From To-Do Lists to To-Be Lists: A New Approach to Goal Setting for 2024

Oh, the breathless possibilities of a new, blank planner.  I am an unapologetic stationary person, and there is no better stationary than a planner in which I’ll organize my entire life, right there in black and white (well, black, purple, and white, in my case) and lay out all of my goals as the calendar turns to 2024.  

I’ve been rolling possible 2024 goals around for about a week.  Before I could really get into them, though, I needed to review my 2023.  I wanted to see what worked, what didn’t, and what I could learn from the past year, so I didn’t spend time re-creating wheels in 2024.  When I reviewed my 2023 planners (I use a quarterly planner, more on that in a minute), I saw there was a lot of good in there: big things I accomplished, fun things I deliberately made time for, long periods of time where I felt in a state of flow while being a physician, ethicist, wife, daughter, granddaughter, niece and friend.  There was also a bit of frankly awful.  But when I think back to those awful times, something in me found the beauty in them.  In her book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, Susan Cain describes the state of feeling bittersweet as “…an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.”  With the death of my dad early this year, I see so much that is stubbornly, sometimes overwhelmingly, beautiful.  How loving and gracious people were to me during that time, and still are even so many months later.  How scrappy I got to figure out the business of a loved one dying (because it is a master class we don’t go through until we have to).  How grief feels to me now, after Mom being gone 23 years, having dozens (hundreds?) of patient deaths, and now Dad being gone.  I’m certainly not grateful for the experience, but I can appreciate the bittersweet of it.  Honestly, my dad’s death probably defined my entire year.  As it should have, I suppose.

Having wrapped my head around 2023, I started marinating on what I wanted for 2024.  When I was writing out possible goals, it took the form of a to-do list.  My love/hate relationship with to-do lists is evolving: ticking off tasks has gotten me this far in life, but I’m attaching my self-worth to whether “enough” of the tasks get done on any given day, and I’m pretty sure that’s not serving me anymore.  So, I decided to zoom out, think about who I want to be in 2024, and then build my goals from there.  It’s like seeing the picture on the puzzle box and then making a plan as opposed to dumping all of the pieces out and waiting to be surprised by the final picture you’ve put together.  With this shift, “lose 20lbs” became, “I want to be strong and balanced enough to easily get the Christmas decorations off of the stop storage shelf in the garage and climb up the three flights of stairs that get me back and forth to my office at the hospital.”  “Take on 10 new 1:1 coaching clients in the first quarter of 2024” became, “I want to be somebody who 1) deftly uses AI to offload repetitive tasks and 2) creates predictable, reproducible systems so that I have the time and brain space to help as many people get out of burn out as possible.”  From these two “big picture” goals, my 2024 to-do list becomes gets me to who I want to be as opposed to just doing things I feel I need to do.  There’s much different energy in that: it’s an energy that pulls instead of pushes.  Maybe the results are the same (but I suspect they’ll be better), but the effort to get there will be much different.

One of my coaches, the fantastic Judith Gaton (https://www.judithgaton.com/), puts her clients through an imaginary red carpet or talk show interview when they’re setting goals.  She describes imagining yourself in the future and having “I totally did this thing” energy or a “Here’s how I overcame these obstacles” story.  What are you wearing?  How are you styled?  Who are you with?  Who do you have to thank?  What did you learn?  What is your message for somebody going through this very thing right now?  Taking yourself through this exercise prompts you to brainstorm your path to achieving your goals.  My “I want to be strong and stable enough for Christmas decorations and stairs” becomes “Lift weights twice per week, do yoga twice weekly.”  My “deftly uses AI and systems” becomes “spend 10 minutes experimenting with ChatGPT for something you write, professionally or personally, every day” and “check out that Coursera course about AI prompts you heard about” (shout out to my lovely colleague Dr. Michael Miller for that last one).

Now, that bit about quarterly planning.  For years, I’ve used the Full Focus Planner (https://fullfocusstore.com/pages/planner, shout out to my lovely colleague Dr. Bill Cutrer). It prompts users to break big goals down into quarterly ones and also review how the past quarter went before moving on to the next.  It’s taught me that a year is an entirely arbitrary period of time and that the binary “0 or 1, did you achieve your goal in 365 days or not?” isn’t particularly useful for me.  What matters way more is the process of achieving the goal, not whether I achieve the goal in the exact manner I planned.  Focusing on the process of achieving the goal lets me figure out if what I’m doing is working rather than focusing solely on the goal and then beating myself up if I’m not achieving it.  Look back on the first quarter of 2024 and see that my schedule didn’t let me lift weights and practice yoga twice a week?  Cool, what do I need to do to make that happen?  Or, cool, do I still even want to be able to pull the Christmas decorations off of the top shelf in the garage and climb three flights of stairs anymore?  Because goals do not have to be set in stone.  We can let them go if we’ve given our level best to achieve them, but through the process, we've figured out that the work necessary to achieve that goal is not something we’re willing to do right now.  I will say that my health goal will persist throughout 2024: I’m constantly envious of the cardiologists bounding up the stairs with ease, and I honestly thought I was going to die a gruesome TBI-and-broken-pelvis-associated death pulling the Christmas decorations down this year.