Intentionality and Agile Teams

Intentionality is critical to nearly every complex, valuable, or long-term goal. If you don’t have a detailed understanding of why you’re doing something, you lack a critical decision-making guide and your opportunities to fail begin to multiply. The range of potential pivoting justifications broadens to the point that abandonment becomes an option when things become even slightly difficult.

It’s possible for mature, agile, and otherwise highly functional software engineering teams to operate with surprisingly little intentionality. You can probably think of examples. Maybe your team is an example; however, in nearly every case, intentionality is going to improve the way a team operates, makes decisions, and cultivates a healthy culture. While there are many ways to introduce more intentionality to your work, I firmly believe in one model that promises significant results relative to its degree of implementation effort.

CMV

This approach ensures that your goals’ intentions are well-defined by looking at them from three separate perspectives. I call this CMV.

CMV stands for the three perspectives: Credo, Mission, and Vision. These are terms you may have heard associated with businesses or brands, but they’re valuable tools for professional, personal, entrepreneurial, or creative goals as well.

Here’s a breakdown:

Credo

• Beliefs about what’s valuable, important, or desirable

• A Latin word that means a set of fundamental beliefs or a guiding principle

• Begins with “I believe…”

• Example: I believe that individuals in malaria-afflicted countries should have the opportunity to live long, healthy lives.

Mission

• Your purpose or calling. What you’re hoping to accomplish.

• Begins with “To…”

• Example: To increase malaria treatment availability in afflicted countries

Vision

• An image of the Mission accomplished (or being accomplished)

• An ideal future state (framed within the scope of your influence)—though not necessarily an end state—which would be possible only if your Mission was successful

• Reflects high standards

• Creates a visual scene

• Worded in the present progressive (“it is”) or present perfect progressive (“it has been”) tense

• Example: The cities and towns of historically malaria-afflicted areas are bustling with healthy humans; when doctors encounter a case of malaria, they’re genuinely alarmed and puzzled because it's so rare an occurrence.

Note that your Mission is an actionable manifestation of your Credo, and your Vision validates your Mission. Everything flows together.

You can (and should) develop a CMV for every remotely complex goal or undertaking in your life that you value. Scale doesn’t matter; the exact same structure can be applied to anything from cutting carbs or managing social anxiety to building a business empire.

A CMV:

• Brings everything you do into focus and lets you make progress toward your goal with intentionality

• Ensures you have a quickly accessible and simple way to illustrate your intentions, motivations, and purpose to others

• Helps inform decisions and risk tolerance

• Reminds you what to value/prioritize vs. what to disregard

• Sparks insight and provides guidance when you’re unsure about your next step

• Keeps you more intimately engaged with your goal and therefore less likely to give up when things become difficult

CMVs for Technical Teams

The above general guidance is applicable to personal, professional, entrepreneurial, or creative undertakings of any sort, but when crafting CMVs for/with a technical team, there are a few more considerations:

You only really have to share your Mission.

Viewed practically, your Credo is a tool for defining and understanding your Mission, and your Vision is a test against which you can measure your success and stay focused. As such, your Mission is in many cases the aspect of your CMV that external stakeholders will care about and therefore the one that’s most important to share widely.

Many of the teams I’ve led have stated their entire CMV on a “welcome to the team” informational page or something of the sort, available to new team members and anyone who cares to learn about them, but shared their Mission more widely (e.g. at the top of documents, in their primary Slack channel topic or description, and in email signatures).

If you’re a leader, guide from afar.

Many years back, I changed roles and began leading a new and unfamiliar group of software engineering teams. Once I understood the teams, their current goals, and their respective histories, I was tempted to propose a CMV, but instead opted to gather everyone together to create one democratically. Given my familiarity with the model, I attended and was happy to provide clarity and guidance when it was requested, but otherwise tried my best to remain hands-off. The exercise went really well, and even the most skeptical engineers on the teams found themselves deeply engaged in both the process and resulting CMV. I’ve since used the same approach with great success.

Keep your Credo and Mission simple and clever.

If your Credo and Mission are simple and clever, they’ll be more memorable.

In Jeff Lawson's book, Ask Your Developer, the Twilio CEO and founder writes: Values can be empty words on the wall, or they could be guiding principles used daily by employees to make countless decisions. What takes them off the wall and into practice is two things: memorability and mechanisms. If they’re memorable, then employees are more likely to remember them, refer back to them, and want to use them in daily interactions.

Due to their narrative nature, Visions may sometimes need to be a bit long, and so I purposely leave them out of this point.

Your CMV doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

While CMVs should exist on the team level, they should also celebrate and work within the overarching parent organization’s goals and values, whether explicit or implicit. If the team’s values or CMV conflict with the organization’s at large, then you have a much larger problem on your hands.

Recognize that intentionality is an investment.

When you feel like you’re running on a treadmill, it can be hard to justify spending time and energy on something “big picture” or philosophical; however, you shouldn’t underestimate intentionality maturity’s potential to circumvent dysfunction, empower individuals to make decisions, distribute accountability, and reduce time spent debating direction. While often difficult to quantify its payoff, it does pay off.

Learn More

Want to go deeper? I go into much more detail about CMVs and dive into some real-world examples here.

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Intentionality is just one of the fundamental concepts I explore in my book, Foundations of Execution.

• About the Book

  You’re ambitious. You’re driven. You’re creative, believe in your vision, and know what you’re capable of. But like most, you often find it difficult to make progress toward the things you value.

  When it comes to accomplishing personal, professional, entrepreneurial, and creative goals, the world is bombarding you with bullshit guidance — coddling mantras of positivity and motivation devoid of practical action. Bullshit sounds good. Bullshit feels good. But bullshit will fail you in the long run nearly 100% of the time.

  No more bullshit.

  Let’s change tactics. Foundations of Execution won’t motivate you; it will give you the tools you need to execute despite the lack of motivation that will inevitably befall you. It won’t train you to abstain from excuses; it will give you the tools to strip all power from the excuses that will inevitably bubble to the forefront of your consciousness. It won’t argue the same tired case for self-discipline and convince you to work against your nature; it will show you how to circumvent your nature when it undermines your interests.

  As shockingly simple as it may seem, three behaviors tend to separate those who struggle from those who consistently execute on their goals; and by the time you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll have mastered all three. You’ll come away with repeatable habits that address not just how you tackle complex undertakings, but also how you think, behave, and approach problems in all aspects of your life. It’s an irreverent, philosophy-first, whole-self approach to execution that will change you forever.

  Paperback & Kindle

  181 Pages

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The Franklin Principle: A New Definition of Time Management

In Managing Extreme Personal & Professional Complexity, we discussed how managing complexity requires you to answer three questions:

• How? — How will you organize your goals?

• When? — When will you address your goals?

• What? — What tools will you use to record/represent your goals and the time you’ve committed to addressing them?

We addressed How? in that piece, and now we're going to explore When? by learning about The Franklin Principle.

Let's start at the very beginning: How would you define Time Management?

Traditionally, Time Management refers to performing tasks in a certain way, in a certain order, and at certain times or within certain time frames in order to get more done in a shorter amount of time, or something of that nature. I’ve always loved a quote by author Charles Richards: “Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One man gets only a week’s value out of a year while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week.”

However, this is only a small part of something larger. Something deeper. Something more human. To understand what I mean, first consider the following: Our time on this planet can be broken down into two parts—things we have to do and things we want to do.

Without getting bogged down in details about the fundamental concept of free will, we effectively have to do certain things under normal circumstances in order to live our lives the way we’ve crafted them. For most of us, this means we have to maintain some source of income. We have to remove garbage from our homes. We have to go to the dentist to make sure our teeth don’t rot.

On the other hand, there are things we want to do. Under most normal circumstances, we want to spend time with our loved ones, we want to eat delicious food, and we want to feel emotionally fulfilled. We want to stay healthy and spend time doing things we enjoy.

Additionally, there are a few things that fall into both categories. For most people, sleep falls into this category. We need to sleep — we have a biological requirement for it — but aren't there times when you can't wait to go to sleep? After you’re exhausted from a long day?

What things do you have to do? What things do you want to do? It’s from this distinction that I propose The Franklin Principle.

The Franklin Principle

The Franklin Principle is the idea that meticulously organizing the things you have to do lets you maximize uninterrupted time with which you can guiltlessly do what you want to do. That’s a superior approach to Time Management, as it presents a broad solution to the largest and most ubiquitous challenges you face when pursuing ambitious undertakings: you want to work toward your goals, but life is full of things you have to do.

I named The Franklin Principle after Ben Franklin, who was — to say the least — an interesting guy. In his roughly eighty-four years on this earth, Franklin became an accomplished inventor, founder, and the author of everything from almanacs to autobiographies. He retired comfortably at forty-two with wealth he accumulated from a printing company, furthered our understanding of electricity, participated in the creation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, and served as US ambassador to France. And this is just the tip of the iceberg; in short, the man knew how to execute.

How did he get this all done?

Take a look at an example from Franklin’s own account of his daily schedule from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin:

• 5 to 7 a.m. Rise, wash, and address “Powerful Goodness!” Contrive day’s business and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study; and breakfast

• 8 to 11 a.m. Work

• 12 to 1 p.m. Read or overlook my accounts, and dine

• 2 to 5 p.m. Work

• 6 to 9 p.m. Put things in their places, supper, music, or diversion, or conversation; examination of the day

• 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. Sleep

With very few exceptions, Franklin knew what he would be doing during every hour of every day. He organized his time into specific sessions of Blocked Time, each dedicated to the furthering of a specific project or work track. He respected these sessions, and even though they were self-prescribed, he treated them as though they were defined by a ruthless supervisor. Franklin also took fun seriously (no, really — look it up), and actually blocked off time for it (6 to 9 p.m.: music, or diversion, or conversation). He didn't let any Have-to-Dos interrupt his fun, and despite being a notorious partier, he never let his Want-to-Dos get in the way of getting work done. His prodigious track record of execution was seemingly possible partly due to his having learned to say, There’s a time for that, but now is not that time.

The above is admittedly a broad example (for instance, what exactly does “work” entail?), but if you dig deeply into his writings, you’ll see he broke his sessions of Blocked Time down into much more detail. He socialized his behaviors and traditions to those around him, both professionally and personally. He started on time and ended on time.

He wasn’t the only prodigious historical figure to adhere to a detailed, block-based schedule; other noteworthy individuals cited behaviors and traditions like these as vital to their success. Theodore Roosevelt was arguably just as prodigious a character as Franklin. Browsing his impressive résumé, you'd find that he was president of the United States and a Nobel Peace Prize recipient. He authored dozens of books on a wide range of subjects. His interests were broad, and he could famously talk into the wee hours on virtually any topic. How did such a unique character organize his time?

Take a look at a breakdown of a day on the campaign trail, excerpted from The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris:

• 7 a.m. Breakfast

• 7:30 a.m. A speech

• 8 a.m. Reading a historical work

• 9 a.m. A speech

• 10 a.m. Dictating letters

• 11 a.m. Discussing Montana mines

• 11:30 a.m. A speech

• 12 p.m. Reading an ornithological work

• 12:30 p.m. A speech

• 1 p.m. Lunch

• 1:30 p.m. A speech

• 2:30 p.m. Reading Sir Walter Scott

• 3 p.m. Answering telegrams

• 3:45 p.m. A speech

• 4 p.m. Meeting the press

• 4:30 p.m. Reading

• 5 p.m. A speech

• 6 p.m. Reading

• 7 p.m. Supper

• 8 p.m. Speaking

• 11 p.m. Reading alone in car

• 12 p.m. To bed

As you can see, Roosevelt’s time was broken into small blocks. This isn’t surprising, given the fact that time spent on the campaign trail implies time-sensitive obligations; however, consider that at noon, Roosevelt was reading about birds. This obviously had nothing to do with his campaign or his political career, but was rather something he wanted to do. How could Roosevelt justify this without feeling pressured or rushed? How did one of the most powerful men in the world—arguably one of the busiest men in the world—have time to read about birds while campaigning to retain the presidency of the United States?

Or history (8 a.m.)? Or the works of Sir Walter Scott (2:30 p.m.)?

If Roosevelt had just tried to fit leisure reading in when he had time, do you think he’d have been able to do it? What you’re seeing Roosevelt do in the above schedule is true Time Management: using meticulous organization to take and protect time for the things that mattered to him.

To quote author Kerry Johnson, “Do we need more time? Or do we need to be more disciplined with the time we have?”

The Franklin Principle in Your Own Life

Remember our new definition of Time Management: to meticulously organize the things you have to do in order to maximize uninterrupted time with which you can guiltlessly do what you want to do.

Uninterrupted. Guiltlessly.

These are important words.Imagine the following example: You wake up on Saturday morning and want to relax. You had a rough week, and before beginning any chores, you want to kick back for an hour or so and watch some mindless television. However, you know the lawn needs to be mowed (or a window frame needs to be caulked, or the bathroom needs to be cleaned, or cupcakes need to be baked for a school event), and it’s your responsibility. While trying to relax, you're invariably going to suffer from some degree of pressure about the impending chore. It may be subtle—a mere shadow in the deepest recesses of your mind — or it may be blatant, haunting your every thought. Either way, the whole time, you know deep down that you really should be getting to that chore.

Feel familiar?

On top of this, internal sources of pressure are met with external sources, as spouses, family members, roommates, and parents all contribute to this weight. Of course, you can say, “I’ll mow the lawn after I watch these cartoons,” and everyone around you can acknowledge your promise and seem to accept it, but is it really that simple? Is the guilt and pressure really gone? Can you truly enjoy your Want-to-Do, or has the Have-to-Do infiltrated the experience? At any given time, you most likely have dozens of responsibilities you need to get around to; while they wait in line, will you truly enjoy what you’re doing or be able to fully engage?

Let’s further explore the psychology behind this. Assume your job functions on a typical office schedule (Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.). If that’s the case, barring any extraordinary circumstances, it's unlikely that you'd suddenly find yourself on the couch on Saturday morning saying, “I really feel like I should be at work.”

Why not?

The reason is simple: You’ve established set, defined times you're supposed to be at work, and because of this distinction, you allow yourself to step away from it — guilt-free — when it’s appropriate to do so. This is part of the culture surrounding your relationship with work (behaviors, traditions). Anyone affected by your being at work or not being at work understands why you aren’t there on Saturday morning. This makes perfect sense for your job, but with many of the Have-to-Dos in your personal life (such as the chores mentioned), you don't make these same distinctions; rather, you let them pile up in a shapeless, guilt-inducing backlog, from which you’re expected to pluck the next chore whenever the opportunity presents itself.

This is not conducive to properly separating life’s Have-to-Dos and Want-to-Dos, as your Have-to-Dos will constantly haunt you while engaging in your Want-to-Dos. We're completely used to this feeling, and as such, this anxiety and pressure is an accepted part of modern life—a grim, subtle weight bearing down on us from above, compounding and causing everything from vague irritation to measurable hypertension.

You’re being robbed of your right to the present by your Have-to-Dos. It doesn’t have to be this way.

The solution is simple: If you define a specific time and duration for a specific chore (or type of chore), you’ll be less prone to feel the task looming over you. This is because until the time arrives, it simply isn’t the appropriate time, just as it isn't time for work yet on Saturday morning. If you subscribe to this way of doing things, socialize it, and exhibit behaviors that demonstrate that you take it seriously, you’ll alter your personal culture, slowly build trust among those around you, and find that you’ll shed feelings of pressure about Have-to-Dos — feelings you may not even be aware you’re currently harboring. Commit to mowing the lawn at 11:30 a.m. sharp, and don’t let yourself begin even a minute late. Treat the Blocked Time with respect, and you’ll slowly train those around you to respect it, as well. That’s The Franklin Principle. That’s real Time Management.

Counterintuitively, this type of meticulous organization will simplify your life whether you have two or two thousand responsibilities. I think we can all relate to the experience of focusing on mental to-do lists when we should be engaging with loved ones or enjoying ourselves. If you find yourself struggling with anxiety you can trace back to an inability to mentally detach from your responsibilities, I encourage you to shoo away the thoughts with the mantra, There’s a time for that, but now is not that time.

By organizing the things he had to do — by blocking off specific time for both work and play — Roosevelt let himself have his bird-reading fun without needing to feel any guilt or anxiety about it. He created separation, and you don’t need presidential authority to do the same; you simply need patience as those around you adjust to your new approach and the trust it requires.

