Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You

by Ali Abdaal

All these acronyms have something in common. First, they emphasise the importance of every goal being clear and quantifiable. Whether they’re ‘specific’ or ‘explicit’, your goals are supposed to be easily tracked and checked. Second, they’re very focused on outcomes: the function of words like ‘measurable’ and ‘observable’ is that you can tell, objectively, when you’ve reached the desired end-state. So it would be a pity if it turned out that highly trackable, outcome-oriented goal-setting was ineffective. If sometimes, goals of this kind turned out to be an obstacle to productivity, rather than the key to it. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what a new wave of research seems to indicate. Studies have found that although specific, challenging goals can increase performance for certain types of people and tasks, they can also have unintended negative consequences. I