My goals for january went well, so I’m hoping to continue the momentum this month.

Last month I focused on building up some personal productivity time in order to kick-start my ability to drive personal growth. Now that I have some “income” to spend, the most pressing thing right now feels like paying down my “high-interest debt”. That is, the set of backlogged tasks which most heavily weigh on my mind and are most detrimental to leave undone. I believe that there is more than enough work in this category to fill a month at my current rate of time investment, and that doing so will be more beneficial than trying to jump directly into other projects.

Like January, February feels like a particularly critical time to build this habit. I’m no longer riding the New-Year’s wave, so this is the first month I’ll be depending almost entirely on the mechanisms I put in place last month. I’m writing this post retroactively, but I did write these goals up in a document on January 31st and sent them out to my challenge network, who were able to provide helpful feedback and encouragement. This post (and all monthly goal posts) is based on the associated document and is written from the perspective of the time that the document was shared, not from the perspective of when the associated blog post goes live.

So with the motivation out of the way, let’s jump into the specifics:

Goal 1: Systematize the Backlog

Right now I track tasks, ideas, projects, and TO-DO items is several different places. These include phone notes, todoist, workflowy, phone reminders, calendar reminders, miscellaneous pieces of paper, and sometimes just my brain. I don’t have any habits around checking these locations, and some of them I haven’t visited in years. This does not seem like an ideal way to track tasks I care about. Instead I would like some single unified system, and a set of habits for interacting with it.

I would like this unified system to support several key use-cases. It should be trivially easy to add new tasks to some kind of “inbox” whenever they come to mind, which also means easy mobile access is a must. It should also support time-based reminders and recurring items.

I should be able to put items into buckets by an approximate estimation of value-per-unit-time, which should be the primary prioritization metric. That is, the system should enable me to visually sort tasks by how much value I expect to get out of spending time on that task. I also hope that repeatedly attempting to measure new ideas on this metric will help me improve my ability to estimate it.

Finally, it should support a similar type of visual sorting by “urgency”, or an estimate of how quickly the value of a task decays over time if left undone. Some tasks, like exploring new forms of exercise, might have a low urgency, even if they would be very valuable. If I don’t get around to it now, it will have almost identical value in the future. By comparison, hard near-term deadlines impose a high degree of urgency. Keeping “value” and “urgency” distinct in my head is something I’ve always found difficult, but hopefully making this kind of clean separation will help. I don’t want to perpetually fall into the trap of prioritizing urgent but low-value tasks over non-urgent but high-value ones.

This month I want to create such a system to my satisfaction, or at least allocate 5 hours to figuring it out (predict 70% chance of success). The only reason my prediction is this low is because it is at most my 3rd highest priority task this month, the other 2 being large high-value high-urgency items that I deferred in January. I won’t consider it a failure if the only reason I don’t get to this is because I’m too busy working on more important things. Despite this, I expect (95%) that I will allocate at least 1 hour. I also expect this to be a first stab at a system that will evolve as I use it, and expect to make at least one nontrivial change after using the system for a couple weeks (70%).

Goal 2: Pay Down the Worst “Debt”

As mentioned above, I have some particularly high-value high-urgency items on my plate right now, especially as I had deferred things in January to make room for creating my monthly goal system. This month I want to focus on clearing the worst of these off so they don’t get in the way of future monthly goals. Note that evaluating something and deciding to deprioritize it is an absolutely valid way of dealing with backlogged tasks.

I predict that with concerted effort, I could complete all high-value and high-urgency tasks up to and including writing this blog post and the January retrospective, before the end of the month (70%). Here “concerted effort” just means spending all the time I had carved out of my schedule through the January goals. I predict that I will spend at least 80% of this productive time in February primarily working on these backlog items (95%).

Goal 3: Carry Forward January Goals

This one is pretty self-explanatory, except that I plan to relax some of my requirements. For instance, instead of requiring myself to do my weekend work block at a library, I can do it at home if I feel confident in my ability to do so. Now that the habit is much more firmly ingrained, I’m not as worried about my adherence. I’ll also be less strict about the exact composition and daily timing of my strength and cross-training workouts.

I predict that throughout February, I will continue to adhere to my productive work-block habits on weekdays and weekends (90%). I will carry through January goal 3 by writing and publishing a January retrospective, writing and sending out a draft document for February goals, and doing the same for March (60%). The prediction is not that high because I expect to prioritize the “debt” described in Goal 2, and wouldn’t be surprised if that ate up too much time to get to all these. I predict that I will continue cross-training and building up mileage as part of my 4th January goal, under the new more-lax rules (85%).

Parting Thoughts

I’ve updated towards being slightly more confident in my predictions due to the success of January. I didn’t update super heavily, because January could be an outlier and has the advantage of being the first month of the year, which benefits from New Year’s energy.

In the future, I don’t expect to explicitly call out that I will be carrying forward new habits from previous months. Anything that is a recurring time-usage or system habit will be recurring by default (including timing and existence of work blocks and usage of my new backlog system). Goals related to concrete tasks (such as Goal 2 about clearing off my backlog) will not recur by default. I expect these to be intuitively obvious to me, and hopefully to anyone else reading these posts.

edit: you can find my retrospective for these goals here.