The Art of Taking

In order to block off time for Want-to-Dos (like your goals), you have to first understand and accept that you can’t just fit things in. That model rarely works for anyone, and if you’re honest with yourself, I think you’ll agree it’s failed you, as well. If you want to get something done — if it’s truly valuable or important to you — then you need to grant it the dedicated time it deserves. You can’t find time, and you can’t make time, but you can take time.

Say those three statements aloud and really think about each, as well as the distinctions between them: You can’t find time. You can’t make time. But you can take time.These three sentences demonstrate a shift in language — both internally and in communicating with others — that conveys that time is something you have considerable (albeit specific) control over. You can’t find or make time because time is, by definition, a finite resource. When you’re born, you’ve been granted an inheritance. Most of us have been handed a huge amount of wealth in the only truly global currency: time. This is why people talk about how they spend their time. Everything you do costs you a bit of this currency, and — while you can live healthfully and try to elongate the tail end of your life — you can’t truly make time. There are twenty-four hours in the days of the both the laziest and the most productive individuals on Earth. However, you can take time; you can tactically deprioritize or displace other responsibilities — responsibilities with inflated priority due to recency bias, short-term vision, perceived urgency, routine, or others’ wishes.

This shift in language should empower you. Decide that you’ll no longer tolerate passivity in your relationship with time. Resolve to stop speaking in lamentations and commiseration, despite how embedded they are in the language of Western culture. We all have excuses — we’re all tired, we’re all busy — but you can decide what matters to you. That TV show? Drinks with friends after work? An unnecessary extra half-hour of sleep? Playing dumb games on your phone while you’re on the bus to work? Or making progress toward your goals? Your side business? Your novel? Your art? Your relationship with your child? Your career growth or career change? Your studies?

Accept that you have considerable control over the finite time you have, and that — under normal circumstances — your decisions to engage in all but the most necessary acts are indeed decisions.

There isn’t a single person with whom I’ve shared this behavior who hasn’t been able to take a little time each week for something they value. That’s not an exaggeration. No matter how much responsibility they had, everyone I’ve worked with has been able to take useful chunks of time back from the rhythms of their lives — this includes executives, business owners, entertainers, attorneys, and even a mother of young twins. I know how difficult it can be to adopt these behaviors; we each think we’re an exception, and that our days and lives are somehow busier than everyone else’s. That our jobs are stricter. That we can’t build the appropriate trust and that we’re not in a position to influence the culture that surrounds us.

Remind yourself about this approach from time to time when working toward goals, and start using your new language in response to others’ requests for your time: “Yeah, I can take the time to do that.” Once you begin using this terminology, you’ll begin to think about Time Management in an intention-driven manner. It will force you to face and convey to others the fact that you’re either willing or unwilling to spend currency (time) on x instead of y — currency you’ll never get back.

I’m certainly no Franklin or Roosevelt, but I can personally attest to the power of The Franklin Principle. In many ways, it’s responsible for my remaining effective and low-stress while simultaneously writing thousands of pages of content for books and articles, serving as a senior technology leader in demanding corporate environments, tackling ambitious personal and creative projects, speaking at events, and pursuing new skills. It’s responsible for my book about this very topic, Foundations of Execution — not in some abstract way, but directly: I used these behaviors to bring the book to life while juggling a vast number of other responsibilities and still managing to be an attentive husband, father, son, and friend. It’s kept me perfectly sane when my life probably looked unsustainable to an outsider. Had I simply “fit writing in when I had the time,” I can tell you without question that the book never would have never come to be. Only by sectioning off non-negotiable sessions of Blocked Time was I able to dedicate enough time and energy to progress at a reasonable rate. I didn’t find the time. I didn’t make the time. I took the time. I’ve done the same thing for fitness goals, personal goals, creative goals — the list goes on and on. Every valuable Want-to-Do is given the proper time and organization, and every Have-to-Do is isolated, communicated, and executed on. Perhaps most importantly, I promise you I’m not up at night worrying about what I may have forgotten or missed.

And if I can’t take the time to address a desire or project, it forces me to ask the sometimes-difficult question of whether or not it’s truly valuable or important to me. Something may seem important in the moment, and this process forces you to truly assess its value. This is a healthy and natural filtration system for those who — like me — are easily enthused.

It’s deceivingly simple, but I promise you it works:

Take the Blocked Time. Arrive at the Blocked Time. Use your Script. Use your Hot List.

Take the Blocked Time. Arrive at the Blocked Time. Use your Script. Use your Hot List.

If you haven't read about Scripts and Hot Lists yet, take a few minutes to do so; you're going to need to understand these concepts well before continuing.

Most people would agree that there are multiple factors that contribute to success, whatever their definition of success may be. However, I argue that this behavior is the one most universally shared across some of the greatest success stories in history, as well as in the lives and careers of the greatest leaders I’ve worked for and the most interesting people I’ve ever met. I’ll take it a step further and say that I believe this behavior is the one most universally ignored by those who are constantly making excuses and trying to catch up.

Blocked Time

We’ve obviously touched on Blocked Time, but let’s look at it in more detail.

Living The Franklin Principle

Let’s go through an example that marries both professional and personal sessions of Blocked Time into one calendar. In this fictional scenario, this individual—let’s call her “Janet”—works for a print/digital magazine. We’ll explore how she uses Scripts and Hot Lists to make use of the time she dedicates to both her Have-to-Dos and Want-to-Dos.

• 9 a.m. BLOCKED TIME: Work

• 10 a.m. Meeting with Joan C.

• 10:30 a.m. Review committee proposal

• 12 p.m. BLOCKED TIME: Work

• 12:30 p.m. Lunch

• 1 p.m. Meeting with Sean S.

• 2 p.m. Weekly marketing team meeting

• 3 p.m. Interview new journalist prospect

• 4 p.m. Daily wrap-up meeting

• 5:30 p.m. BLOCKED TIME: Study German

• 8:30 p.m. BLOCKED TIME: Irish dance

• 10 p.m. Bed

Janet sections off two sessions of Blocked Time during her workday. In the first, you could imagine that she comes into the office, gets settled, and goes through a Work Daily Script not unlike the one we used as an earlier example—she responds to emails, makes notes for the day’s meetings, etc.:

1. Check work email and voicemail and reply as needed

2. Assess any new items you need to keep track of and add them to your Hot List

3. Check your calendar; review the day's meetings and prepare notes for each

4. Perform daily repeated tasks

5. Address your Work Hot List

Then she spends the rest of the hour working on her Work Hot List once directed there from her Script. She ignores her emails and phone during the Blocked Time, and if someone pops into her workspace and makes a request, she either asks them to come back later or quickly jots a note about it on her Work Hot List. At 10 a.m. sharp, she stops because she has other responsibilities; even if she’s in the middle of a task, she doesn’t let herself go over by even a few seconds. At 12 p.m., she begins another session of Blocked Time and again focuses on Work Hot List tasks until she eats lunch and relaxes at 12:30 p.m.

From what you’ve learned so far, you should recognize the benefits of approaching the day in this structured way. Among them:

• Isolating sessions of Blocked Time and focusing on only the current Script/Hot List item (as well as enforcing a not-now culture for anyone trying to infiltrate) lets Janet focus and either defer incoming tasks or quickly place them in her Work Hot List to be properly prioritized.

• Using a Script and a Hot List to keep her on task reduces context switching and the efficiency lost in context switching (we’ll explore this further shortly).

• Using a Script and a Hot List helps her manage anxiety since nothing will get lost or require her to use her memory alone to track tasks or responsibilities.

• These organizational behaviors will build trust and the impression of responsibility over time as her ability to keep track of and address multiple ongoing bodies of work improves.

Please note: This example highlights how Blocked Time can help manage complexity for those who have jobs for whom schedules are fluid, but responsibilities tend to collect — such as is the case with managers, knowledge workers, administrative assistants, project managers, realtors, finance professionals, and salespeople. If Janet had a different type of job entirely — one with fundamental consistency (data entry or factory work) or one hinged on customer interaction (retail or food service), for instance — she may find it much more difficult to block off time during her workday, and doing so may not provide as much value.

The next section of the example is applicable to anyone, however. On the personal side of things, imagine that Janet is trying to learn German, since a close family friend moved to Berlin, and she promised to visit him one day. Learning a new language is notoriously difficult for adults, so this is a great example of an endeavor that requires regular practice and would get nowhere if she was simply “fitting it in when she can.” When she’s on the train home at the end of the day, instead of playing games on her phone, chatting with friends, or reading, she studies German. She’s well aware she could spend that time engaged in a leisure activity, but learning German is a Want-to-Do she values enough to ensure she’s giving it the structure it needs.

When she steps on the train and gets settled, her calendar beeps and reminds her it’s time for a German session. First, she takes a look at her German Script:

• Review verb list

• Review the list of phrases I’m having difficulty with

• Consult German Hot List

Once she goes through her Script’s first two steps, she finds herself directed to her German Hot List (which, since it lays out the end-to-end instructions for her goal, we can call a Goal Scaffold). She references it to determine where she left off (in this case, we could imagine that it points her to Chapter 6 of an audio course she’s working through) and continues from there.

Later that night, while her husband gives their kids a bath, she goes into the garage and works on learning Irish dance, another Want-to-Do she’s been interested in since childhood but never had the time to pursue. She now blocks off a little time every Thursday night and Sunday morning for it. Much like German- and job-centric sessions of Blocked Time, she starts promptly, ends promptly, and consults her Script and eventually her Hot List for Irish dance. She even uses a timer to let herself know when she only has five minutes left.

She socializes it; she tells her husband and kids about the Blocked Time. Her parents and friends know not to call (and even if they do, her phone will be in a different room). Janet knows that this can be a big shift in mentality for those around her, so she lets people know why blocking off this time was important to her. With time and rigidity, she builds a culture of trust within her family; they know she’ll be available again at 9 p.m. sharp and can therefore work around the Blocked Time. In doing so, she can focus on these goals without guilt, pressure, or anxiety. She also lets her family know that, in return for their leaving her alone, she’ll be respectful of their Blocked Time if they choose to pursue their own Want-to-Dos.

Janet’s schedule may seem obnoxiously strict, but without building this structure and adhering to it, she’s probably going to fail at learning German and Irish dance. She faces the same choice you’ll have to face whenever you consider a goal’s value: you can live a completely flexible, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants life, or you can embrace serious organization, properly manage complexity, and accomplish the things you want to accomplish. You can’t have both.

Let’s discuss some best practices in detail.

You May Be Many Yous

Notice that in the above example, Janet didn’t create Blocked Time for Personal Interests, but rather specifically for German and Irish dance. While some goals may be simple and warrant generic Blocked Time, defining specific sessions may be vital in other cases.

I once spoke with an agent/manager who represented extreme athletes, and while he employed an assistant, he was stressed out to a degree I couldn’t exaggerate if I tried. He was already blocking off parts of his day for work, family, self-care, etc. — a rare-but-crucial practice for the self-employed — but when he faced work time, he found himself addressing tasks that fell into a wide range of themes. During the brief time I was speaking with him, he received questions about payments via email, took a call about work visas for a Canadian BMX athlete entering Singapore, and handled something else work-related via text (he didn’t share details, but he shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and sighed audibly).

As I explained to him, while he existed in a single body, he was functionally performing the jobs of over a dozen separate individuals: a business owner, a project manager, an artist relations professional, an accountant, an IT consultant, a sponsorship coordinator, a branding and marketing manager, a mentor (and occasional therapist), a career coach, an operations professional, and a travel agent, among others. Instead of dedicating sessions of Blocked Time to work (generically), I asked him to dedicate specific sessions and resources to each individual work track on which he needed to focus — to create Scripts, Hot Lists, and Blocked Time for the business owner version of himself, other Scripts, Hot Lists, and Blocked Time for the sponsorship coordinator, and so on. In doing so — and in being diligent about ensuring that each resource and session of Blocked Time remained untouched by the other work tracks or versions of himself — he could work efficiently, reduce stress, and improve his rate of progress. Perhaps most importantly, each work track’s priorities would remain independent and would never need to compete. For instance, instead of having to compare the urgency of securing a website domain name for a motocross athlete’s upcoming memoir against determining which hotels are closest to an arena in Arizona, the former could exist at the top of the IT consultant’s Hot List and the latter at the top of the travel agent’s Hot List—to be addressed during each work track’s respective Blocked Time. Never the two tasks shall meet.

Starting on Time and Ending on Time

When you dedicate a session of Blocked Time to a Want-to-Do or Have-to-Do, start on time, and just as importantly, end on time.

Starting on time makes perfect sense — doing so is a fundamental function of discipline ingrained in us since childhood—but many people overlook the importance of ending on time.

Even if you’re on a roll and everything is going really well, stop your sessions of Blocked Time when your allotted time is up — not a second later. Over time, this will train you to work efficiently. Parkinson’s Law states that the amount of time required to perform a task is directly related to the amount of time allotted to perform the task; that’s why it took you two weeks to write a report in school when it was due in two weeks but only took you two hours when it was due the next day. If you acknowledge that sessions of Blocked Time — like all time, in the larger sense — are finite, then when you realize time is running out for a specific session, you’ll focus on what’s important and work effectively.

Treating Blocked Time with Respect

Once you have sessions of Blocked Time allocated and have committed to starting and ending on time, you need to treat the time with respect.

Let’s illustrate this with an example to which most people can relate. Imagine that your boss blocked off a half-hour to meet with you, and then a peer tried to book you for that same time slot. You’d feel justified in saying, “I can’t meet then. I have something,” because you see your meeting with the boss as something you really shouldn’t move. You respect it.

This makes sense — your boss is your boss. However, this proves that you can defer or reasonably refuse others’ requests for your time without the world ending. If you block off your own personal or professional time, you likely treat it with much less respect. Your own time is always the first to be compromised when you encounter a conflict; it’s human nature. Unfortunately, your Want-to-Dos and Have-to-Dos need Blocked Time, so you have to shift your mentality.

While Blocked Time can be used in both your private and professional endeavors, it’s especially important to build a culture of respect around it during private time, as this is when you’re most likely to work on tasks that relate to personal goals. There’s an art to saying, “I can’t do that at that time,” when reasonable, without the conversation being uncomfortable. In many cases, the right delivery can ease any impressions of rudeness or disrespect, especially if you share context/justification and proactively work with the requester to find a different time that works for you both. Consider the long-term gain that could come with making progress toward your goal and weigh that against the perceived urgency of any task or time being asked of you by others. Weigh that gain against your anxieties about the impression you think you’re creating by saying no. We often default to saying “yes” instead of truly considering the value of what’s being requested and deciding whether it’s something worth spending Time Currency on. Ask yourself what Ben Franklin would do. If you’re still having trouble creating and defending Blocked Time after communicating your goals and justifications to those who may try to claim your time, you may have larger issues to address in the Cultures that surround you.

Blocking your own time at your job — as our fictional friend Janet did — can seem even more uncomfortable, but this is one of the first things I ask of emerging or developing leaders I work with. If one of my employees ever came to me and said, “Listen, I’ve been having a hard time getting things done and leaving at a reasonable time with all of these meetings—I want to block off my first hour of each day to catch up, prepare, and work on valuable projects,” I would absolutely encourage them to do so. In fact, I would challenge them to take even more time, and if their proposed “first hour” timing posed problems for any reason, I would collaborate with them to identify times that work better. That’s how important I believe Blocked Time is. If socialized properly and used to its fullest by responsible individuals, professional Blocked Time almost always adds value.

As mentioned at the beginning of this piece, managing complexity requires you to answer three questions:

• How? — How will you organize your goals?

• When? — When will you address your goals?

• What? — What tools will you use to record/represent your goals and the time you’ve committed to addressing them?

We addressed How? in Managing Extreme Personal & Professional Complexity, and When? here in The Franklin Principle. Lastly, we'll explore the What? by digging deep into some of the tactics through which you'll give these principles life.

Worksheet

Get your hands dirty! Check out a comprehensive (and free) worksheet to help you make the most of this specific Foundations of Execution strategy.

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The Franklin Principle is just one of the fundamental concepts I explore in my book, Foundations of Execution.

• About the Book

  You’re ambitious. You’re driven. You’re creative, believe in your vision, and know what you’re capable of. But like most, you often find it difficult to make progress toward the things you value.

