🎯 2025 Personal Goals: Pt. 2

Last week we covered setting goals for 2025. Today we are going to work out how to achieve them.

Our objective today is to break down the goals into bite-sized, more achievable mini-goals that we can accomplish throughout the year. This makes them easier to keep up with, is more motivating and will also tell you what you need to focus on each day.

Break your annual goals into quarterly ones

Start by taking the end state goal for 2025 and turning them into quarterly goals. You should plan to accomplish the Q1 mini goal by the end of March this year.

What this mini goal is will depend on the type. My investing goal, for example, is a constant contribution. It’s therefore pretty simple to break down into 4 parts:

My writing goal is also linear, since I’m not planning on increasing my ability to write more, I just want to sit down and do it. I’ll structure it in the same way.

My weightlifting goal on the other hand is not linear. Since I want to learn to deadlift, but haven’t previously, I can expect to make relatively quick progress in the beginning, but that progress might slow a bit throughout the year. It also wouldn’t make sense to start at zero.

But a fitness goal like starting to run might need different weighting. Starting running is quite hard if you have not done it before. Even a mile can be challenging. But as you learn proper form and start quickly building a strong cardiovascular system, you’ll make much faster progress. Adding an additional 5 miles to your run in a year might feel similar to adding 1 right now.

For something that’s a bit more abstract like “starting a company”, I want to set more milestones based on how I want to build and grow. The quarterly goals are more functional than numerical.

Quarterly → Monthly Goals

We’re now going to do the same thing but for each quarter, breaking them down into goals for each of the 3 months.

To save some space, here is just Q1 for the others:

You’ll notice on my writing goal, the numbers don’t work out evenly, so I did my best to make a judgement call.

My milestone-based goal starts getting tricky here. I know exactly what I need to do in Q1, but it gets less clear for future quarters. Don’t worry much about this. It would be foolish for me to try to map out what my full product will need when I haven’t even built let alone gathered feedback on the MVP.

For this example I’m going to be building a marketing tool, and I’ve decided to make a playbook as an MVP.

Monthly → Weekly Goals

Finally, I’m going to break down these monthly goals into tiny weekly ones. This might feel like going a layer too far, but it’s incredibly nice to start your week and know what you want to accomplish.

A month might feel like a long time in the beginning, but it will go by shockingly quickly. If you leave your goals at the month level, I think they are much harder to achieve.

For my investing goal, I now know how much to invest each week (again, I did some rounding here).

For my deadlifting goal, I know that I first need to learn how, so my starting point is a bit unique. I also started at an artificially low weight so I don’t injure myself.

For my writing goal, I made the first week super easy on myself so that I know I will successfully start.

In general, I think this is a smart way to go about it. Make your goals psychologically easy on yourself. If my goal on January first is to sit down and write an entire article, I’m less likely to stick with it. It’s not that I can’t write an article in a day, it’s just that I should be focused more on getting in the habit of doing it each day. This will be easier if I make the first few days easier.

I used a similar trick for my company goal. I’ve setup a business entity before and, while not hard, it’s very boring. I don’t want to sit down on January 1st and do that, because I’ll feel uninspired.

Instead, I’m starting with a fun task – starting to map out my MVP. Now of course the admin stuff is important (I’ve also made the mistake of delaying the boring stuff too long), so I put it as second, sandwiched between fun product work.

🏃‍♂️ Tracking and achieving your goals

You now have a week by week plan of how to achieve your 2025 goals! Each Sunday evening or Monday morning, sit down and look at what you need to get done for the week. Break them down into individual daily tasks so that by the end of the week it gets done.

Evaluate your progress as you go. It would be strange if you didn’t have to adjust any of your goals. We simply aren’t that good at predicting and estimating. If you are falling behind and it’s causing you to lose momentum and feel you want to quit, re-adjust them to be more achievable. This is much better than giving up.

When you meet your goals, feel victory! You’ve met the challenge, not the default. Feel the real sensation of success each week, month and quarter that you meet your goals.

If you can set up daily habits for your goals, like writing, do it. Habits and discipline are ultimately what will bring you success. Calendar time blocking is also wildly helpful. Make sure you are actually setting aside the time needed to accomplish the things you care about.

Lastly, good luck achieving your goals in 2025!