The importance of setting non-work goals

Hello there! Today I want to share some of the reasons behind setting goals in different areas of your life, not just your work and why it is so useful. Let's go! As you probably know, under the Monthly Method, you set goals in three areas of your life: Career and Growth, Health and Key Relationships, and the Quality of Life. You set three goals in each of the three areas of your life. I came up with the system after spending years trying different methods, different apps, reading different books, et cetera. Most of us set goals in our professional life. If you're a business owner, you set goals for your business. Some of us have health-related goals. But setting goals for key relationships and the quality of life is kind of unheard of. But after embracing the Monthly Method for a few years now, and also teaching it to my clients, I can say that this definitely works. And here's why. The most obvious reason is that this approach helps you to bring balance to your life. That way you don't have one area of your life heavily dominated while others are getting completely ignored. Every month, you are doing something to elevate your key relationships, your health and your hobbies. You also engage in the activities that create great memories through the quality of life goals. You go on that weekend get away. You go to that concert. You read that book that you wanted to read. You meet with your friends. All of that is what adda color and flavor to your days, to your weeks, to a month, to your years, to your life. And this prevents the ground hog day effect. Very important, in my opinion. The second benefit of setting goals in multiple areas of your life every single month is that it reduces stress and prevents burnout. Let's say you have a goal of going to bed at 10:00 PM every single night to get enough sleep. This is one of the goals that you're working on under the Monthly Method in your health and key relationships category. Great. And let's say another habit that you're working on is building a meditation habit. And you choose to play with your kids outside for an hour after work while your spouse is cooking dinner instead of continuing working on your laptop. All of these little things prevent burnout. They allow you to relax and recharge. And you can work on all of them every single month. A less obvious reason why this approach reduces stress is that it puts your work life in perspective. Again, under the Monthly Method, you have three work goals and six non-work goals. So one category is work-related and two categories are non-work related. And I like how one of my clients put it during our last call. She said, "I just realized that I have more to my life than work. I have all these other things in my life, all these other roles that I am playing." Under the Monthly Method, your work goals are just one-third of all the goals that you set. It's not a hundred percent. It's only one-third. And this is the reality. Think about it. You have 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That's 160 hours. Your workweek is 40 hours a week. That's only 24%. Okay. Add the commute, deduct the brakes, and we are averaging at about 30 to 33%. Why are we making our work feel like it's a hundred percent of our time when there is so much more to our lives than work. By setting goals in other areas of your life, you realize the proper significance of your work. Not that it doesn't matter, but that it's not everything. And you should treat it accordingly. And realizing that it's only one-third of your life downplays the significance of the problems and stresses you might be experiencing in that area of your life. You always know that you have your health, your key relationships and your enjoyment of life to pay attention to. And this offsets some of the hard days at work, some of the stresses, some of the terrible conversations, bad clients, et cetera. When you realize that it's only one-third of your life, then it's not as important as it used to be. And this helps with stress management. The third reason behind setting goals in different areas of your life is that it helps with energy management. Your productivity levels rely on two things, your time management and your energy management. Because think about it. Even if you have time to do the things you want to do, but you have no energy to do them. Guess what? You're not going to do them. So it's not just about time. The best energy management framework I found is embracing the circular cycle of want-to vs. need-to activities. I have an entire episode on this topic. It is episode number 30. Highly, highly recommend. I can guarantee it's not something that you've heard before. It's a completely new framework. If you listened to episode number 30, you remember that in order to have more energy, you regularly need to engage in your want-to activities. By setting goals in the quality of life category, you are making sure that you're engaging in the want-to activities during the sprint. The quality of life category fuels you with the energy that you need to use in the other two categories. And this is the secret sauce behind the Monthly Method. This is why my clients don't get exhausted following the Monthly Method. They are replenishing their energy resources by showing up for their equality of five goals. By the way, if you're new to this podcast and you're feeling a bit confused with all these categories, download the