  When it comes to accomplishing personal, professional, entrepreneurial, and creative goals, the world is bombarding you with bullshit guidance — coddling mantras of positivity and motivation devoid of practical action. Bullshit sounds good. Bullshit feels good. But bullshit will fail you in the long run nearly 100% of the time.

  No more bullshit.

  Let’s change tactics. Foundations of Execution won’t motivate you; it will give you the tools you need to execute despite the lack of motivation that will inevitably befall you. It won’t train you to abstain from excuses; it will give you the tools to strip all power from the excuses that will inevitably bubble to the forefront of your consciousness. It won’t argue the same tired case for self-discipline and convince you to work against your nature; it will show you how to circumvent your nature when it undermines your interests.

  As shockingly simple as it may seem, three behaviors tend to separate those who struggle from those who consistently execute on their goals; and by the time you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll have mastered all three. You’ll come away with repeatable habits that address not just how you tackle complex undertakings, but also how you think, behave, and approach problems in all aspects of your life. It’s an irreverent, philosophy-first, whole-self approach to execution that will change you forever.

  Paperback & Kindle

  181 Pages

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Managing Extreme Personal & Professional Complexity

Whether personal, professional, entrepreneurial, or creative, when pursuing a complex, ambitious, or long-term goal, you face several needs, among them:

• Understanding your motivations so you can refer back to them when you face challenges

• Refining your goal and creating boundaries around it

• Managing complexity

The first point is discussed in Foundational Wealth and CMV, and the second in M-SMART Goals, so you should read those first, if you haven’t already. This final point is the one I'll be writing about here. In my book, Foundations of Execution, I cite managing complexity as one of the three behaviors that separate those who consistently execute from those who consistently fail. But what does complexity mean in this context?

Learning a new skill or volunteering for a cause you care about is harder than sitting on your ass and watching TV. Just like having the tough conversation and moving all your stuff out is harder than staying in a bad relationship. These actions are harder not just because they involve work or emotional strain, but also because they introduce complexity to your life—they introduce unknowns and potential problems, anxiety and the possibility of regret. There’s complexity in the unfamiliar and the risky, and haven from complexity in familiar routines and paths well traversed.

With very few exceptions, anything ambitious introduces complexity to your life. Think about it: adopting a pet, starting a new workout routine, or even traveling to a new location all introduce some degree of newfound complexity. Whether or not they’re enjoyable, fulfilling, or worthwhile, embarking on them is always more complex than the alternative.

What about starting a business, reconnecting with an estranged loved one, pursuing a new career, taking on a creative challenge, committing to a lifestyle change, or working toward a professional goal?

Complexity. Complexity. Complexity.

You most likely never learned to manage complexity properly — it’s simply not something we’re taught — so you never learned to manage ambitious goals (which are inherently complex) properly. And yet, you’ve doubtlessly heard the same advice from gurus, loved ones, colleagues, and inspirational memes scattered across social media: get out there and begin working on your goals today. Unfortunately, this is no different than telling you to start building the walls of your dream home without first laying a foundation. As goals evolve and progress, tasks and responsibilities begin to pile up, and anyone who lacks a concrete framework for prioritizing and organizing them is going to quickly become overwhelmed.

The overwhelmed tend to suffer. And those who suffer — especially before seeing benefits — tend to quit.

Moreover, complexity doesn’t emerge only from your ambitions, but from all aspects of your life — whether interesting or mundane — and you need to learn to manage complexity in all of its forms. Luckily, managing complexity doesn’t have to be complex. You can build a framework that leverages basic organizational skills and simple technologies. Managing complexity requires you to answer three questions:

• How? — How will you organize your goals?

• When? — When will you address your goals?

• What? — What tools will you use to record/represent your goals and the time you’ve committed to addressing them?

Here, we'll answer the first question. The second two are covered in The Franklin Principle: A New Definition of Time Management and The Three-Tool Execution Ecosystem, respectively. The short answer to "How?" is: Become accustomed to creating Scripts and Hot Lists.

Scripts

A Script is a simple, ordered, linear process that you follow to keep yourself on task whenever it’s time to work on something. Your Scripts shouldn’t change much from day to day — you won’t be deleting or editing items (at least not often).

To illustrate this, imagine that you’re a professional with an office job. You come into work in the morning and pull up your work Script:

1. Check your work email and voicemail and reply as needed

2. Assess any new items you need to keep track of and add them to your to-do list

3. Check your calendar; review the day's meetings and prepare notes for each

4. Perform daily repeated tasks

5. Address your to-do list

I call this type of Script a Daily Script. Once you arrive at work in the morning and get settled, you know it’s time to refer to this Script. A Daily Script can work for a job, a morning routine, or even as a way to provide structure upon retirement.

A Script like the one outlined here may seem insultingly obvious, but it exemplifies a habit I reinforce time and time again whenever I help someone manage complexity: the habit of recording every remotely complex process you perform. I have dozens of multi-step processes I need to follow in all aspects of my life — some of which I only have to reference a few times each year. Do you think I want to have to remember every step of each? No — I don’t want that burden or the stress that accompanies it. Personally, I’ve used Scripts for opening a pool, collecting materials for taxes, intonating a guitar, assembling children’s school lunches, and dozens of other multi-step, repeated processes. Professionally, I’ve used Scripts for performance evaluations, root cause analyses, new staff onboarding, financial forecasts, process audits, training, technical security reviews, and more.

Note that the item Perform daily repeated tasks in the above example could refer to anything applicable to your specific job. Think of a job right now — either your current job or one you’ve had in the past. If you’re in IT, you may need to review technical logs every morning; or maybe you’re a retail manager who needs to look at the night shift’s final tallies. Maybe you’re a competitive athlete who performs visualization exercises before starting your daily training regimen. Maybe you’re a contractor who needs to clean your tools and stock up on materials for the day. Do you change ink cartridges, check tire pressures, manage your stress with mindfulness practices, or feed all of the animals in a shelter? Do you order new inventory? Almost everyone has things they have to do or check every day, and there’s value (and often safety) in organizing them and articulating them outside your head as opposed to relying on your memory, which can be affected by countless factors.

Creating a reliable, meticulously organized, and consistent ordered process for any multi-step task not only helps to reduce oversight, but also the anxiety that often subconsciously accompanies the fear of oversight.

“Shit — did I skip a step in opening the pool and damage my pump?”

“Shit — I feel like there was one more item I collected for my taxes last year. What was it?”

“Shit — this kid’s lunchbox looks kind of empty. Am I missing something?”

Avoid the shits.

The examples given so far have focused on tasks and processes, but Scripts really shine when it comes to goals. Consider a personal goal: imagine that you’re learning to juggle and set aside two dedicated thirty-minute practice sessions each week. What could a Script look like for each chunk of Blocked Time?

1. Locate your juggling materials (1 minute)

2. Set up in a quiet place; mute your phone (2 minutes)

3. Stretch (2 minutes)

4. Review fundamental exercises (5 minutes)

5. Review most recent exercises (15 minutes)

6. Study new exercises (5 minutes)

I know nothing about juggling, but I think that’s probably a decent guess (and I’ll wait for a professional juggler to correct me).

For some Scripts — especially those that relate to skill acquisition, like juggling — adding time limits to each item may make sense. In other cases — such as in the Work Daily Script above — you may simply want to work through each item until you’ve completed it. Use your judgment given the nature of the Script.

What would a Script look like for learning sign language or how to play guitar? Pick one of the two (or any practice-oriented discipline with which you’re more familiar) and create a Script for it. What would you do consistently during each session? Remove as many decisions as possible from your workflow. Mindless process is the name of the game; imagine that these instructions were written for an understudy who lacks the context to make educated assumptions.

Once finished, look at the Script you just created and take a moment to consider what you’re doing here; you’re outsourcing a process from your brain to an external artifact. The steps you go through during each practice session for guitar or sign language may seem obvious, but in providing yourself with ordered instructions, you’re assigning intentionality to the time you spend working on it. It’s becoming structured. It’s becoming something you’re taking seriously. This level of organization, applied to seemingly inconsequential processes like these, creates a shift in mentality that will prepare you for the complexity you’re going to face when addressing much more complex goals.

Hot Lists

A Hot List is a simple, constantly changing, text-based list of prioritized tasks. It isn’t just a to-do list (otherwise it would be called a to-do list). To-do implies items that — once addressed — can be removed, and that’s not necessarily the case with Hot List items. While there may be to-do-style items on a Hot List, it may also contain items to which you need to continue paying ongoing attention.

Since we were introduced to Scripts through an office job example, let’s do the same in order to become familiar with Hot Lists:

• Follow up with the legal team about the wording of the new advertising posters. Last contact: Frank Doe (phone), 2/6, 5:39 p.m.

• Talk to the recruiter about filling the sales position. Last contact: Lara Gupta (email), 2/7, 3:11 p.m.

• Schedule time with the boss to talk about next year’s goals

• Get Dave White access to the new project management tool

• Schedule a meeting with the design team to discuss the new branding guidelines

A few things to note here:

First, the more important or pressing an item is, the higher it is placed on the list.

Next, you’ll notice that certain items are nice and simple: Get Dave White access to the new project management tool. This is a classic to-do list item: you do it, it’s done, you cross it off, and move on. However, not everything is like that. Some items require ongoing attention. Take a look at Talk to the recruiter about filling the sales position and note the comment at the end: Last contact: Lara Gupta (email), 2/7, 3:11 p.m.; this serves several purposes. First, if Lara claims you never contacted her about this topic, you can correct her, citing the day and time without second-guessing yourself or having to dig through your records. We communicate through multiple channels — in person, via email, over the phone, via text, or through messaging apps — so it’s useful, in many cases, to note the channel through which the contact occurred so you have the option of quickly pursuing more detail should the need arise.

More importantly, recording the last contact gives you an idea about when you should follow up next; this makes it easy to stay on top of things and remain effortlessly responsible. To illustrate this, consider the first item, Follow up with the legal team about the wording of the new advertising posters. Note the last contact comment next to it.

Imagine that you and Frank from the legal team have gone back and forth several times about these posters, and now the ball’s in his court — he has to make some changes and get them to you for review. Technically, at this point, you’re absolved of responsibility; Frank is a grown man who’s accountable for his own promises.

However, a simple note like this gives you the opportunity to showcase a heightened sense of ownership — to go above and beyond the call of duty. As you can see, your last contact with him was on February 6. When you come upon this item in your Hot List on February 7, you can say to yourself, “It’s only been a day, so I won’t bother him yet,” and move on to the next item. The same can be said for February 8, February 9, etc. However, a week later, you may say, “You know, it’s been a week, and I probably should have heard from Frank by now. I’ll follow up to make sure he didn’t lose track of this.” You would then follow up and update the last contact comment. Updating the comment is simple, painless, takes only a moment, and removes a lot of ambiguity; you’ll now know for a fact when your last contact was and can reference it almost immediately.

I can’t tell you how many times over the course of my career and personal life I’ve heard, “Oh, I totally forgot about that—thanks for following up.” Our lives and workplaces are awash in a sea of individuals for whom the volume and complexity of responsibilities have slowly grown over the course of years, and now find themselves drowning in a seemingly endless backlog and with no process with which to manage their workloads. Oversight, mistakes, and slippage have become the tolerable norm. However, amidst this chaos, here you are, cool and collected. This little trick can drastically change the way people perceive you, because it can make you seem more responsible and reliable — and that’s not just perception; that’s reality. That is you being more responsible and reliable. That is you staying on top of things. That is you inspiring trust. It just doesn’t need to all be in your head — you can outsource the work and stress of remembering to follow up and have technology track it for you. You don’t get an award for doing this without tools, and in The Three-Tool Execution Ecosystem, you’ll learn what types of tools are best suited for building and maintaining Hot Lists.

This isn’t a wild, innovative secret, and yet almost everyone fails to take advantage of this type of simple behavior. Those who struggle often assume the successful and organized are simply gifted and keeping all of their responsibilities in their heads; most of the time, that’s simply not the case. I consider myself responsible and reliable — I pride myself on being so — and I can assure you my tasks, responsibilities, and commitments aren’t all stored in my head. Far from it. I promise you that the dozens (sometimes hundreds) of last contacts I may need to reference in the coming weeks are captured digitally, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’d be an absolute disaster if I wasn’t employing these types of behaviors.

You’ve already come to understand how Scripts can reduce the anxiety that often subconsciously accompanies the fear of oversight; the same is true for Hot Lists. If utilized properly, you no longer need to suffer from the uneasy feeling that you’re forgetting something at work or home. The 2 a.m. realization that, “Shit — I just realized I forgot to respond to so-and-so,” or “Shit — I never booked a rental car for the trip,” or “Shit — I just remembered I have to schedule blood work before the Tour de France” can become a thing of the past. This “shit reduction” is an important by-product of becoming organized that people often overlook. These behaviors help battle one of the most pressing and constant sources of anxiety we face in the modern world: the shapeless weight of collected responsibilities.

If you were to suffer a blow to the head and become an amnesiac tonight, but have been following the processes you just learned, you should be able to look at your Scripts and Hot Lists after leaving the hospital and continue on with what you were doing without a single responsibility getting lost. And while amnesia is, of course, unlikely, consider that you can go on vacation for several weeks and come back knowing exactly where you left off relating to everything you were working on. I’ve also shared this process with employees who go on maternity leave or sabbatical. They hand off their Hot List to a peer with a little contextual explanation, and the delegate knows exactly what’s already been done and what should happen next.

In order for this framework to be effective, however, you need to be diligent about truly recording every item that needs tracking and include enough detail to ensure that each is actionable. If you begin to miss things or let things slip, you’re defeating the purpose, you’ll lose faith in the process, and the whole system will go to hell. I’m personally diligent about my Hot Lists and prefer the negligible work of staying organized to the immense work and stress that accompanies inconsistency and failure. Any task or communication that requires action or follow-up — pretty much any worthwhile personal, professional, or creative task — is captured in an appropriate Hot List.

It can be strange to approach aspects of your life — your personal life, especially — with this level of organization, but I assure you that these are processes worth adopting and are non-invasive once you become used to them. And again, this will all translate from the day-to-day minutia you’re learning about here to big goals. Simple behaviors like this, repeated until they become habit, fundamentally change how you operate.

Hierarchical Thought

You learned how Hot Lists can help you organize processes, multi-step tasks, and simple goals, but before you can apply Hot Lists to larger, more complex goals, you need to better understand how you handle information in general.

Even as infants, we manage complexity by categorizing and placing things within hierarchies; it’s a natural human tendency. The universe is comprised of objects, places, times, events, actions, and ideas that — while complex — relate to one another in consistent ways, and being able to use these relationships to predict future events and risks has immense evolutionary value.

This is so obvious and ingrained into the way we operate that it seems silly to think about (though doing so is the foundation of a serious field of study called ontology).

As a quick example of hierarchies, consider the following list of items:

• John Wick

• Incredibly irritating songs from the 1990s

• Rambo

• Rednex: “Cotton Eye Joe”

• Entertainment

• Films

• EMF: “Unbelievable”

• Music

• Action movies

Given only a few moments of sorting, you’d most likely be able to turn the above into the following hierarchy of nested items/lists:

• Entertainment

  • Films

    • Action movies

      • John Wick

      • Rambo

    • Music

      • Incredibly irritating songs from the 1990s

        • Rednex: “Cotton Eye Joe”

        • EMF: “Unbelievable”

Each item — other than the broadest — represents an instance or example of its immediate parent item (the one above it). Looked at another way, each item — other than the most detailed — describes its immediate child items (those below it). Once you begin to apply this somewhat obvious mental model more intentionally to increasingly larger and more multifaceted things, you’ll begin to manage complexity in a more scalable and sustainable way that will serve you well when the time comes to tackle large-scale or long-term goals.

While an item may have multiple child items beneath it (for example, there are several films listed under the Action Movies item), an item can be associated with only one parent item (for example, Coffee couldn’t be beneath both Things I like and Things that are hot without being duplicated). This is a limitation to two-dimensional mental models like this one, but it’s an important benefit; this limitation will actually force you to keep things simple in a way that will prove useful.

To illustrate how you could apply this model in the real world, let’s look at a fictitious person’s entire personhood — a collection of her actions, how she spends her time, and the things she focuses on.

We’ll call her Jackie. Like you, Jackie is dynamic and multidimensional, so she may choose to mentally organize her life such that the broadest practical distinction she can make separates her personal and professional interests.

