Goal to Calendar in Three Steps
Compress most productivity advice into: pick the goal, set the weekly action, calendar it
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 86%
Ali Abdaal argues that roughly 95% of the world's productivity advice condenses into three moves. First, figure out where you actually want to go, because productivity is an effectiveness measure on the way to a goal and is pointless without one. Second, convert each goal into the specific action you must take each week or day: writing 1,000 words daily, weight training three times a week. Third, put those actions into your calendar and then make yourself the kind of person who does what is in the calendar. Everything else, including the perfect app, pen or system, is at most the extra 1%. The mechanism is deliberately unglamorous: define, schedule, execute, repeat over a long enough horizon that consistency compounds.
Origin
Ali Abdaal's distillation after reading over a hundred productivity books, offered as end-of-year advice for anyone wanting to be more productive next year.
Core principles
- 01Productivity is only meaningful in service of a defined goal
- 02Goals must be converted into a repeatable weekly or daily action
- 03What is scheduled gets done; what is not scheduled competes for scraps
- 04Become the kind of person who does what is on the calendar
- 05Tools and optimisation are the last 1%, not the mechanism
How to run it
- 1
Decide the destination
Make at least a rough first draft of where you actually want to go. Without a goal, optimising output is meaningless.
Pro tip Use the Odyssey Plan if you are unsure what the goal even is.
- 2
Convert to a weekly action
Turn each goal into the concrete action required each week or day, such as 1,000 words a day or three gym sessions a week.
Pro tip State the action as a countable behaviour, not an outcome.
- 3
Calendar it and do it
Place the actions in your calendar and become the kind of person who does what is scheduled when it comes around.
Watch out Actions left off the calendar lose to whatever is scheduled instead.
In the wild
Someone wanting to be fitter starts by naming the real goal, then converts it to a weekly action of three weight-training sessions, then blocks those sessions into the calendar. When each block arrives they train, whether or not they feel like it, building both fitness and the identity of a person who does what they said they would.
→ A concrete, recurring behaviour that advances the goal without daily deliberation.
Common mistakes
Skipping straight to tools
Choosing apps and systems before defining the goal and weekly action optimises a thing you are not doing.
Goals that never become behaviours
A goal that is not translated into a scheduled weekly action stays a wish.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone who has goals but keeps failing to translate them into weekly behaviour.
Not ideal for
People whose real blocker is emotional avoidance rather than lack of a plan.
From the transcript
“figure out where you want to go turn it into and figure out how you're going to get there and then just put it in…”
“that is like 95% of all of the world's productivity advice condensed into three things”
From the episode
You’re Not Lazy: How To Make Discipline Easy - Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday