretend I’m actually able to read anything when I wake up). Anyway, having that reference be easily accessible is in my opinion the biggest factor in helping me ‘focus’ my attention towards my goals throughout the year.

It has happened so many times that I won’t read the goals for a few weeks, and then skim through them on a random day - suddenly I realize that I’ve been neglecting goals A, C and F, and I’ll have a burst of motivation to get back into those, and to stop spending time on whatever distraction I’ve been busy with in those last few weeks.

So all of this is in defence of setting goals, full stop - it gives me clarity, focus and a target to keep looking at through the year.

However, me being me, I usually end up over-committing on goals as well - I try to do too much in too many areas and come the end of the year (or even partway through), I realize that there are a bunch of goals that I haven’t even started to think of, and a lot more that I’m just doing lip-service to by doing the bare minimum. With AI, especially this year, I think I really over-estimate what I can achieve (even though it genuinely has helped lift my productivity, it’s not as much as I’d like to think). The goals where I’m able to actually put time in show progress, but that list is a significantly filtered version of what I originally started with.

I recently watched a MasterClass from Cal Newport on the topic of ‘Slow Productivity’ - it’s based on his book, which we have at home but I haven’t had the chance to read, so I thought a 2-hour MasterClass could get me the important stuff and hopefully help save me from this tendency of over-committing.

One of the biggest ‘themes’ that came out of what I watched was the concept of doing less, but better. This is actually a school of thought that I have heard more and more of even at work - brands are talking about doing fewer media campaigns in a year, but making sure the ones they do are bigger, better and can deliver sizeable impact. The idea here is the same: limit the things you want to work on so that you can really give them your all and be productive.

So the first place I decided to implement this thinking was in my yearly goals - I did feel like I was trying to ‘do too much’ with them, and even though I am genuinely interested in all the different orthogonal aspects of life that were part of my goals, it just was not feasible or realistic for me to make continuous progress on all of them throughout the year, not with a day job anyway. My habit tracker is a consistent reminder of this - I could try to focus on listening to podcasts, or programming, but it would invariably come at the expense of reading, or piano, or yoga, or something else.

So what’s the solution?

Quarterly goals!

I’ve only just started this with Q4 2026 (+1 month extra in September), but I’m basically going to pick 1-2 things that I want to focus on in these 4 months and genuinely try to give them more effort and focus than I’m otherwise able to do across the 7-8 things I’d like to do in a year.

To keep myself accountable, here’s one of the goals I will be focusing on: re-learning linear algebra, initially from Khan Academy and then potentially looking for other sources once I’ve exhausted that content (maybe YouTube lecture uploads from MIT/Stanford etc.) I think linear algebra is so fundamental to what I do not just at work, but also in anything AI-related, that it makes a lot of sense to refresh the fundamental understanding that is probably now pretty rusty thanks to 11 years in corporate life (another topic I’d like to write about someday).

There’s a couple of other goals that I’ll keep to myself for now, but the gist of it is to control quantity and focus on quality. I think this is a good maxim to live by, but it’s uncomfortable to follow. At least personally, there is always this guilt that I’m ‘not doing enough’ and losing ground in the rat race to be successful that we’ve all successfully been forced into, but that’s part of the challenge. In fact, I think that’s the real challenge - once you’re able to control your brain to slow down and not need the endless amount of stimulation we’ve gotten used to relying on, then focusing on a couple of goals for 3 months at a time is almost relatively easy.

As an aside, of course you need to make sure these goals are things of genuine interest - you can give yourself just one goal to work towards over 3 months, but if it’s not something you find interesting then you won’t be able to make any progress towards it, no matter how many distractions you eliminate.

So anyway, that’s it - this was the first attempt at me writing a shorter ‘note’ vs. something more fleshed out. One of my other goals is writing more frequently, so I am going to try doing more of these instead of my usual perfectionist attempts at the ideal essay, so here’s hoping. I will check in on my quarterly progress in January with a follow-up post to see how I did!