• Personal

• Professional

She could then expand these top-level items to think of her life as a whole: The catering business owner Jackie; the parent of three Jackie; the business student Jackie; the weekend acapella-techno DJ Jackie.

• Personal

  • General to-do list

  • Parenting

  • School

  • DJ/Music

  • Health and fitness

• Professional

  • Work to-do list

  • Work meeting notes

  • To-do list to prepare for upcoming vacation

However, Jackie doesn’t always want to look at her life as a whole. She wants to be able to mentally “zoom in” on a distraction-free view of a single theme or specific undertaking — to compartmentalize. For example, drilling down within the Health and fitness item in the above structure should bring her to deeper items nested within it and push everything else out of view:

• Health and fitness

  • Soccer

  • Gym

Then, drilling down into the Soccer item should show her even further nested items:

• Soccer

  • Ball control drills to work on

  • Research stretching routine

We do this naturally, but it’s useful to think about it intentionally because we’ll be using this type of structure to organize more complex and large-scale undertakings.

With this mental model in mind, let’s dig into Hot Lists a bit deeper.

Almost everything you’d ever want to accomplish, no matter how large or small, can fit under some sort of theme or heading. Embracing this approach — understanding where your goals fit within your life, as a whole — is key to managing complexity. Like Jackie, create separate Hot Lists for each such theme/heading in their appropriate place within an overarching hierarchy that loosely reflects your life. Examples of Hot Lists within a Personal list could be Home improvement, Books I want to read, Things I want to learn, or Model airplanes to build.

• Professional

  • General work Hot List

  • Career growth Hot List

• Personal

  • Home improvement Hot List

  • Books I want to read Hot List

  • Things I want to learn Hot List

  • Model airplanes to build Hot List

What about things that don’t really fit into a project heading quite so cleanly? Something like Scan old childhood photos is unrelated to any project, so where would you place it? For these, a Hot List entitled General personal Hot List could work.

• Professional

  • General work Hot List

  • Career growth Hot List

• Personal

  • General personal Hot List

    • Scan old childhood photos

    • Look into helicopter lessons

    • Get tattoo of Nicholas Cage as his character in Con Air

  • Home improvement Hot List

  • Books I want to read Hot List

  • Things I want to learn Hot List

  • Model airplanes to build Hot List

You can then prioritize the items within that specific Hot List in relation to one another.

Handling Slightly Larger Goals

Even though they can seem intimidating, larger goals are really just comprised of a series of smaller tasks that share something in common. That sounds ridiculously, dismissively simple, but really think about it. Both the Manhattan Project and Napoleon’s plan for invading Russia were really just collections of a staggering number of individually actionable tasks that shared a mission and were placed in a logical order.

Above, there’s a Things I want to learn Hot List underneath the Personal theme. Imagine that it contained the following:

• Things I want to learn

  • Real estate investment

  • How to speak Brazilian Portuguese

  • How to snorkel

See the first item? Real estate investment. Imagine that you’ve always wanted to learn about real estate investment, but that isn’t exactly a simple, cut-and-dry topic you can master in an afternoon. You can put aside time each week for this goal, but when those sessions of Blocked Time arrive, you may find yourself asking, “What do I actually do?”

First, you need to perform some research. Learn a little bit about the subject matter, refine the goal, and decide on a series of smaller tasks that will culminate in your reaching the larger goal. When it comes time to work on this goal, you should follow a Script, which should eventually send you to your Hot List. An example of your Real estate investment goal in your Things I want to learn Hot List could, therefore, look like:

• Real estate investment

  • Read Real Estate Investing for Dummies (Eric Tyson and Robert S. Griswold)

  • Read Property: Examples and Explanations (Barlow Burke and Joseph Snoe)

  • Read about Internal Revenue Code 1031 (online)

By the time you actually begin working your way through this Hot List, you should be confident that it’s well-researched, prioritized, and placed in a logical order; if so, you can focus on the first task (in this case, the first book you want to read). Once you finish the first task, you would know to move on to the second:

• Real estate investment

  • Read Real Estate Investing for Dummies (Eric Tyson and Robert S. Griswold)

  • Read Property: Examples and Explanations (Barlow Burke and Joseph Snoe)

  • Read about Internal Revenue Code 1031 (online)

Think of this as though you were serving three roles in a small business dedicated to this goal: you act as the researcher, the project manager who organizes the goal and ensures progress is being made, and the individual performing the tasks.

Here, we've taken a goal — learning about a complex and multifaceted subject matter — and broken it down into several smaller, more manageable tasks (reading three books). We’re going to call the larger task a Major Task, and the smaller tasks that comprise it Minor Tasks.

Let’s explore a slightly more complex example: imagine that you need to plan your wedding, and this is the top item in your General personal Hot List. This is certainly a Major Task, because it isn’t something that can simply be done all at once; it’s comprised of many Minor Tasks. They include:

• Plan wedding

  • Select venue

  • Select date

  • Select theme

  • Invite guests

  • Select DJ

  • Get tuxedo (or dress)

Let's imagine that you’ve finished the first three Minor Tasks and need to begin the fourth, Invite guests. This is a Minor Task, because it’s a component of the Plan wedding Major Task, but it doesn’t tell you what actually needs to be done; it’s not itself actionable. In reality, it involves several even smaller Minor Tasks, which can themselves involve even smaller Minor Tasks. As a result, there’s no steadfast rule about what you’d consider a Major or Minor Task except in relation to its respective parent and child tasks. All but the highest- and lowest-level tasks are going to be both Major and Minor, depending on what level of detail you’re focusing on. Let’s expand the final three items under Plan wedding.

• Plan wedding

  • Select venue

  • Select date

  • Select theme

  • Invite guests

    • Create an ideal, unedited list of prospective guests

    • Reduce the number of guests to comply with seating limitations

    • Locate contact information for all members of the final list

    • Purchase invitations, envelopes, and stamps

    • Address, stamp, and mail invitations

  • Select DJ

    • Research DJs online; make a list of prospects

    • Call each, interview them, confirm availability, and collect quotes

    • Decide on a DJ and book the engagement

  • Get tuxedo or dress

    • Research tux rental services or dress shops; make a list of prospects

    • Decide on one

    • Go into the shop, get fitted, discuss details, and finalize order

If you think about it, this looks like the outline of a book: Major Tasks like Select venue and Select date are like sections, the first sets of Minor Tasks like chapters, and any deeper Minor Tasks like paragraph headings. While a Hot List can refer to even simple collections of tasks, when we’re talking about a single goal broken down a few layers deep in this way, resulting in what amounts to an instruction manual for end-to-end execution, I call this a Goal Scaffold.

In many ways, we already do this in our heads all the time, even though we don’t necessarily use this terminology or subscribe to the same level of detail. Think about it: isn't a grocery list simply an array of Minor Tasks that exist under the umbrella of the Major Task, Go food shopping? Organizing this way, you can break your grocery list down by store section, reducing any need to backtrack through the aisles.

• Go food shopping

  • Dairy

    • Milk (skim)

    • Almond Milk (vanilla, unsweetened)

    • Yogurts (Greek, raspberry)

  • Fruits and veggies

    • Eggplant

Sure, it may seem a little over the top to organize your grocery store list this methodically, but it’s perfectly sensible to apply this model to more complex aspects of your life (like big goals).

As an exercise, break the Major Task, Make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, into at least seven Minor Tasks. Imagine that this is a set of instructions not for you, but rather for someone who has never made any sort of sandwich before. The more detailed you can be, the less likely they’ll be to miss a step or forget something.

Really do this. Take your time and continue when you’re done.

How far did you break it down? How many layers? A preparation/set-up section, during which you check your bread, peanut butter, and jelly inventories, get everything out, and locate a knife and a plate? A sandwich construction section? A clean-up section?

Ask yourself if you could have broken things down further. This exercise may seem silly, but it serves to build a skill you’ll need when it comes time to make sense of and tackle incredibly complex, daunting, multi-month or multi-year goals. Detail is your best friend.

With the PB&J example fresh in your mind, break down the Major Task, Throw a birthday party for a five-year-old, on your own however you see fit. Spend the time to organize it as clearly and logically as possible.

A Quick Note About Priorities

The order in which you need to execute on tasks is sometimes obvious. Consider the example of a screenplay’s life cycle — Brainstorm screenplay, Outline screenplay, Write screenplay, Edit screenplay, and Sell screenplay. By nature, you don’t really have too much flexibility in that order, as each Major Task has a dependency on the Major Task before it. In the same way, you would need to decide on the guest list for a wedding before sending the invitations. However, when it comes to independent tasks (such as Paint the basement floor and Clean the shed), an order may not be quite so obvious. Likewise, it can be difficult to prioritize unrelated tasks within a single goal when no dependencies are involved.

The best thing you can do to simplify prioritization is to build highly detailed hierarchies within your Hot Lists and Goal Scaffolds. If more than a dozen Minor Tasks exist within a single Major Task, consider whether the Minor Tasks share attributes that make them candidates for further grouping.

Imagine that you were an individual who was starting your own knife-sharpening business, and your Hot List looked something like this:

• Decide on company name (Lookin’ Sharp? Knife to See Ya?)

• Sharpen the knives dropped off by Samantha G.

• Buy a new sharpening kit

• Take photos of recent work for website

• Sharpen the knives dropped off by Garrett T.

• Open a credit card in the business’ name

You have six items competing for priority. However, if you refine it a bit, you may end up with:

• Company formation tasks

  • Decide on company name (Lookin’ Sharp? Knife to See Ya?)

  • Take photos of recent work for website

  • Open a credit card in the business’ name

• Current sharpening work

  • Sharpen the knives dropped off by Samantha G.

  • Sharpen the knives dropped off by Garrett T.

• General

  • Buy a new sharpening kit

This way, you now only have three Major Tasks competing for Priority, or which — in cases like this — can be treated like independent Hot Lists and addressed during different sessions of blocked time dedicated to each. Within each of these three Major Tasks, three or fewer Minor Tasks compete for Priority. Organizing with this level of detail helps make prioritization simpler, but you still need to prioritize the most granular, actionable Minor Tasks: how do you decide whether to sharpen Samantha’s or Garrett’s knives first?

At its simplest, Priority is the recognition that some tasks need to be completed before others due to factors like deadlines, financial considerations, and risk. While you certainly shouldn’t overthink Priority, it’s valuable to have a thought process at your disposal because winging it can cause you to miss such factors and, therefore, prioritize poorly.

Bullshit alert: If you perform an online search, you’ll find hundreds of prioritization systems out there. Some of them are incredibly complicated, with more extreme examples suggesting you label tasks by urgency and importance, rank them numerically, sort them by the estimated time necessary for completion, and use this to form a Priority matrix. While I appreciate the intention, such approaches are unnecessarily convoluted, even for prioritizing complex goals. Don’t fall into the trap of organizational fetishism. You’ll spend more time organizing your tasks than you will executing on them, and this can foster a false sense of accomplishment.

Here’s a simple and effective thought process: If something new requires your attention and you need to fit it within a Hot List or Goal Scaffold of related tasks — and there are no dependencies involved — place it at the very top, compare it to the task below it, and:

1. Ask the question, “Which, if any, has a more pressing deadline?” Maybe Samantha is competing in a knife-throwing competition next Thursday, while Garrett simply wants to refresh all of his high-end kitchenware.

2. Ask the question, “Which, if any, could cause potential problems if put off?” To use an example you might find on a General personal Hot List, you probably want to fix a broken window before it rains in lieu of shopping for a new bowling ball.

3. Ask the question, “Which, if any, involves financial considerations? What are they?” If you don’t pay the bathroom floor contractor on time, you may incur a late fee. If you need to decide between that and buying a fancy new coffee maker, the priority becomes obvious.

4. If it makes sense at the top, leave it. If you had to perform a swap, repeat the same comparison along with the next peer task, over and over until the new one lands in an appropriate place. Once it has, review the entire group of tasks to ensure the overall order still makes sense after introducing the latest item.

Hot List Maintenance

Hot Lists need to be curated occasionally; sometimes tasks age out after being pushed down a few times by more pressing items, so don’t be afraid to dump tasks you’re probably never going to get around to—tasks that provide no value and for which dumping would introduce no risk.

Consider this example: A few years ago, I was suddenly reminded of a lunch pail full of cassette tapes I always listened to as a kid, including some carefully curated mixtapes I made of all of my favorite music. Overcome with nostalgia, I resolved to find them. I was sure the lunch pail was in my basement or attic somewhere (or maybe my aunt’s), and before I forgot, I placed this item in a General personal Hot List. It was low-Priority because, as you can imagine, it was in no way urgent—no deadline, no problems introduced by putting it off, no financial considerations, etc.

After about a year, this item was still hanging out near the bottom of the Hot List, constantly displaced by higher-Priority items. Finally, I just got rid of it. Sure, it wasn’t causing any harm aside from cluttering up my list, but it’s a good idea to ask yourself now and again if a lingering task is really going to provide any value, or if its presence is devaluing the rest of the items on your Hot List. I asked myself, “What would happen if I just deleted this?” In the big picture, the answer was, “absolutely nothing,” so I dumped it and never looked back. If I really want to take a trip down memory lane while blasting a grainy cassette version of Poison's “Cry Tough,” I can certainly reconsider at a later date.

Use your head, and most importantly, respect your Hot Lists by ensuring they’re not polluted by low-class citizens—forgotten stragglers and relics of intentions and whims past. Your Hot Lists are not journals or reminders; they’re a record of your intention to act.

Earlier, we discussed how managing complexity requires you to answer three questions:

• How? — How will you organize your goals?

• When? — When will you address your goals?

• What? — What tools will you use to record/represent your goals and the time you’ve committed to addressing them?

We just addressed How? Next, explore When? by learning about The Franklin Principle: A New Definition of Time Management.

Resources

If you’re a Workflowy user and want a jump-start, you can copy my template, which is pre-populated with a few example hierarchically organized nodes.

Worksheets

Get your hands dirty! Check out a comprehensive (and free) worksheet to help you make the most of this specific Foundations of Execution strategy.

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Managing personal and professional complexity is just one of the fundamental concepts I explore in my book, Foundations of Execution.

• About the Book

  You’re ambitious. You’re driven. You’re creative, believe in your vision, and know what you’re capable of. But like most, you often find it difficult to make progress toward the things you value.

  When it comes to accomplishing personal, professional, entrepreneurial, and creative goals, the world is bombarding you with bullshit guidance — coddling mantras of positivity and motivation devoid of practical action. Bullshit sounds good. Bullshit feels good. But bullshit will fail you in the long run nearly 100% of the time.

  No more bullshit.

  Let’s change tactics. Foundations of Execution won’t motivate you; it will give you the tools you need to execute despite the lack of motivation that will inevitably befall you. It won’t train you to abstain from excuses; it will give you the tools to strip all power from the excuses that will inevitably bubble to the forefront of your consciousness. It won’t argue the same tired case for self-discipline and convince you to work against your nature; it will show you how to circumvent your nature when it undermines your interests.

  As shockingly simple as it may seem, three behaviors tend to separate those who struggle from those who consistently execute on their goals; and by the time you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll have mastered all three. You’ll come away with repeatable habits that address not just how you tackle complex undertakings, but also how you think, behave, and approach problems in all aspects of your life. It’s an irreverent, philosophy-first, whole-self approach to execution that will change you forever.

  Paperback & Kindle

  181 Pages

---

What is "Foundational Wealth?"

People often associate wealth with money and possessions, but wealth is much more accurately defined as the leverage or power to consistently experience the type of existence you prefer. Money and possessions have come to be associated with wealth because—among other reasons—money is often necessary to participate in the types of activities many people assume they want to experience (leisure and luxury), and possessions are often indicative of a surplus of said money.

However, it could be easily argued that a practicing Buddhist or ascetic could consider themselves enormously wealthy/successful without any money or possessions whatsoever. To highlight this distinction, I like to use the terms Foundational Wealth and Foundational Success instead. I define Foundational Wealth (in pseudo-economics terms) as the currency you value at the deepest level, and Foundational Success as having a strong equity position in said currency. If you’re honest with yourself about your personal definitions of Foundational Wealth, you can more precisely and consistently trace your motivations to their deeper roots. This will help you to better understand your goals and decisions, and make intentional choices that serve those motivations. This exploration can be both immensely valuable and profoundly humbling.