free guide I have on my website. It will walk you through the process and it will give you examples of goals you can set in each of the categories. You can find the guide at monthlymethod.com/guide. I will leave the link in the show notes. So coming back, the quality of life category is often the category of clients have the most trouble setting goals in because we're not trained to set goals that will be fun and enjoyable. We've been so obsessed with productivity that we forgot to pay attention to what we actually like doing for the sake of the process, not the outcome. Not having goals in the quality of life category will lead to exhaustion hundred percent guarantee. Because when you only focus on the work goals or the health goals, they all consume psychological energy and your energy resource becomes depleted. And that's when you feel exhausted. So here's a tip for you. If you often feel exhausted in your goal setting. It might be the sign that you don't have any activities in your life that would replenish your energy resource. Check out episode number 30 to get some ideas on how to fix it. The number one secret behind any success is consistency. So if you're exhausted all the time, you will not be consistent. At some point you will give up. Don't believe in the hustle culture message that you have to be exhausted all the time when you're pursuing your goals. It's not true. It's not productive. It's not effective. It's just silly. Try something different. Try setting goals in the quality of life category. Have some fun. There's as what gives you energy to do the difficult work and health related tasks. And now the final in most important reason why setting goals in different areas of your life works so well. Setting goals in different areas of your life makes you more productive. It makes you more productive in your work as well. You can get a lot more valuable things done during your work hours when you have goals in other areas. And this is how it works. Generally speaking, people schedule their goals from category number one and number two, the health and care relationships and the quality of life goals, in the evenings and on the weekends. You probably don't want to schedule family time and fun stuff during your nine to five. So you schedule them after work or on the weekends. Because you have all these exciting things scheduled after five, and you're truly excited about them. You're kind of forced to get all your work done during your work hours. You simply don't have time to be working after five because you have goals to spend time with your kids. Go for a run. Meet with your friends, et cetera. Your life after five and on the weekends is simply too exciting to be working. And by having these commitments on the weekends and evenings, you become much more productive during your work days. Do you remember the last time you went on a two week long vacation? The week prior to your vacation was probably the most productive week you had in months, wasn't it? Because you were excited to go on vacation and there was no way on earth you wanted to work during your vacation time. So you got everything that needed to be done done as quickly and as efficiently as possible. The same thing happens when you have something exciting scheduled for your evenings and your reading. Now, in comparison, let's look at what happens when you set goals in just your professional life. You probably end up procrastinating because Hey, you have the whole day to get it done. You can always work on it after dinner. And you don't really have anything planned for the weekend. So you might spend a couple hours on Saturday working on your work goals and maybe Sunday. And then before you know it, your work occupies your whole life. Just because you're not actively setting goals in other areas of your life. So this is what I've realized. Having fun as an adult requires time planning and effort. Getting together with your friends requires planning. None of it will happen on autopilot. You need to take the ownership of the quality of your life, the same way you're taking ownership of the quality of your work. It's no different. No fun trips, beautiful hikes, memories with friends will happen on its own. You need to make them happen. And you need to plan for them and make time for them because what's the alternative? The alternative is to be working all hours of the day and then be watching Netflix because it's the lowest effort leisure activity out there. It doesn't require any planning. It doesn't require any effort. You just turn it on and that's it. By planning these memorable activities and allocating big chunks of your time for them, you become so much better complete in your work goals because you don't have a whole day to get one task done. You only have couple of hours because then you're meeting with your friends. Maybe you're going on the hike. Maybe you're going to someone's birthday. You have other things planned, so you can't procrastinate till the end of the day. You'll have two hours to get it done. So you get it done. Okay guys, these are the main reasons why I advocate for setting goals in different areas of your life, not just work. As you can see, by setting goals in different areas of your life, you get to elevate all of them, including your work. Try it out for yourself and let me know how it goes. I love hearing your stories. Please subscribe. If you want to get a freshly baked episode delivered to you next Monday.