Why Goal Setting Doesn't Work And What To Do Instead

Setting goals is the first bit of advice any productivity expert will give you. The standard advice runs as follows:

1. Brainstorm what you want to achieve in your life across all areas of your life. This should cover career, health, family, money, education, voluntary work and any other area of your life you feel is important.
2. Select from this a handful of lifetime goals that really inspire you.
3. Break these down into smaller goals that are milestones on the way to your lifetime goals. Start with five year goals, then three years, then one year, then six months until you get to daily and weekly to-do lists.
4. Make sure all these goals are SMART. 
5. Write all of them down. 
6. Make sure they are all positive and specific.
7. Focus on your contribution rather than the achievement of the goal itself. There may be something stopping you from achieving your goal out of your control but you can control your own performance.

 What are the weaknesses with this approach?

 The principal weakness of this approach is it assumes you don't change. What I want from my life now compared to 10 or even 5 years ago is completely different. I have different interests, different wants and needs now. People change. And not just people. Lifetime goals written in 1990 (when i graduated from university) would be based on a very different world from the one we live in now.

Also, you have no way of knowing how easy or difficult achieving the goals is actually going to be. The breakdown into smaller goals and milestones is then somewhat arbitrary. You just guess when it will be done by.

It also tries to cover all areas of your life at the same time. Even with prioritising you are likely to have a range of goals that may or may not fit together. 

What this means is that goal setting becomes very artificial and rigid and it bears no relation to your actual life. In fact, it can become a trap because you feel that you should continue to work on achieving something that you no longer care about. Dropping a goal feels like quitting and no one likes to quit.

What can you do instead?

1. Don't have goals, have projects. Forget trying to create lifetime goals. For the areas of you life which you are currently interested in, choose one and define as a project. Projects are about changing what we have now into something new. Learn from it. 
2. Choose one. Do that completely. Then do another one. Don't try and do several at the same time. Only do what excites you at the time.
3. Everything worth doing can be done in two years. From travelling the world to starting a business to writing a book, two years is the maximum you will ever need. Many can be done in much shorter times.
4. Do testers. Goals are by their nature aspirational but often you don't know whether you will be good at or even like what you set out to do. If unsure, instead of launching into the main project, do a tester project, a shorter version of the main one. If it goes badly and isn't what you thought it would be you can drop it and move on to something else. This isn't quitting. It's evaluation.
5. Celebrate your successes. Every project completed deserves celebration. It is enough on its own. 

How would you improve on the standard approach to goal setting?