What’s your definition of Foundational Wealth? Most don’t tend to think about this too often or too deeply, so it can be difficult to get started. For many, the hardest part is being completely honest with yourself and shedding any concerns about how you may be perceived. Free yourself from this burden up front; as you explore this question, do so knowing that you and you alone will hear the answers. Here are some questions to help prime your reflection:

• Of what accomplishments are you most proud? Why?

• Of what attributes, traits, or characteristics are you most proud? Why?

• How do you want to be remembered? Why?

• What are you doing at your happiest?

• If you could affect or help two groups of people, who would they be? Why? (Interpret groups in any way you’d like.)

• What would you do if you never had to earn money again? Why?

• Who is dependent on you, and in what contexts? What do you like and dislike about the nature of that relationship?

• To whom (or what) do you currently have to answer? To whom are you accountable?

• What did you want to do when you were five? Ten? Seventeen? Do you still feel a connection with those desires, forged from a more innocent mindset?

• Think of individuals you admire; what about their lives, ideals, or careers do you see as worthy of admiration? What do you think Foundational Wealth might mean to those individuals?

These questions are also captured in a printable worksheet.

Think about these questions on the scale of your entire life and being, and answer them without any goals in mind. First, write your answers down quickly and associatively. Don’t overthink them; just write what comes naturally. Then, go back and take your time. Labor over each question and try to dig into why you answered each question the way you did.From your answers, I encourage you to craft two related definitions of Foundational Wealth:

1. An intensely personal, self-focused definition

2. An externally focused definition that centers around your effect on society

The first should essentially be selfish. It should seek to furnish you with aspects of the life you imagined when answering questions like, What are you doing at your happiest?, and What would you do if you never had to earn money again?

I’ve asked myself these questions many times over the course of my adult life and have come to recognize (and—over time—refine) what I value. To illustrate this concept, I’ll share an aspect of my personal definition of Foundational Wealth: While I value many of the same things many individuals my age tend to value (quality time with family, career challenges and fulfillment, etc.), I felt those answers came too easily and challenged myself to articulate more precisely what’s novel about the things I value—to identify the common threads among them and explore them more deeply. After a good deal of reflection, I concluded that my personal definition of Foundational Wealth revolves in many ways around diversity of experience. Life is short, I’m a high-energy individual, and I think consistency, relaxation, and routine are overrated. I love to travel, experience new things, gain insight into others’ perspectives, meet new people, learn, and push the boundaries of my comfort zone. Whenever I’m experiencing something new, I succumb to a childlike sense of excitement and feel as though time slows to a crawl. I feel better able to focus on the present.

It was a major realization: Whether or not I was consciously aware of it, this simple idea has been a huge motivator throughout my entire adult life and has directly informed my risk tolerance. As I reflected on my past, I was reminded of example after example of professional, financial, personal, or lifestyle goals, and realized how diversity of experience (either immediate or deferred) has been the primary currency in which I’ve framed decisions and the potential for decisions to provide me with personal value. I came to understand that diversity of experience serves as a connective force between seemingly disparate motivations. I love experiencing new things with my family and feel as though I learn something new and unexpected about them every time we find ourselves somewhere unfamiliar. I also love experiencing new career challenges and relish the discomfort and growth that accompany them.

To summarize: When I’m regularly involved in diverse experiences, I consider myself wealthy by my self-focused definition. As much work as it was to come to this realization, it was profoundly impactful and connected many dots for me. I now keep my personal definition of Foundational Wealth actively in mind as I make decisions and refine goals.

The second definition of Foundational Wealth—centered around your effect on society—should describe ways in which you’d like to contribute to a larger purpose. It should seek to furnish you with aspects of the life you imagined when answering questions like, Of what accomplishments or characteristics are you most proud?, How do you want to be remembered?, and If you could affect or help two groups of people, who would they be? Note that I used the terms your effect on society instead of your value to society and contribute to a larger purpose instead of contribute to the greater good; while most people’s definitions will naturally gravitate toward positive, society-benefiting behaviors—and while I certainly encourage you to consider the greater good when crafting this definition—your definitions of Foundational Wealth are intensely personal, so I want to be careful about limiting them with that wording.

To again illustrate this with a personal example: I think daily about how the next Elon Musk, Salman Khan, and Oscar Wilde may be out there in the world right now and could very well go to their graves never having shared their vision simply because they didn’t know what to do. Whenever my insight and experience can help someone execute on the things they believe they were meant to share with the world, I consider myself wealthy by my externally focused definition. My being consciously aware of this definition drives me to work hard and continue sharing my message (hence, what you're reading right now and Foundations of Execution).

If you only have a self-focused, personal definition of Foundational Wealth, I urge you to think of ways in which you can affect others; you’ll likely find that expanding your scope of influence enriches your self-focused definition and brings you increased fulfillment. On the other hand, if you only have an externally focused definition of Foundational Wealth, I urge you to identify self-focused things you value; you’ll likely find that you can engineer the former in order to achieve the latter. Referring back to my personal examples: While my self- and externally focused definitions of Foundational Wealth may seem unrelated on the surface, the work I’ve done and the decisions I’ve made in pursuit of my externally focused definition have furnished me with a staggering number of diverse experiences otherwise unattainable.

I encourage you to spend some time reflecting on your own definitions of Foundational Wealth. This can take quite a while, but you need to do it before pursuing complex, ambitious, or long-term goals. Dedicate blocked-off sessions of time to this endeavor and feel free to use this worksheet. Once you’re confident that you’ve come to understand them, write them down and keep them in mind as you explore personal, professional, or creative goals.

With Foundational Wealth at the core, I encourage you to learn how to define your goals by exploring CMV: Extreme Intentionality.

---

Foundational Wealth is just one of the fundamental concepts I explore in my book, Foundations of Execution.

• About the Book

  You’re ambitious. You’re driven. You’re creative, believe in your vision, and know what you’re capable of. But like most, you often find it difficult to make progress toward the things you value.

  When it comes to accomplishing personal, professional, entrepreneurial, and creative goals, the world is bombarding you with bullshit guidance — coddling mantras of positivity and motivation devoid of practical action. Bullshit sounds good. Bullshit feels good. But bullshit will fail you in the long run nearly 100% of the time.

  No more bullshit.

  Let’s change tactics. Foundations of Execution won’t motivate you; it will give you the tools you need to execute despite the lack of motivation that will inevitably befall you. It won’t train you to abstain from excuses; it will give you the tools to strip all power from the excuses that will inevitably bubble to the forefront of your consciousness. It won’t argue the same tired case for self-discipline and convince you to work against your nature; it will show you how to circumvent your nature when it undermines your interests.

  As shockingly simple as it may seem, three behaviors tend to separate those who struggle from those who consistently execute on their goals; and by the time you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll have mastered all three. You’ll come away with repeatable habits that address not just how you tackle complex undertakings, but also how you think, behave, and approach problems in all aspects of your life. It’s an irreverent, philosophy-first, whole-self approach to execution that will change you forever.

  Paperback & Kindle

  181 Pages

---

M-SMART Goals

If you’ve already explored what drives you (Foundational Wealth) and  learned how to create credos, missions, and visions around the goals you value, your goals are defined. Now it's time to refine them. That's where M-SMART Goals come in.

Learn Spanish isn’t really a goal because you don’t have any criteria by which you can say you achieved it. Almost everyone in the United States, South and Central America, and Europe technically speaks some Spanish—most people have probably said or at least heard the word “adios.” Furthermore, even highly educated native Spanish speakers realistically speak only part of the language; I doubt many people know every single Spanish word, much like you and I don’t know every single English word. Knowing a language isn’t really a black or white thing.

So, at what point can you say you “learned Spanish?”

Does knowing how to say, “¿Dónde está la biblioteca?” count as having learned Spanish? Or is that not enough? How about being able to watch a Spanish-language soap opera and follow along with the plot? Or being able to hold a conversation in Spanish with a native speaker without their knowing it wasn’t your first language? That one may be a bit unrealistic.

With this ambiguity highlighted, what are the criteria by which you’d be able to say you’ve achieved your goal? This is my point: it’s important to refine goals you value—to add details about your execution plan, timelines, and desired end result.

Plain Old SMART Goals

I feel a little dirty discussing SMART Goals because they’ve been addressed ad nauseam by thousands of personal development educators and corporate trainers. Along with words like synergy, it reeks of the type of overused business jargon that makes you want to pair the word with an air quote gesture. Buzz-term or not, they’re an incredibly simple and effective way to think about goals.

If you’re not familiar, a SMART Goal refers to a goal that’s specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.

To illustrate, let’s turn learn Spanish into a SMART Goal: Be able to speak Spanish well enough to watch and understand all dialogue in the film Die Hard in Spanish (without subtitles) on or before February 1, four years from now. This is a purposely silly example, but it’s memorable and perfectly illustrates SMART Goals and all they entail.

• It’s specific — You chose to specify “Die Hard” instead of saying “an action movie” and “Spanish” instead of “a foreign language.”

• It's measurable — In the big picture, you can measure success by whether or not you understand all dialogue by your deadline; if a single sentence evades you, you haven’t succeeded. In the short term—that is to say, during the process of achieving your goal—you could quantifiably measure your improvement each time you watch the film; for instance, you could dedicate time to learning Spanish every Monday through Thursday, and then watch the movie each Friday; you could then write a plus or minus symbol on a piece of paper after each sentence of dialogue to signify whether or not you understood it, and then go back afterward and determine what percentage you understood, tracking your progress week over week. It’s certainly a clumsy solution, but it makes the goal measurable.

• It's attainable — Human beings can learn new languages at any point in their lives. Others have done it. The goal isn’t to be the first person to speak Spanish on Jupiter.

• It’s realistic — The due date is set four years into the future, which—some cursory research will show—is an ambitious but reasonable amount of time for an adult English-speaker to learn a Romance language somewhat well. You didn’t say you wanted to accomplish the goal within three months. Don’t confuse attainable and realistic; attainable means it can be done, and realistic means you can do it within the time limits and constraints described.

• Lastly, it’s time-bound — Time-bound and realistic are closely related. An end date is set, and it’s expected that the goal will be reached on or before this date. You didn’t say you’d learn Spanish eventually. There’s an art to giving your goal’s timeline some breathing room while not providing so much that you can afford to slack. Everyone has to take a break now and then, and life occasionally throws unexpected challenges your way. Later, you’ll assign consequences to inaction and failure, so resist the urge to be hyper-aggressive when deciding on timelines. You’ll also soon learn why the date you choose here will most likely not end up being your final deadline; rather, it provides an estimate that serves to guide your overall intention.

We’re used to ill-refined goals; they’re baked into our culture and language. I constantly hear educated adults state their so-called goals with the same dismissive simplicity they probably exhibited when their fourth-grade teacher asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. “Start a helicopter piloting school” is an ill-refined goal. “Create an iPhone app that helps identify wild birds” or “become the number one private wealth advisor in the region” are only a little better. What are three primary functions the wild bird app should provide? You want to become the number one private wealth advisor in the region by what metric? Customer satisfaction? Revenue? Market share? By when?

Take a few moments and construct SMART Goals from the following incomplete goals:

1. Be able to run a 5k

2. Learn self-defense

Take your time and perform some basic research, if necessary.

There are obviously many possible SMART Goals that could be extracted from these two incomplete ones, but here are some possible solutions for example’s sake:

1. Be able to run a 5k in twenty-three minutes (under normal weather conditions) by this time next year.

2. Achieve a non-beginner degree in a self-defense-applicable martial art (such as blue belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or green belt in Krav Maga) at a respected academy within two years.

Take a close look at these two SMART Goals. I think you’ll agree they’re both specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. Your research should have shown that if you aren’t incredibly young or elderly and don’t have any outstanding health or physical impediments, both running a twenty-three minute 5k and earning a non-white martial arts belt are realistic (though ambitious) in the respective amounts of time allocated.

Adding the “M”

Now let’s talk about a Foundations of Execution-specific addition to the classic SMART Goal. As you may have guessed given how much I've written about Foundational Wealth and CMVs, the M stands for Motivation. An M-SMART Goal is motivation-focused, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. As much as possible, your M should embody a concise summary of how the goal will help you realize your CMV.

While a SMART Goal may be formatted as I want to achieve [goal detail] by [date], an M-SMART Goal would look more like I want to achieve [goal detail] by [date] because [motivation]. This will often result in a run-on sentence, a series of sentences questionably tied together with semicolons, or something of the like. That’s okay; your high school English teachers won’t see it. Going back to CMVs: In many ways, the SMART aspects of these goals define paths to execution and reflect their respective Missions, while the M tends to speak more to Credos and Visions.

Here are two examples:

I want to build a marketing strategy consulting business with at least four active simultaneous clients and monthly revenue of over $1,000 on or before December 31st of next year because I enjoy working in the marketing field but feel that my vision, experience, and unorthodox ideas are under-appreciated by my current employer.

That was definitely a run-on sentence. Another:

I want to write a novel about a young woman whose confidence and luck improve drastically after being bitten by a wolf, only to later realize that the power of positive change was within her the entire time and that the bite had nothing to do with it. I want to have it written, edited by a third party, and pitched to at least one publisher before December 31st of next year. I’ve struggled with confidence in my own life, so I want to explore the idea of finding inner strength and share the story with others who may be experiencing similar confidence issues.

That one was a full-out paragraph. That’s fine, but don’t go crazy and write a manifesto; you should be able to (loosely) recite your M-SMART Goal from memory. As an exercise, take the above two SMART Goal examples (be able to run a 5k and learn self-defense), come up with imaginary motivations, and add Ms to them.

Worksheets

Get your hands dirty! Check out a comprehensive (and free) worksheet to help you make the most of this specific Foundations of Execution strategy.

---

M-SMART Goals are just one of the fundamental concepts I explore in my book, Foundations of Execution.

• About the Book

  Description text goes hereYou’re ambitious. You’re driven. You’re creative, believe in your vision, and know what you’re capable of. But like most, you often find it difficult to make progress toward the things you value.

  When it comes to accomplishing personal, professional, entrepreneurial, and creative goals, the world is bombarding you with bullshit guidance — coddling mantras of positivity and motivation devoid of practical action. Bullshit sounds good. Bullshit feels good. But bullshit will fail you in the long run nearly 100% of the time.

  No more bullshit.

  Let’s change tactics. Foundations of Execution won’t motivate you; it will give you the tools you need to execute despite the lack of motivation that will inevitably befall you. It won’t train you to abstain from excuses; it will give you the tools to strip all power from the excuses that will inevitably bubble to the forefront of your consciousness. It won’t argue the same tired case for self-discipline and convince you to work against your nature; it will show you how to circumvent your nature when it undermines your interests.

  As shockingly simple as it may seem, three behaviors tend to separate those who struggle from those who consistently execute on their goals; and by the time you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll have mastered all three. You’ll come away with repeatable habits that address not just how you tackle complex undertakings, but also how you think, behave, and approach problems in all aspects of your life. It’s an irreverent, philosophy-first, whole-self approach to execution that will change you forever.

  Paperback & Kindle

  181 Pages

---

The Three-Tool Execution Ecosystem

Managing complexity requires you to answer three questions:

• How? — How will you organize your goals?

• When? — When will you address your goals?

• What? — What tools will you use to record/represent your goals and the time you’ve committed to addressing them?

I talk about How? in Managing Extreme Personal & Professional Complexity and When? in The Franklin Principle. Here, we’ll explore the How? by digging deep into some of the tactics through which you’ll give these principles life.

A few years ago, over dinner, a friend told me about a problem he was having: Aspects of his personal life were spinning out of control. First, he missed a few appointments—a dentist’s visit, a family event, and so on—but over time, he found himself losing track of more and more. He began to wake in the middle of the night with the sinking feeling he was forgetting things.

As we dug into his issue, the cause became obvious: as it turned out, my friend—a husband, father of four, manager at a major insurance company, and youth sports coach in his late thirties—had no personal calendar. None. Not on his desk, not on his wall, not in his phone. He simply tried to remember an extraordinary volume of personal and professional responsibilities in his head, and, as an unsurprising result, began losing track of things.

And it didn’t end with events. He had no to-do list, sticky notes, notebook, or scribbles on the back of his hand. No collection of crumpled napkins with scrawled reminders stuffed into the pockets of his jeans.

