From goal to action plan

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When people talk about goals, you often hear things like “Having a goal is important” or “Your goals should be S.M.A.R.T. (meaning measurable).” This is only part of the story. Having a goal alone doesn’t get you there.

After all, you set a goal to achieve it. But how do you put together a coherent set of action steps to reach it? That’s what this post is about.

You do always start with a goal. It’s your compass and your measure of whether you’ve achieved a particular result or reached a milestone. You then attach several strategies to that goal and draw up a series of action points for each strategy. Throughout the process, you measure everything so you can adjust your course.

If you were to show it as a pyramid, you could use the following structure.

1. Set a goal

The first step toward achieving your goals is, of course, to set a clear, measurable goal. Measurable is actually very simple: either you’ve done something or you haven’t (run a marathon), or you can attach a particular unit to it.

For weight loss, that might be a clothing size, a target weight or something else that motivates you. For running, it might be a target time, and so on.

When setting a goal, you don’t immediately need to consider whether it’s realistic or how you’ll achieve it. You can always adjust it if you gain different insights later. You may find, for example, that you’re unwilling to invest the time after all. You can change course later.

Is the goal right for you? One important measure is that thinking about it and working on it should make you happy. Enthusiasm, from the Greek enthos, the god within, is a wonderful indicator.

2. Strategy: the plan for achieving your goals

A goal on its own doesn’t get you very far, because once you have a goal, you still need to do things to achieve it. To do this in a structured way, it helps to identify the main pieces of the puzzle you’ll need. Each piece is a strategy.

But what exactly is a strategy? Strategy is simply a fancy word for a plan: all your practical choices about how you’re going to reach your goal.

Taking a moment to think about strategy before rushing into action helps you make sure you’re on the right track!

The diagram below makes clear why you need all three steps, and why combining just two isn’t enough.

If you only have a goal and a strategy, you aren’t taking action. You keep dreaming and get nowhere. If you only have a goal and daily actions, you’re running around like a headless chicken. You can’t properly tell whether you’re achieving your goal.

Having only a plan and the associated daily actions is like driving without entering an address in your GPS. You aren’t clear on where you ultimately want to end up or what your constraints are.

How do you draw up a plan like this, and what are some concrete examples of strategies? This is a good way to approach it:

  1. Identify your constraints. These might include a maximum amount of time you can invest, or staying injury-free. What you need to do to satisfy a constraint is a strategy.
  2. Think about the “how” without going into too much detail. For example, if you want to grow a business, you could do so by forming partnerships with third parties. Exactly how this works and which actions it involves fall outside strategy.

Here are some examples to make developing strategies clearer.

Suppose your goal is to run a marathon in under four hours. Your strategies could be:

  1. Stay injury-free by getting enough rest and increasing training intensity gradually, for example in a four-week cycle.
  2. Increase your speed through interval training.
  3. Have a plan ready for race day.

If your goal is to get more done in a day, you could consider:

  1. Creating large blocks of uninterrupted focus.
  2. Always identifying the problem behind a request before starting, so you don’t duplicate work.
  3. Matching the right kind of work to your energy levels throughout the day.

A strategy is more practical, then, but still broad enough to fill in later.

3. Set daily and weekly tasks

Now that you know how you’ll go about achieving your goals, you can look at WHAT to do. This can be very simple, and the tasks involved can always change. At this stage, it’s important not to set the bar too high immediately, and to celebrate small successes.

For injury-free running, the actions might be:

  1. Before running, I do a few stretches.
  2. After a ten-minute warm-up, I do a few stretches.

For maintaining focus, you might consider:

  1. Charge your phone outside your bedroom and leave it in airplane mode until noon.
  2. Turn off all notifications.
  3. Before finishing your workday, open the programs and documents you’ll need the following day.

Now you know what to do, it’s time to hold yourself accountable. Are you actually doing what you say you’ll do?

The easiest way is to track it in a to-do list app. I use Microsoft To Do, but any to-do list app will work.

What I like about Microsoft To Do is how easily you can add tasks on any platform: Linux, Android, Windows and so on. Creating lists is easy too, and recurring tasks work well and intuitively.

At the end of the week, you can also open the completed-task overview to see what you did and didn’t finish. It’s quick and easy.

  1. Actually carry out the tasks

This may be the hardest part, but a few small tips can make it easy to get going. Now we have a to-do list, we can schedule the tasks throughout the day. Before doing that, here are some useful tips to make things easier.

  1. Perfection doesn’t exist. Just start small and adjust where needed.
  2. Keep it simple. Alongside the ideal version of a task, create a smaller version that makes starting easier. Writing a blog post? It could be as simple as writing 20 words.
  3. Feel successful when you’ve completed the small version. If you keep this up, it will only get easier. Small successes count too. Even if you write just 20 words a day, you’ll still have a short blog post by the end of the month.
  4. Consistency matters more than quantity.
  5. Attach your starting step to another action. My Saturday running routine is simple, for example. After getting up, I immediately eat breakfast. After putting my breakfast things away, I put on my running shoes and clothes while my food settles. Once it’s settled, I head out. A chain of “after this, do that” makes things very easy for you.
  6. Evaluate and adjust.

The real world is never perfect, of course, and plans quickly change. That’s fine. What matters is noticing that it’s happening, when it happens and how you could do things differently.

This is where tracking and reflection come in. The questions to answer are:

  1. Have you carried out all the actions in your action plan?
  2. Does an action change your other measurements? It’s important to have tried the actions for long enough.

If you’re struggling to carry out the daily actions, you can adjust in several ways:

  • Choose a different time for the action.
  • Scale the action down to a smaller version.
  • Have someone else carry out the action, if possible.
  • Perhaps the task doesn’t need to be done at all, and an alternative would work instead.

Another possibility is that you’re faithfully completing all your tasks, but your measurements aren’t changing. Then it’s worth checking whether the strategy works and whether the tasks you’ve set contribute effectively to it. Here too, it’s important to give it a fair chance and not give up too quickly.

In a flowchart, the process looks roughly like this.

I set aside a regular time for this evaluation. It’s almost always on Sunday after getting home from my endurance bike ride.

Do you find it hard to approach things this way yourself? You can always get help from someone who has already achieved the goal you’re aiming for and knows how to go about it. With the knowledge in this blog post, you’ll be able to recognize the three different levels and feel more confident that the plan fits together and will get you where you want to go.

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