Happy New Year from the Manager Lab: Rituals for Clear, Intentional Goals

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Happy New Year from the Manager Lab. It's good to be with you today. This is the time of year where we think about. New Year's resolutions, perhaps, or goals, whatever your term is for that. This is the time of year where we kind of reflect on the previous year and think about all that is possible in the year to come. So this will be a little bit different cast. This will be more, perhaps, I hope not, but a little bit more of a rambling kind of cast.

Normally, I'm pretty structured. I've got my notes, and I follow notes and I keep pretty timely. But today I'm just going to kind of pontificate on my process that I've been probably doing for 30 years now. Back in 1995, I read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. You might have heard of that book by Stephen Covey. And it really kind of changed the trajectory of my life for many, many reasons.

But one of the concepts that came out of The Seven Habits was this idea that we can really lump our life into four really broad categories. And again, this is a ritual that I've been doing really since then, since 1995. and Dr. Covey wrote that if you look at goals and you look at resolutions, you can really lump them into four broad categories. So, there's the physical life, there's the mental life, the social-emotional

life, and the spiritual life. And. You're hard-pressed if you come up with a goal, you're hard-pressed not to be able to fit that goal or that resolution into one of these four categories. And so every year, I sit down with my previous year's goals, and I kind of just look through them. I don't look at these every week or even every month. I probably glanced at them like once a quarter because these are kind of really big picture projects that I'd like to accomplish for the year.

And so yesterday, and I'll do a lot of this today, I'll look back at that. I'll reflect on what I've accomplished for the year. And then I will decide the things that I didn't accomplish. I will decide how important those things are to me to continue into 2026. And a lot of them were just things that excited me at the time that no longer really holds that excitement. And so I might just, you know, just archive those and think about them in years to come.

Or I may restructure them and put them into my New Year's goals and my New Year's resolutions. So that's really it. I don't really, I don't put my work-related goals into this system. These are all just things. Personal goals that I have. And again, I reflect on those. I'll spend hours thinking about those towards the end of a year and hit the new year running with some real clarity and with some real intention.

And of course, the literature is replete with articles that if you have clarity about what you're doing, you know, Gallup says that's the most important thing that engages employees. Well, I think it's the most important thing that engages us as humans. And so having real clarity about what you want to accomplish at the very beginning of the year just helps you hit the ground running. And then, of course, writing them down and keeping them in a place where you can reflect on them often.

I use Evernote. I don't know if I could live without my Evernote. I keep everything in Evernote. And it just kind of helps me keep everything top of mind. I can shuffle in my priorities as I need to, and I'll shuffle in this document every quarter or so just to make sure that I'm keeping the first things first. If you're tracking with me on the seven habits, that's habit three, right? That's the habit of management is first things first.

So this is a system that Dr. Covey kind of put forth in his book. I followed it for 30 years, and it's done very well for me. I might have... Three to five goals per category. So I'll look at my physical life, you know, maybe some weight loss goals, if I'm honest, some things that I like to do as far as exercise go. Things like that, physical activity, you know, to keep me, you know, to keep me healthy, essentially. And then the mental goals, how do I want to really build brain cells this year?

You know, what am I going to be working on that's going to really help me think more clearly, think better, think more strategically, less tactically, perhaps, things like that. And then social emotional is all about your friends, your relationships with people. What's the priorities that you want to keep top of mind? What are some new relationships, perhaps, that you need to build? And then finally, spiritual, which is listed here last, but for me, it's the most important.

What do you want to do to really elevate your spiritual, your faith life, and things like that.

So I'll reflect on those today. I'll really kind of do a deep dive on 2025 and then spend most of today thinking about 2026. And I'll launch this cast tomorrow on the first day of the year, but I'm recording this on the last day of 2025. So I'll spend a lot of time thinking about 2026 today. And then the final thing, and it's part of a social-emotional ritual, is that my wife and I typically will pick a new restaurant that we haven't tried before.

And tonight's no different. We're going to try a new Chinese restaurant. And we'll go out to dinner, usually pretty early because we like to make it a very extended dinner. We may spend a couple to three hours at dinner, and we'll talk about these goals. She'll look at hers. I'll look at mine. We'll talk about them, see how we can support each other. And things like that, and make sure that we're together on our goals for 2026.

All right, I hope that helps. I hope that you have a ritual of your own that works, but if not, maybe something that you've heard here will help you really, you know, think through how you can live with more clarity, live with more intention, and hopefully accomplish a lot of things in the new year. So that's really it. Thanks for listening to the Manager Lab this year.

It's been a fun year. We launched the Manager Lab in 2025, and we have well over 100 podcasts now, and hopefully we'll just continue that streak into 2026. I wish you all the best for this new year. I hope you become a better manager. I hope you become a better leader, and most importantly, I hope you become a better human being. Thanks for listening, and until next time we meet in the Manager Lab. Do good work.