I sat there, slack-jawed, as I came to comprehend the depth of his stress. His kids’ social security numbers weren’t written down. His blood type wasn’t written down. The date of his last oil change, his bank account numbers, and bands his friends suggested he might enjoy were all just swirling around in his head, devoid of hierarchy or priority. He had no calendar reminder letting him know he needed to be in work early for mandatory training the following Thursday, or that his wedding anniversary was approaching, or that he had to take his Irish Wolfhound for her annual checkup.

It’s not the year 1410, and—without even considering goals—you most likely have more to keep track of than you can reasonably expect to keep in your head. I gave my friend (who was admittedly an extreme case) this advice: act as though you’re a project manager hired to keep track of the affairs of a small business—and imagine that small business is your life. Treat that job as though your performance was being tracked and measured. Strive to do a great job. Once you get used to this shift in mentality, its value will become evident, and the behaviors you’re learning will naturally carry over from your personal life into whatever ambitious projects or goals you take on.

This means your Scripts, Hot Lists, and Blocked Time need to exist somewhere outside your skull. There’s a clinical precedent for this advice: doctors will often suggest that adults suffering from ADHD adopt the use of tools to manage their lives. While the complexities of everyday life may be enough to overwhelm someone suffering from ADHD, there’s no reason the rest of us can’t take advantage of the same constructs; and in a hyperconnected world, we all suffer from some degree of attention deficit brought on by external forces. Especially if you plan to launch into an ambitious undertaking or have a wide range of disparate professional responsibilities, the use of tools will be vital not only to your success, but also your sanity.

You’re not an exception.

The Three Execution Tools

In order to implement the strategies discussed in Managing Extreme Personal & Professional Complexity and The Franklin Principle, you’re going to need three Execution Tools:

• A Note-Taking Tool

• A Listing Tool

• A Calendar

You’re going to learn about each tool and discover how they collectively create a perfect ecosystem that represents the mental organizational model you’ve come to know and love. When we’re done here, you’ll live and die by these three tools, and they’ll become core to your personal culture.

A Note-Taking Tool

There’s no twist here: a Note-Taking Tool is a utility you use to capture, store, and reference notes. I define notes as detailed, medium-to-large bodies of information, which are typically comprised of sentences and paragraphs.

If I go to a class, seminar, conference, or talk, I’m likely taking a few pages of notes. I collect notes for books, articles, and presentations I’m writing or projects and programs I’m developing.

Your notes should be quickly available, easily searchable, and accessible from a number of devices. Given these criteria, I wholeheartedly endorse Evernote. This suggestion is the result of a good deal of trial and error on my part and the parts of individuals with whom I’ve shared these tactics. Evernote is a robust tool that lets you make notes out of anything; you can use your voice, clips from websites, emails, photographs, and more. However, I argue that its real power is plain text; I essentially treat Evernote like a series of digital marble notebooks.

I should probably point out that I’m not endorsed in any way by the tools I suggest in this piece or my book—they’re simply the ones that seem to work best at the time of this writing.

Evernote is accessible through a desktop app, mobile apps, and web browsers. It’s cloud-based, which means information is stored remotely and securely, and syncs between multiple devices; if you create, edit, or delete a note, the changes will propagate across all the devices you’re using. Furthermore, you can sort notes into notebooks and add tags to notes for easy searching, which lets you intuitively organize and quickly locate notes relating to individual undertakings—something useful given your new mental organizational model.

If you don’t already have an account, sign up for Evernote Basic now. As of the time of this writing, you can use the service on two devices at once without a paid plan unless you’re storing a high volume of notes and syncing a lot of data. Ultimately, you may prefer to use something else, which is fine as long as it fits all of the criteria discussed here; however, in order to follow along with the book, go with Evernote for now (trust me and avoid the headache of painstaking research). Add it to the devices you most often use—I prefer to have it on my laptop and my phone.

If you’re already using Evernote, clean it up; get rid of any notes or notebooks you no longer need, group notes logically, and add tags wherever appropriate.

A Listing Tool

While Evernote can be used for lists and smaller bits of information, tools exist specifically to accommodate this need. Workflowy is a tool I’ve used for years with great success and have shared with countless others. Like Evernote, it’s accessible via a desktop app, mobile apps, and web browser, and it lets you structure information the way your mind works, whatever that may be. It lets you create and easily navigate through lists, with smaller lists nested infinitely within larger ones—exactly like the Hierarchical Thought model we discussed in Managing Extreme Personal & Professional Complexity. When items are completed, you simply click a button that either hides or removes them. Some people prefer more polished tools like Google Keep, but as of the time of this writing, I strongly recommend Workflowy, due not only to its direct applicability to the suggested mental model, but also due to its ease of use and beautiful simplicity. Other than a few optional keyboard shortcuts, there’s almost nothing to learn.

Nearly everyone I’ve convinced to try Workflowy ended up a long-term user. If you pay for the professional subscription, you can create unlimited lists and take advantage of features such as automated daily backups, custom themes, and more; however, you can perform most basic functionality with a free plan.

Remember our fictitious friend, Jackie, from Managing Extreme Personal & Professional Complexity? The whole-person hierarchy we developed for her can be represented perfectly in Workflowy. If you recall, at the highest level, her life was divided into two lists that represented the broadest practical way of splitting her focus:

• + Personal

• + Professional

By clicking the little + symbol next to each item, Workflowy lets you expand these top-level lists to see her life as a whole (we’ll add a few more items now that you’re familiar with Scripts and Hot Lists):

• - Personal

  • + General Hot List

  • + Parenting

  • + School

  • + DJ/Music

  • + Health and fitness

• - Professional

  • + General work Script

  • + Work Hot List

  • + Work meeting notes

  • + Vacation/absence prep Script

By clicking on any item, you can see a distraction-free zoomed-in view of it. For example, clicking on the dot next to Health and fitness in the above list would show you deeper lists nested within it and hide everything else from view:

• - Health and fitness

  • + Soccer

  • + Gym

Then, clicking on Soccer would show you even further nested lists:

• - Soccer

  • + Soccer solo practice Script

  • + Soccer Hot List

  • + Stretches

  • + Ball control drills to work on

Then, you can expand these lists to navigate, as needed:

• - Soccer

  • - Soccer solo practice Script

    • Stretches (30 seconds each)

    • Practice each ball control drill (5 minutes each)

    • Address Soccer Hot List

  • - Soccer Hot List

    • Research a more challenging stretching routine

    • Inflate back-up ball (in the garage)

  • - Stretches

    • Shoulder extension

    • Rear hand clasp

    • Full squat

    • Standing pike

    • Kneeling lunge

    • Lying twist

  • - Ball control drills to work on

    • Happy feet

    • Toe touches

    • V-rolls

    • Pull-and-cuts

In this example, Jackie is looking at her Soccer lists and none of her other personal or professional lists, which lets her focus only on what she wants to focus on at the time. You can imagine that she’s come upon a session of Soccer Blocked Time and finds herself out in her yard with the above series of lists pulled up on her mobile phone. She uses her Script to guide her and her other lists to provide the context needed to progress toward her goal.

The scale of perspective is completely up to her and easy to navigate, as it lets her zoom in and focus just like she does in her mind. I’m sure you can relate: you sometimes want to take inventory of entire undertakings, while at other times you surely want to focus only on the tasks at hand.

Listing Tools aren’t just for lists, Scripts, and Hot Lists; I also suggest using a Listing Tool to record anything small. For example, I live just outside Philadelphia and spend a lot of time in the city, so the odds of my car being stolen at some point are pretty high.

I mean, I love Philly, but let’s be honest about it.

Should my car be stolen, I’ll need to provide information to the police. Unlike my chronically stressed-out friend, I don’t have my VIN or license plate memorized; however, I can simply pull out my phone, go into Workflowy, go to my Cars/automotive list within my Personal list (which is actually a shared list with my wife’s Workflowy account—another useful feature), click on the item for that specific car, and find the information there. I can also do that in a much easier way: I can search for the actual text included in the items themselves, like “car,” “VIN,” “license,” or “license plate.” My wife and I also share grocery lists, items to talk to our pediatrician about at our next visit, lists of healthy dinner ideas, etc.

Imagine that you’re an employee at a mid-sized company. Take a look at a smallish bit of professional information that could be useful for you to keep in a Listing Tool.

• - Benefits Information

  • - Annual Bonus

    • 5% of annual salary

    • Split into two payments

    • 75% of bonus in first January paycheck; 25% of bonus in first July paycheck

  • - 401(k)

    • 3% is automatically deducted from every paycheck, matched by employer

  • - Health Benefits

    • Call advisor at 800-555-5555 or ask a question via online form on the company website

  • - Tuition Reimbursement

    • Up to $1,800/year

    • Must retain GPA above 3.0

    • See company website for details

This departs from the lists we’ve explored so far in several ways: items don’t exist in a particular order, and they’re informational as opposed to actionable. This list simply contains knowledge you would need to access from time to time, and it isn’t lengthy or narrative enough to require a note.

Here’s a simple Script example you might find in your Listing Tool within your Work heading:

• - Work Processes

  • - How to make a call to an outside line using the new phone system at work

    • Pick up the phone, press 99

    • Wait until the dial tone goes away

    • Press the squiggly arrow

    • Dial the number you want to call

Pause here and sign up for Workflowy if you haven’t already. Again, you may ultimately prefer something else that meets all of the criteria I mentioned, represents Hierarchical Thought in a simple, navigable manner, and allows for the same ability to dynamically shift your view and focus. However, for now, sign up for Workflowy so you can follow along with the book. If you already use Workflowy, take some time to organize it and clean it up. You’ll be utilizing a Listing Tool quite a bit throughout this book as you work through examples and begin to organize your goals. Once you’re signed up, try to create a structure that reflects your life. Spend some time playing around with it and create some sample lists and sub-lists—Hot Lists for organizing tasks by theme and Goal Scaffolds to reflect some simple goals. Grab the mobile app and sign in there, too.

An interface like Workflowy’s may be hard to get used to at first just because it gives you so much freedom, but after spending some time with it and curating it in a way that reflects your own mind and your own life, you’ll find this to be an invaluable tool.

Some people like to keep their notes and lists in a single tool; I don’t suggest doing so because each tool has its own strengths. Evernote allows for much more formatting flexibility (text markup, image insertion, tables, etc.), which can be handy for note-taking. On the other hand, Workflowy’s (intentional) limitations force you to create pure, simple text content, and the flatter organizational structure (no notebooks, notes, etc.) make for more efficient searching and more direct parity to a whole-life hierarchy mental model. Beyond the tools’ respective strengths, creating a firm distinction between lists and notes will help you keep both clean and well-organized, which will reinforce trust in the tools and encourage you to curate them properly.

A Calendar

Lastly, you need a Calendar. As of the time of this writing, Google Calendar is free and has every feature you should ever need. It's accessible through web browsers and easily integrated into the native Calendar apps on most phones and tablets. You can sync multiple Google Calendars, so you can see other peoples' changes in real time, as well as create, edit, and delete events within each Calendar from a single interface. For example, you may have a personal Calendar, your spouse may have a personal Calendar, your kids may have personal Calendars, and you may all share a “family” Calendar, which includes events you’ll all have to attend. You may share yet other Calendars with friends or keep a separate professional Calendar.

Aside from keeping track of your commitments, Calendars also let you know when to begin and end sessions of Blocked Time relating to your Have-to-Dos and Want-to-Dos.

If you don’t already use Google Calendar, stop now and sign up; all you need is a Google account, and you’ll already have a Calendar available to you. Once you have an account, set it up to sync with your mobile device (instructions for your specific device are only a quick Internet search away). As with Note-Taking and Listing Tools, if you ultimately prefer a different Calendar tool, that’s fine, as long as it fits the criteria mentioned and can sync across devices.

By this point, I’m going to assume you’re willing to give these new behaviors and traditions a chance; now it’s time to put your money where your mouth is. Open Google Calendar. Regardless of how you used your Calendar in the past, we’re going to set it up so it directs virtually all of your waking time.

First, make sure your Calendar reflects your responsibilities as accurately as possible so you can fully trust it; this will let you confidently navigate around existing commitments when identifying opportunities for Blocked Time. This also reduces stress as it absolves you of the need to keep any obligations in your head. Don’t be like my friend; get organized. Outsource your memory onto third-party tools.

Let’s begin with your personal commitments. Add to your Calendar any gym time, dentist and doctor’s appointments, events, parties, parent-teacher conferences, happy hours, sports practices, band practices, networking events, school concerts, sporting events, awkward first dates, amateur wrestling conventions, roller derby championships, pet massages, frat reunions, psychic readings, and cult mixers. If you already use a Calendar—and I sincerely hope you do—you probably have a good deal of these types of things in there already. Take the time now to add anything that may have been missed, tighten it up, and turn it into something you can truly trust to guide you.

Next, think about which events may be important to share with anyone with whom your life is intertwined. If possible, set up joint Calendars with these people. As an example: My wife doesn’t use her personal Calendar quite the way I do, but we share two joint Calendars to which she contributes events and obligations. Even if she didn’t reference them herself—which she does—she would keep them up to date because she knows and respects the fact that I rely on my Calendar as my source of truth.

Many professionals have their own work Calendar, often based in other tools like Microsoft Exchange or Google’s G Suite. If you have a work Calendar that can be seen in your personal or combined Calendar view, feel free to make it visible, but make sure it still remains a separate Calendar. Don’t start adding your personal events and obligations to your work Calendar, as many companies have policies restricting the use of work-provided resources for personal needs. More importantly, if you end up leaving the company unexpectedly, you’ll lose all your personal events.

Notice that the specific tools suggested—for Note-Taking Tools, Listing Tools, and Calendars—all fulfill a set of simple criteria. They’re all:

• Quickly accessible — They’re all available on your mobile device, which you can pull out and access in a matter of seconds. If you're in a developed nation, there’s a good chance your phone is on your person at almost all times, so it’s by far the best place for Execution Tools. Even the most basic modern phones let you do much more than text and send memes to your friends.

• Cross-device in real-time — This is a way of saying that any update made on one device will be almost immediately available on another. For instance, if you make a change to Workflowy, Evernote, or Google Calendar on your computer, walk down the hall, and check your smartphone, you should see your change reflected there.

• Redundant — Redundancy is a technical term for data existing in more than one place, so if you lose or accidentally delete something, you can still recover it, either from backups, the cloud-based service itself, or from another device. Redundancy is one of the primary reasons I’m vehement about using digital technology for these tools. I’ve worked with people who carry around a single flash card for each day or who use sticky notes or small notebooks; while these behaviors may work well for certain individuals, they’re not redundant, and if you lose your physical notes/lists, they’ll be lost forever. It’s not 1989, so please don’t do this. I can lose (or destroy) every device I own, buy new ones, sign into these services, and not a single note, list, or calendar event will have been lost.

• Simple — Each tool must be simple enough that you can master most major functionality after only a little use. If you use more complex tools with a whole suite of options, it will take you longer to feel like a power user, and you’ll be less prone to use them or customize them in a way that suits your personal style. You want to quickly cultivate a sense of familiarity with your Execution Tools, and using simple ones makes this easier.

• Free — While paid premium versions of Evernote and Workflowy exist, you can use most functionality with a free account. Free doesn’t mean you should use it for years without putting money into the pockets of these tools’ creators. It means there’s no reason not to at least give them a try—there’s no harm and no risk.

Recurring Tasks

You may encounter tasks you need to perform on a regular basis that are simple and don’t necessarily fit into the Hot List model.

As an example, consider taking your car in for an oil change every few months. For most people, that’s pretty isolated; such a task wouldn’t be paired up with other, related ones, and since it’s a Recurring Task, it wouldn’t make sense in a Hot List. Since your car’s health relies on this being done every few months, you can’t let it lobby for priority against other tasks and risk being pushed down or chronically deferred. The best method for handling such a Recurring Task is to decide on Blocked Time during which you’ll perform it, and create a recurring Calendar event for it. If a task is unavoidable, you may as well organize it to avoid losing track of it. Shed the stress of having to remember it—along with dozens of similar Recurring Tasks—in your head.

For instance, you could create an oil change Calendar event for 9 a.m. on the first Saturday of January, April, July, and October. You can also set reminders for one week before each so you can check your Calendar for any conflicts, adjust the times if necessary, call for appointments, etc.

