The Cascading Goal Ladder (Yearly to Daily Non-Negotiables)
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Grace Beverley runs goal setting at five nested time horizons — yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily — with each level deliberately cheap in time. Yearly takes about an hour, monthly about twenty minutes, daily about two. Each horizon mixes SMART goals (a revenue number by a date) with what she calls 'floaty' goals (feeling more fulfilled, having made progress on something), because a life measured only in numbers pulls an already obsessive person further into metrics. The daily layer is three written non-negotiables, on the logic that a year is only 365 days and accumulation does the work. The second mechanism matters as much as the first: revisiting goals surfaces the ones you have outgrown, so you stop autopiloting toward a destination you no longer want.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Set yearly goals split into work and personal
Once a year, spend around an hour setting goals in two buckets. Include hard targets — a revenue figure versus last year, by a date — alongside softer directional ones.
Pro tip An hour is the budget. Time spent worrying about whether goal setting is too woo-woo is time not spent moving toward the goals.
- 2
Mix SMART goals with 'floaty' goals
Alongside the measurable targets, write goals of the form 'by this time I want to feel like I've made more progress towards this' or 'I want to feel more fulfilled in my everyday because I'm including more hobbies'. These catch the outcomes that reporting cycles never capture.
Pro tip If your work already produces weekly numbers, deliberately over-weight the floaty goals to rebalance.
Watch out If you know you are an obsessive or numbers-driven person, be wary of framing every personal goal as a metric — Grace notes the healthier version is 'go to the gym four days a week', not a weight target.
- 3
Break down into quarterly and monthly goals
Step the yearly goals down into quarters and then months, asking what has to happen inside that month to make the annual goal reachable. Monthly review takes about twenty minutes.
- 4
Plan the week against those goals
Set broader weekly goals and lay them into the week's plan, so the time management and the goal setting are the same exercise rather than two separate rituals.
Pro tip Grace frames goal setting as long-term time management — treat the calendar as the enforcement layer.
- 5
Write three daily non-negotiables
Every day, without fail, write down three things you will do that day. This takes two minutes and is the layer where the accumulation actually happens — a year is 365 days, and the small daily changes produce the largest results.
Pro tip Goal setting at this level does not need a vision board — three lines is a complete daily goal-setting practice.
- 6
Audit whether the destination has changed
At each yearly or quarterly review, check whether the goal is still one you want. Priorities shift as you grow up — you may find you no longer want ten grand extra, you want three more days a week with friends. Write the change down rather than drifting.
Pro tip Some years bring a bigger mindset shift than others; expect the audit to be uneventful most of the time and decisive occasionally.
Watch out Without the audit you autopilot toward an outdated destination and only notice years later.
In the wild
In her second year at university, Grace's headline goal was to land a big collaboration with a fast-fashion brand, because that was what the most successful creators were doing at the time. She was, in her words, aimlessly working and doing as much as she could. About nine months later, while setting goals for the following year, she realised not only was it no longer a goal, she would actively decline the deal if it were offered — it had become entirely out of line with what she believed. That audit preceded her cutting her fast-fashion contracts and eventually founding a sustainable activewear brand.
→ A stale headline goal was deleted before it consumed another year of effort.
Ali describes getting a full-body DEXA scan and finding the body-fat and muscle-mass numbers liberating and motivating for training. Grace agrees it works for her — she attributes progress to measurable outcomes — but flags the caveat that both are type-A, numbers-driven people, and that for many others turning training into a metric is the fastest route to hating it. Her stated healthier alternative is to set the behaviour as the goal, 'go to the gym four days a week', rather than the number the behaviour is supposed to produce.
→ The same goal is set as a metric or a behaviour depending on the person's disposition.
Common mistakes
Treating goal setting as a big annual ceremony
Doing it once a year in a long session means the goals never reach the days that would deliver them. The whole system costs about an hour a year, twenty minutes a month and two minutes a day; the daily layer is what converts intention into accumulation.
Never re-checking whether you still want the goal
Priorities shift, and an unreviewed destination keeps pulling effort long after you have stopped wanting it. Grace only caught her fast-fashion collaboration goal because she reopened last year's list before writing the next one.
Making everything a number
For obsessive or type-A people, converting every personal goal into a metric is counterproductive even though metrics are efficient. The floaty goals exist precisely to protect the areas of life that should not be scored.
From the transcript
“i think goal setting as much as it like comes across quite woo-woo and wishy-washy it's literally like the steer at steering wheel to make…”
“every single day i will write three non-negotiable things i'll do that day”
“not only is that not a goal anymore i also actually wouldn't take it if i was offered that”
From the episode
How To Build A Multi-Million Dollar Empire In Your 20s - Grace Beverley
Grace Beverley