Other examples of daily/weekly/semi-monthly Recurring Tasks:

• Take garbage and plastic/glass recycling to the curb every Wednesday night

• Mow the lawn every (or every other) weekend

• Refill your pill case or charge your hearing aid every Sunday

• Pick up your monthly public transit pass near the end of the month

• Meet a workout partner at the gym three times each week at a predetermined time

Sure, you’d probably remember to take the garbage to the curb without the Calendar event, but creating one eliminates the risk of losing track of the task on busy nights and then realizing once you’re already comfy in bed. It eliminates the vague sense of responsibility that can—in conjunction with other undocumented obligations—add up to an amorphous undercurrent of stress. And what does it cost you? You perform the task and erase the reminder with the simple swipe of a thumb.

Do you take birth control or heart medicine at 8 a.m. each day? Put a recurring event in the Calendar. For things like this—when consistency matters—you can consider the event an insurance policy. Do you visit grandma and help her clean her house every Wednesday at 6PM? Calendar. Change the filter in the fish tank every Sunday? Calendar. Place your daughter’s library book and Girl Scout uniform in her book bag every Wednesday? Calendar. Personally, on the first of each month, I change my contact lenses, organize my home office, swap out my toothbrush, and perform about ten other small tasks.

Then, there are yearly Recurring Tasks. On November 15th of each year, I bring patio furniture into my garage, drain the hoses outside my house so they don’t freeze during the winter, adjust my heater settings, and schedule time to have my gutters cleaned. I use a recurring Calendar event to remind myself that it’s time to perform my winter prep Script, refer to it when the time comes, and work my way through it from top to bottom. I don’t want to have to remember that stuff; I want tools to do it for me. I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night and realize I never drained the hoses.

Other examples of yearly or semi-yearly Recurring Tasks:

• Replace heater filters, clean the chimney, purge the water heater, etc.

• Organize tax and financial records and either file them with the IRS or send them to an accountant

• Update your résumé/CV just to keep it current and list recent accomplishments while they’re still fresh in your mind, regardless of your employment situation

• Schedule doctor checkups, optometrist and dental appointments, etc.

• Perform spring cleaning

Unique Tasks

Unique Tasks are tasks that only occur once, and these too should be reflected in your Calendar when they’re time-specific or time-sensitive. By nature, time-specific tasks are related to a time and, therefore, require very little thought. Consider 3 p.m. on June 4th: Doctor's appointment—bring referral; this is a textbook commitment and aligns with how most people use Calendars.

However, if you find yourself with a time-sensitive task with no specific time assignment, you should assign it a time and put it in the Calendar, as well. Let’s illustrate this with two examples.

Consider Pick up football game tickets from Uncle Fred. With something like this, you wouldn’t just want to “try to remember to get to it before the game;” not only is it time-sensitive, but remember—you’re trying to eliminate stress. Pick a time to do it and throw it in the Calendar. Even if you have to move it a little when the time comes, the task (and stress) of remembering is still outsourced.

By contrast, something like Look into alternate Internet service providers wouldn’t be a good candidate for this practice since it isn’t necessarily time-sensitive; instead, this one makes more sense as an item on a General Hot List and worked on when its Priority is appropriate during sessions of Blocked Time dedicated to that particular Hot List. Other priorities may bump it down, but unlike the Pick up football game tickets from Uncle Fred example, there isn’t a specific time by which you need to perform this task before it’s too late.

This all becomes natural with practice, and common sense will get you pretty far in assessing the best way to record, organize, and prioritize a given task. Either way, you’re getting it; I can see it in your eyes. Get obnoxiously organized. Become your own personal assistant. Your own best employee. Your own overbearing, micromanaging project manager.

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Managing personal and professional complexity is just one of the fundamental concepts I explore in my book, Foundations of Execution.

• About the Book

  You’re ambitious. You’re driven. You’re creative, believe in your vision, and know what you’re capable of. But like most, you often find it difficult to make progress toward the things you value.

  When it comes to accomplishing personal, professional, entrepreneurial, and creative goals, the world is bombarding you with bullshit guidance — coddling mantras of positivity and motivation devoid of practical action. Bullshit sounds good. Bullshit feels good. But bullshit will fail you in the long run nearly 100% of the time.

  No more bullshit.

  Let’s change tactics. Foundations of Execution won’t motivate you; it will give you the tools you need to execute despite the lack of motivation that will inevitably befall you. It won’t train you to abstain from excuses; it will give you the tools to strip all power from the excuses that will inevitably bubble to the forefront of your consciousness. It won’t argue the same tired case for self-discipline and convince you to work against your nature; it will show you how to circumvent your nature when it undermines your interests.

  As shockingly simple as it may seem, three behaviors tend to separate those who struggle from those who consistently execute on their goals; and by the time you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll have mastered all three. You’ll come away with repeatable habits that address not just how you tackle complex undertakings, but also how you think, behave, and approach problems in all aspects of your life. It’s an irreverent, philosophy-first, whole-self approach to execution that will change you forever.

  Paperback & Kindle

  181 Pages

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Tactical Consequences: Accountability's Secret Weapon

If you've read some of my other Perspectives pieces or books, you may be familiar with the first two Foundations of Execution — defining and refining your goals and managing complexity. The final foundation is removing failure from the equation. We'll explore this concept here.

At its most basic, removing failure from the equation requires Accountability. For many, Accountability points inward — holding oneself accountable for your decisions. When you apply this concept to goals, you're talking about self-discipline.

Bluntly, self-discipline doesn’t work. Traditionally, people believe the self-discipline required to execute on a goal should come from within; however, that model has a horrible track record. No matter how much you care about what you’re doing, you’re only human. Once you admit to yourself that you probably won’t be able to will your goal into existence—and that you’re not an exception—it’s time to discuss practical tactics for keeping your eyes on the prize.

Accountability means expanding the scope of failure. It broadens the distress associated with inaction or failure because they cease to be private events; it exposes your desires and progress to others and subjects you to judgment. If you want to learn more about Accountability, I explore it at length in my book, Foundations of Execution, but let’s assume you get the idea. How do we take it to the next level? What tactics can you use to not just make failure more public, but rather truly takes failure out of the equation?

Tactical Consequences

Imagine for a moment that you’d like to lose some body fat (a pretty relatable desire, I imagine). You may decide to eat healthfully and head to the gym each morning. You employ all the right behaviors, create detailed goals and milestones, do a ton or research, organize yourself properly in readily accessible tools, leverage Accountability by telling some friends about your plans and urging them to check in on your progress, and so on.

Good work!

However, when you resolve to do something, you’re at one point in your life (let’s call it Point A). The next morning at 6 a.m., when it’s cold and rainy and your alarm wakes you and reminds you to go to the gym, you’re at a different point (let’s call that Point B). Then, when you’re at work and someone brings donuts in, you’re at yet another point (Point C). Finally, when you’re in a rush and hungry and pass a fast food restaurant with an empty drive-through lane, you’re at another point (Point D).

These are four different people.

Who you are—your consciousness—is what many philosophers and neuroscientists refer to as integrated. You change as you receive and process new information, go through new experiences, and undergo fluctuations in hormone and chemical levels throughout the day. Since your consciousness—which is dynamic—is your sole connection to reality, you’re dynamic. And while core aspects of your personality and memory forge a convincing semblance of continuity, you’re constantly changing into what one could argue are fundamentally different individuals. Due to this, the you that makes a decision is a different person from the you who’s tasked with enforcing it. More importantly, the you who’s tasked with enforcing it is different from the you that will see the benefits (or lack thereof) down the road. When it comes time to do the hard work—to step on the treadmill at 6 a.m. or refrain from indulging in the donut—it’s hard to imagine being the you down the road who would have benefitted from current you’s sacrifice. This isn’t nearly as much of an exaggeration as you may think it is, as science directly supports this perspective’s functional validity. When we think of our future selves, our brains respond as though we’re thinking of an entirely different person[1].

You at Point A had the easiest job of all. Making a decision doesn’t hurt; it’s not work. However, in order to ensure you execute on Point A you’s intentions, Point A you—honorable and idealistic, driven and clear-headed—needs to inflict your will on Points B, C, and D you. This is precisely what Tactical Consequences achieve.

Incidentally, a close friend actually did decide he wanted to lose weight a while ago and had failed at dieting and exercising for years. We were talking about it one night when I suggested a plan. The next time we were hanging out, he handed money over to a mutual friend and made sure I witnessed the exchange. We told our mutual friend that she was to return the money to him only if he had lost a predetermined amount of weight by a certain date. If not, she could keep the money.

Right there, we moved beyond simple accountability and implemented Tactical Consequences. The goal was weight loss; the method was handing over the money and agreeing to the terms; and the Tactical Consequence was losing the money. To be sure it would work, though, we made some additions that would cause additional distress:

• To his wallet — My friend was gainfully employed, so if the consequence was only five dollars, the risk of losing it most likely wouldn’t generate proper incentive. It was important that he handed over enough money that it would be worth his while to follow through.

• To his sense of ethics — If he failed to lose the weight, he could take solace in the fact that the money was going to a close friend. I suggested that instead of keeping the money, our mutual friend should instead send it to a group or charity that supported a cause the dieter disagreed with. We settled on a group that it’s pretty safe to say very few decent people would likely want to support (this is sometimes referred to as an anti-charity). Everyone agreed to the change, and my friend followed through on his goal for the first time since his first Point A years ago.

My friend was tired of Point B sabotaging him and making him look bad; it was time to wage war. He put his future self at risk of embarrassment and damage to his sense of integrity by sharing the goal with more people. He put his future self at risk of monetary penalty by putting money on the line. He put his future self at risk of indirectly supporting a cause with which both his current and future selves disagreed. He tactically subjected his future self to consequences.

We were certainly not innovators here. However implemented, the core concept is simple: replace self-discipline and motivation with consequences. Earlier, I mentioned that self-discipline and motivation fail to deliver consistent results, and now you understand why: they’re fleeting because you’re constantly transforming into different individuals. Tactical Consequences work because they transcend time: inaction or failure become less likely options if they would introduce a problem to your life. Set up your future self to fail at the cost of money, pride, possessions, integrity, or combinations thereof.

In some cases, due to the nature of your goal, you can put into place your own Tactical Consequences with little or no outside assistance. For example—and continuing with the ongoing weight-loss theme—during periods of my life in which I participated in martial arts competitions, whenever I wanted to lose a few pounds after the Thanksgiving/year-end holiday eating gauntlet (the goal), I would enter myself in a tournament a few weeks into the new year, but would do so in the weight class that contained my goal weight (the method); I would leverage Accountability by letting family and teammates know I entered, and then if I didn’t make the weight, I’d face much stronger and larger opponents (Tactical Consequences).

As another example of self-inflicted Tactical Consequences, one of my closest friends maintained a day job for years while building his small business. Once it grew to the point that he could just about sustain his bills without working elsewhere, he pulled the trigger and quit (the method); if he didn’t work hard to network and drum up new business, he would find himself in dire financial straits or have to again seek employment (the Tactical Consequences).

Let’s discuss some implementation details and explore why it’s important that you only use this behavior sparingly.

Setting Mile Markers and Understanding Your Domain of Control

If your goal is long-term and large-scale, you shouldn’t tie Tactical Consequences to the overall goal, but rather to Mile Markers—checkpoints of achievement that signify progress pertaining to your overall goal. Not only is this model practical because large goals are collections of smaller goals, but there are also psychological factors at play. Hitting smaller goals and spreading your sense of achievement out over time will inspire you to continue more effectively than relying on a single, distant, long-term goal.

Goals that have been properly broken down into collections of smaller sub-goals should provide a nearly perfect collection of Mile Markers.

Imagine that your goal was to become an accomplished glass artist. As mentioned, you wouldn’t want to tie Tactical Consequences to the overall goal, but rather Mile Markers that comprise it. You may think that winning a competition by a certain date would be a good candidate, but it wouldn’t be because such events are qualitatively judged by third parties; you’d be relying, in part, on the whims and biases of judges. Instead, tie the Tactical Consequences to things that reflect your own dedication to the goal, such as entering a certain number of competitions before a certain date. Doing so lies squarely within your Domain of Control, and the preparation required to compete will force you to adopt behaviors that will ensure progress toward both winning competitions and your ultimate goal.

External factors can pose challenges and threaten your ability to execute on even a well-constructed goal’s ultimate success criterion; while you can (and should) adjust for such challenges as they arise, you should tie Tactical Consequences to Mile Markers that rely entirely on your action or inaction. The simpler Mile Markers are, and the more they rely only on your own behaviors, they more effective they’ll generally be.

As another example, imagine that you wanted to publish a comic book. There are quite a few Mile Markers you could tie Tactical Consequences to surrounding writing, storyboarding, illustrating, coloring, etc., but when it comes to publishing, you’re reliant on the willingness of a publisher to work with you. While you can influence that, you can’t control it. Because of this, rather than setting a Mile Marker called have comic book published, pick something like research and send well-constructed pitch letters to at least fifteen different agents or publishers. When no one and nothing else can be blamed for your inability to execute on a Mile Marker, you’ll find yourself robbed of excuses—that’s an incredibly freeing feeling and lets you define Tactical Consequences with impunity.

Which brings us to the next topic…

Taking It to the Limit

Approach the following first as a philosophical exercise before worrying about implementation:

The Tactical Consequences tied to Mile Markers for your goal that lie within your Domain of Control should be extreme if the goal is incredibly important to you. Remember: inaction or failure become less likely options if they would introduce a problem to your life. Let’s amend that to say a catastrophic problem because the more extreme the consequences, the less likely you are to tolerate failure as an option.

As consequences approach intolerable, inaction or failure becomes almost impossible. You at Point A—the enthusiastic, driven version of you—has the potential to become an asshole. A sadistic, devious villain. In such cases, Point B you may hate the Point A version, but too bad—Point A you is in charge because they came first and have the intel needed to leverage Point B you’s weaknesses, fears, desires, and anxieties. In accessing such intimate forces, you can all but guarantee a degree of success otherwise virtually unattainable.

It’s difficult to come up with extreme Tactical Consequence examples because the aforementioned weaknesses, fears, desires, and anxieties are different for everyone. For some, social consequences are far more painful than monetary ones. For some, denial of creature comforts may be a big driver. Be honest with yourself and push the boundaries. If you love television, banning yourself from watching it for a month may seem like a good Tactical Consequence, but does it guarantee you’ll follow through on your Mile Markers? What about if you banned all television and films for a year, and would have to destroy your television?

This illustrates a point: every goal comes with the opportunity to ask yourself if you value success/execution relating to your goal—and all it will bring you—more than you value the things you choose put on the line. Think of your motivations and know that if you want to guarantee success, you always have the option of taking it far, digging deep, and making it hurt.

Before you dismiss me as a lunatic, consider that me at Point B can be pretty lazy. Me at Point C can be afraid of failure. Me at Point D can be overwhelmed by life’s responsibilities, and—worst of all—me at Point E can decide my goal simply didn’t matter in the first place. I know I’m as weak-willed, fickle, and easily distracted as anyone else, so for the goals I’ve valued the most, I’ve devised quite a few extreme Tactical Consequences over the years.

When you began reading this, I promised you the ability to take failure out of the equation—to entirely remove inaction and failure as options. This is it—this is how. It’s not complex, but it’s something very few have the guts to discuss honestly because we secretly like the failure option; it comforts us. We like being able to lay blame on external forces, or to be able to shrug off a previous goal as a phase or bad idea. We like the eject button the failure option provides. I also believe—deep down in our hearts—we all know it’s possible to remove failure. You would hit that first fitness Mile Marker if failing to do so meant using up your vacation time jogging across your entire state in the winter. You would hit your first side-business Mile Marker if doing so prevented your grandmother from opening a sealed envelope containing a detailed list of embarrassing secrets. You would finish the first draft of that screenplay if you would have to donate your car if you missed your deadline. You would launch that online store in time if failing to do so meant burning every existing photo of your beloved childhood pet and deleting any digital copies. It’s a weird and ugly concept, but you should keep it in mind as a viable option because it works when nothing else will. When you’ve failed, procrastinated, and made excuses for years. And when the goal truly matters, I urge you to push the boundaries because if you can tolerate the consequence, inaction and failure will always be options.

Setting Mile Markers well within your Domain of Control gives you the freedom to craft Tactical Consequences that are as ruthless, life-altering, reputation-damaging, and police-report-filing as you’d like. Remember, this is you at Point A; the Accountability and Tactical Consequences you bring to this goal will force you to push through when (not if) you lose steam at Point B, C, or beyond.

Now that you understand that this option is available to you, you need to understand how to wield it responsibly.

Extreme Tactical Consequences as a Filtration Tool

At this point, you may be under the impression that I’m constantly setting up booby traps for myself, living a high-stakes life wrought with minute-by-minute drama and self-abusive consequences. This is certainly not the case, and if I don’t make it to the gym on time today, I can assure you I won’t have to burn my house to the ground. Quite the opposite; Tactical Consequences are an incredibly powerful tool that should be used with caution, and not every goal warrants them. In fact, the exercise of applying Tactical Consequences can often transform into an exercise in filtration.

By implementing Tactical Consequences, you demonstrate that inaction or failure relating to goals you value isn’t tolerated, and if you aren’t willing to commit distressing Tactical Consequences to a goal, then you have to ask yourself if you really want to achieve it as badly as you claim. That’s vital and healthy; if you’re an excitable, enthusiastic dreamer who is interested in taking on the world and chronically spreading yourself thin, the threat of an extreme Tactical Consequence forces you to reconsider, reduce scope, prioritize, and focus your energy. In many cases, the internal discussion about whether or not a goal is truly important enough to decorate with extreme Tactical Consequences frees you; it forces you to ask if the goal was an empowering fantasy you’ve always held onto for comfort but never truly wanted. It isolates and assigns value to your true goals while weeding out the whims. It encourages you to weigh a goal against its ability to bring you more of what you value on the most fundamental level.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue goals that you value but to which you can’t justify applying Tactical Consequences. Personally, I dedicate blocked sessions of time to a number of personal, professional, and fitness goals I value; I meticulously organize them using the tactics I share in Foundations of Execution. I’ve even expanded the scope of failure by sharing some such goals with my family, colleagues, and others. Without employing these behaviors, I know I’m never going to progress as I’d like. While certainly important, these goals are far from my most vital; they don’t have the potential to drastically change my life. For that reason, I choose not to tie Tactical Consequences to their Mile Markers. If I did so for every single such goal—especially if I made the Tactical Consequences extreme—I’d be a stressed-out lunatic. Not every goal is important enough to justify subjecting myself to this practice; and when one is, it’s clear. I’m willing to bet you know which of your goals are worth subjecting yourself to risk and frustration, as well.

Think of Tactical Consequences as a potentially lethal weapon; respect them, use them sparingly and with careful consideration, and when you do actually deploy them, do so without mercy.

Defining an Executor of Consequences and Auditor

If I’ve convinced you that Tactical Consequences are an important tool, at this point, you may be asking how you’re expected to make sure you go through with them. That’s a great question; if Point D you can’t be trusted to follow through on Point A you’s goal, they certainly can’t be trusted to follow through on distressing Tactical Consequences.

Earlier, I cited examples that illustrate how you can often enforce your own Tactical Consequences—such as when I would enter martial arts tournaments in a different weight class, or when my friend quit his job in order to force himself to commit to his side gig. However, not every goal presents such an easy setup for Tactical Consequences, and this is where you may need to leverage Accountability in more unique ways. Online Accountability services like those mentioned earlier can often provide this for you, but may fall short when you want to venture into more extreme or unorthodox consequences. When it comes to such cases—depending on your situation, the nature of your goal, and interpersonal dynamics—you may be able to explore building a support team. Minimally, this means coordinating your goal/consequences with two individuals—an Executor of Consequences and an Auditor.

An Executor of Consequences is an individual who will remain actively engaged in your journey and up to date on your progress, and who will be willing to do the work to ensure that all Tactical Consequences are carried out. This is where you call upon your closest personal relationships.

This is also where things can become a bit uncomfortable.

However, true friendship isn’t most evident in the currency of sympathy, but rather in respect for your best interests; love isn’t demonstrated in leniency and concessions, but rather in helping you pursue the things that matter to you. A true friend will force you to carry out Tactical Consequences—will refuse to come pick you up when it’s cold, and your feet hurt, and you don’t think you can run any farther. A true friend will deliver the envelope of embarrassing secrets to your grandmother. They’ll come take your television off the wall and list it for sale online for you. And if the threat of a Tactical Consequence isn’t enough to force you to execute on your Mile Markers when enthusiasm wanes, laziness kicks in, and interests shift, your desire to spare a friend from the uncomfortable position of having to enforce them may be.

The Auditor is a second individual—essentially a back-up or insurance policy—tasked with ensuring that the Executor of Consequences follows through on their duties. With this second team member in place, in order for a Tactical Consequence not to be carried out, three people have to fail to see the value in your success; three people have to make the decision to spare you the discomfort brought about by your inaction. At the risk of sounding callous, if you truly value your goal and openly share your motivations, yet you and your entire support system are unwilling to step up when the moment comes, you may want to reassess your character as well as the character of those whose company you keep.

If you have no family, friends, or network you can rely on, leverage online communities relating to your interest or goal domain. It may involve a good deal of work, but if you really want to do this, you can find a way to make it work.

Asking someone to be your Executor of Consequences or Auditor can be awkward; however, there are a few tactics you can use to make it less so:

• Increase buy-in by collaborating on Tactical Consequences — You should be the primary author of your Tactical Consequences since you’re the only individual intimately familiar with the fears, anxieties, and desires from which they should be derived. However, if your Executor is somehow involved in crafting the Tactical Consequences and the details surrounding them, they’ll most likely feel more of a sense of ownership surrounding enforcement.

• Make it fun — Don’t approach the request from a place of seriousness, and don’t make the task of enforcing Tactical Consequences seem dark and thankless. Embrace the unorthodox nature of the request, encourage absurd, funny, or embarrassing consequences, and—while your Tactical Consequences should cause you true distress when they relate to important goals—don’t take yourself or this process too seriously. Don’t be afraid to have fun with this.

• Don’t withhold context — If you open up to someone and share your motivations and details surrounding struggles or pain you may have endured due to past failures relating to a particular goal, your Executor and Auditor will most likely feel a greater sense of responsibility to enforce the Tactical Consequences. They’ll believe their enforcement will be in your best interests.

It’s Not Crazy If It Works

When you started reading this, I realize it may not have been exactly what you were expecting, but it’s the truth: in order to follow through and execute, you don’t need to be exceptionally intelligent, motivated, or self-disciplined. You simply need to create situations that force future versions of yourself to make decisions that align with your current values and goals.

I urge you to take some time to identify and write down ten or so Tactical Consequences that would cause you true distress—things you couldn’t even fathom having to deal with. Be creative, and don’t be afraid to get weird. Once you’ve done so, you’ll have them available should you decide to employ them.

[1] UCLA psychologist Hal Hershfield has done groundbreaking work on this topic.

Worksheets

Get your hands dirty! Check out a comprehensive (and free) worksheet to help you make the most of this specific Foundations of Execution strategy.

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Tactical Consequences are just one of the fundamental concepts I explore in my book, Foundations of Execution.

• About the Book

  You’re ambitious. You’re driven. You’re creative, believe in your vision, and know what you’re capable of. But like most, you often find it difficult to make progress toward the things you value.

  When it comes to accomplishing personal, professional, entrepreneurial, and creative goals, the world is bombarding you with bullshit guidance — coddling mantras of positivity and motivation devoid of practical action. Bullshit sounds good. Bullshit feels good. But bullshit will fail you in the long run nearly 100% of the time.

  No more bullshit.

  Let’s change tactics. Foundations of Execution won’t motivate you; it will give you the tools you need to execute despite the lack of motivation that will inevitably befall you. It won’t train you to abstain from excuses; it will give you the tools to strip all power from the excuses that will inevitably bubble to the forefront of your consciousness. It won’t argue the same tired case for self-discipline and convince you to work against your nature; it will show you how to circumvent your nature when it undermines your interests.

  As shockingly simple as it may seem, three behaviors tend to separate those who struggle from those who consistently execute on their goals; and by the time you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll have mastered all three. You’ll come away with repeatable habits that address not just how you tackle complex undertakings, but also how you think, behave, and approach problems in all aspects of your life. It’s an irreverent, philosophy-first, whole-self approach to execution that will change you forever.

  Paperback & Kindle

  181 Pages

---

CMV: Extreme Intentionality

Whether professional, personal, or creative, a well-crafted goal needs to be built on a foundation of Intentionality, and those who consistently execute typically operate with a level of Intentionality often overlooked by others. In this context, Intentionality simply means performing a task or tasks with purpose (as opposed to just performing them). Ben Franklin famously asked himself, What good shall I do this day? each morning, and What good have I done today? each evening. While even such a simple and loose demonstration of Intentionality will provide value, you’re going to take a much more robust approach.

The best way to embrace Intentionality is to define and refine your intentions, and in order to do so properly, you need to understand your goals at two different scales—how they relate to larger, overarching, life-spanning values or motivations (see Foundational Wealth), and in a more granular, actionable, goal-specific sense (which I'll cover here). In doing so, you’ll set yourself up for success in ways you may have never imagined possible.

What is a CMV?

Here, you’re going to learn a unique approach that ensures your intentions are well-defined by looking at them from three separate perspectives. I call this CMV.

CMV stands for Credo, Mission, and Vision. These are terms you may have heard associated with businesses or brands, but they’re valuable tools for professional, personal, entrepreneurial, and creative goals, as well.

Here’s a breakdown:

Credo

• Beliefs about what’s valuable, important, or desirable

• A Latin word that means a set of fundamental beliefs or a guiding principle

• Begins with “I believe…”

• Example: I believe that individuals in malaria-afflicted countries should have the opportunity to live long, healthy lives.

Mission

• Your purpose or calling

• Begins with “To…”

• Example: To increase malaria treatment availability in afflicted countries

Note that your Mission is an actionable manifestation of your Credo. Everything flows together.

Vision

• An image of the Mission accomplished (or being accomplished)

• An ideal future state (framed within the scope of your influence)—though not necessarily an end state—which would be possible only if your Mission was successful

• Reflects high standards

• Creates a visual scene

• Worded in the present progressive (“it is”) or present perfect progressive (“it has been”) tense

• Example: The cities and towns of historically malaria-afflicted areas are bustling with healthy humans; when doctors encounter a case of malaria, they’re genuinely alarmed and puzzled because it's so rare an occurrence.

You can (and should) develop a CMV for every remotely complex goal or undertaking in your life that you value. The exact same structure can be applied to anything from cutting carbs or managing social anxiety to building a business empire.

A CMV:

• Brings everything you do into focus and lets you make progress toward your goal with intentionality

• Ensures you have a quickly accessible and simple way to illustrate your intentions, motivations, and purpose to others

• Helps inform decisions and risk tolerance

• Reminds you what to value/prioritize vs. what to disregard

• Sparks insight and provides guidance when you’re unsure about your next step

• Keeps you more intimately engaged with your goal and therefore less likely to give up when things become difficult

I’m not suggesting you make a CMV for your life as a whole; instead, you should craft unique CMVs for every individual valuable and complex goal, undertaking, or project.

Examples

To share a personal example, here’s my CMV for being a dad, which is easily one of the most valuable and complex things I’ve ever done. I created this years ago when my first child was born.

• Credo: I believe a present, engaged, supportive, and encouraging adult model is critical to the development of wise, confident children.

• Mission: To instill in my children a culture of curiosity and a passion for pursuing the things they value

• Vision: I meet my children for dinner in 20 years and am reminded that they’ve grown to become individuals I admire and genuinely enjoy being with

Think of how these three statements could inform my decisions, conversations, language, and behaviors.

From my Credo, the phrase “a present and engaged adult model” reminds me to remain truly in the moment and resist the urge to engage with unrelated thoughts or actions when I'm spending time with my children. As an example, the nature of my career can sometimes make work/life separation a challenge (which is something I generally don’t mind, since I enjoy what I do)—but I sometimes need a reminder to put my phone away.

From my Mission, the term “a culture of curiosity” informs how I answer questions—I have the choice of answering my children’s more complex questions dismissively or by showing that I value their curiosity and rewarding them with encouragement and by matching their enthusiasm. When my daughter asked me how a car engine worked at age four, I would have been justified in saying, “Look, this is going to go way over your head, so let’s revisit it in a few years.” Instead, I gave her a detailed yet age-appropriate version of the real answer, and then we spent some time that night building moving engine parts out of Legos. She most likely didn’t follow everything we discussed, but she certainly enjoyed it and grew from the exploration process.

From my Vision, the phrase “individuals I admire” reminds me to instill in my children the values and attributes I see in people I admire—to teach them about integrity and to encourage them to question authority but recognize when someone is looking out for their best interests; to reward humor and encourage their interests so they become worldly, interesting, happy, and open-minded adults.

This CMV is guided by and complies with what I value (to understand what you value, read about Foundational Wealth). I value diversity of experience, and my CMV encourages me to seek out diverse experiences with my children, where I can engage with them in novel ways, furnish them with opportunities to exercise curiosity and passion, and help them cultivate the breadth of experience needed to become worldly and open-minded. I want to consistently help them achieve the things they value by empowering them to seek out whatever it is that they see as valuable, even if it’s drastically different from my own definition.

While Credos, Missions, and Visions are all valuable and should be used to inform almost every aspect of a goal, in many cases, Credos and Visions can be kept close—but Missions should be shared with the widest appropriate audience. This is true in almost any context. For intensely personal goals, the widest appropriate audience may just be you—and that’s perfectly fine—for other goals, though, it may be friends, family, coworkers, and anyone you’ve asked to hold you accountable. For larger goals, the widest appropriate audience may include many more people.

To close with yet another personal example, consider a CMV I crafted for myself in a technology leadership role I had. While I only shared my Credo and Vision with a few of the key leaders who reported to me, I shared my Mission far and wide. It sat at the top of nearly every piece of documentation I created, it was laminated and posted on my office door, and it adorned the back of my computer monitor, so anyone sitting across the desk from me could read it without even having to turn their head. After some time, I began to hear members of the team citing it in conversation or when making critical decisions.

The Mission was: To utilize my experience to develop one of the greatest software engineering teams in the company—a team whose expertise will be admired, whose processes will be emulated, and whose guidance will be sought. Think of how that may have informed my pursuing growth or visibility opportunities for my staff; how that may have informed my willingness to have tough conversations or address underperformance; or how that may have influenced the care I put into developing robust, repeatable processes.

This also reflects the things I value. I wanted to furnish my staff with opportunities to grow and—by encouraging them to adopt new ways of doing things and share their expertise outside their immediate teams—to experience new things and push the boundaries of their comfort zones (my self-focused definition). I also wanted to invest time and energy in understanding my staff members’ individual motivations and help them achieve the things they value (my externally focused definition).

There you have it. Understand what truly drives you (by exploring Foundational Wealth), and use that knowledge as a guide for creating CMVs for anything complex or valuable you pursue.

With a CMV in place, you can consider your goal(s) defined. Next, you can use it to refine your goal by crafting M-SMART Goals.

Worksheets

Get your hands dirty! Check out a comprehensive (and free) worksheet to help you make the most of this specific Foundations of Execution strategy.

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CMVs (and Intentionality in general) are just some of the fundamental concepts I explore in my book, Foundations of Execution.

• About the Book

  You’re ambitious. You’re driven. You’re creative, believe in your vision, and know what you’re capable of. But like most, you often find it difficult to make progress toward the things you value.

  When it comes to accomplishing personal, professional, entrepreneurial, and creative goals, the world is bombarding you with bullshit guidance — coddling mantras of positivity and motivation devoid of practical action. Bullshit sounds good. Bullshit feels good. But bullshit will fail you in the long run nearly 100% of the time.

  No more bullshit.

  Let’s change tactics. Foundations of Execution won’t motivate you; it will give you the tools you need to execute despite the lack of motivation that will inevitably befall you. It won’t train you to abstain from excuses; it will give you the tools to strip all power from the excuses that will inevitably bubble to the forefront of your consciousness. It won’t argue the same tired case for self-discipline and convince you to work against your nature; it will show you how to circumvent your nature when it undermines your interests.

  As shockingly simple as it may seem, three behaviors tend to separate those who struggle from those who consistently execute on their goals; and by the time you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll have mastered all three. You’ll come away with repeatable habits that address not just how you tackle complex undertakings, but also how you think, behave, and approach problems in all aspects of your life. It’s an irreverent, philosophy-first, whole-self approach to execution that will change you forever.

  Paperback & Kindle

  181 Pages

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