The Process-Oriented Annual Goal System
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Matthew Dicks has set and publicly published annual goals for roughly fifteen years, and the system's defining rule is that a goal must be something he alone controls. 'Publish a book' fails the test because it depends on editors, agents and publishers; 'write a book I deem outstanding' passes. The cycle runs on a fixed calendar: December is spent auditing last year's list, soliciting suggestions from readers and friends, sorting candidates into categories and setting difficulty levels; the finished list is posted on January 1; a formal re-evaluation happens on June 30. He deliberately includes goals that are cruel to him, and treats a completion rate near 65% as the healthy target — hitting 100% would mean he failed to push himself and left something on the table.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Write only goals you fully control
Convert every outcome goal into an action goal. Replace 'publish a book' with 'write a book' or 'write a book I deem outstanding' — anything whose completion depends on an editor, employer, algorithm or audience is disqualified.
Pro tip Test each goal by asking who else has to say yes for it to count as done. If anyone does, rewrite it.
- 2
Audit last year's list in December
Go through the previous year's goals one by one and sort them into three piles: keep (habits like push-ups that will decay without a goal attached), complete (done, no repeat needed), and drop (goals you consciously abandoned mid-year because they stopped being viable or worth doing).
Watch out Dropping a goal is only legitimate if you decided it wasn't worth doing — not because you avoided it.
- 3
Crowdsource candidate goals publicly
Post publicly asking what goals people think you should take on. Friends will name blind spots, long-time readers will suggest unexplored areas, and strangers will offer things they love that you might love too.
Pro tip The most useful submissions are the blunt ones from friends who tell you where you're being an idiot.
- 4
Sort into categories and set levels
Group the shortlist into standing categories — writing, performance/business, personal, organizational — plus a bucket for brand-new goals that don't fit anywhere yet. Then set the specific level for each one (100 letters, 100 push-ups five days a week, six meetups).
Pro tip Give every goal a number so completion is never a matter of opinion.
- 5
Publish the list on January 1
Post the finished list publicly so the goals exist outside your own head and can be checked by anyone. Dicks runs roughly 52 goals in a year across all categories.
Watch out Publishing works as accountability only if the list is specific enough for a reader to verify.
- 6
Run a June 30 mid-year evaluation
At the halfway point, assess where you stand, which goals are still realistic, and which have been overtaken by circumstance. Add new goals only rarely; mostly hold what you have and release the ones that no longer make sense.
- 7
Aim for roughly 65% completion, not 100%
Treat partial failure as the design goal. A year at 100% is a signal you under-set the list and left capacity unused; a completion rate hovering around two-thirds means the list genuinely stretched you.
Pro tip Deliberately include one or two goals you know are cruel to you, so the ceiling stays out of reach.
In the wild
For five straight years Dicks has set a goal of writing 100 physical letters — handwritten or printed, stamped and mailed. On Teacher Appreciation Day he tracked down the addresses of four favourite teachers and wrote to them. One, an English professor he hadn't spoken to in thirty years, called him up and invited him to brunch; they talked for two hours. She turned out to own horses, and offered to let his children — who had grown up hearing his stories about the horse farm but had never ridden — ride them. Another teacher, now living on the cape, invited the whole family to spend a day at the ocean.
→ The goal completes annually and reliably generates unplanned relationships and invitations he calls 'so much goodness coming back'.
One hundred push-ups a day, five days a week, has been on Dicks's goal list for ten years. He keeps re-adding it not because it's ambitious but because he knows the mechanism: if it isn't written on the list, there will come a point where he simply doesn't do them. If it is on the list, he will absolutely find a way. In the December audit this is the archetypal 'keep' goal — a habit that would decay the moment the external commitment disappeared.
→ A decade of maintained consistency on a habit that would otherwise have lapsed.
Dicks has a best friend of 37 years who lives fifteen minutes away. They text constantly and talk on the phone, but they were rarely in the same room. So one of his 52 goals for the year became simply: see him six times — every other month. It is a personal-category goal with a hard number attached, which makes it verifiable in the June and December reviews rather than a vague intention to 'see more of Benji'.
→ A friendship that was drifting on autopilot gets six scheduled, protected in-person meetings a year.
Common mistakes
Setting goals other people have to grant
Goals like 'get published', 'get promoted' or 'hit a million subscribers' depend on editors, bosses and audiences. When you miss them you fail for reasons you had no control over, which teaches you nothing and corrodes belief in goal-setting itself.
Treating 100% completion as success
A perfect year means the list was set below your capacity. Dicks reads a 100% year as evidence he failed to push himself and left something on the table; roughly 65% is the number that indicates the list actually stretched him.
Setting the list once and never auditing
Without a December re-sort and a June 30 checkpoint, dead goals stay on the list generating guilt, and habit goals that need renewing quietly fall off. The review cadence is what makes the list a system rather than a New Year's resolution.
From the transcript
“I set goals every year I've done it for about 15 years and I publish them on the Internet so people can see what my…”
“it's so important for people to set goals that are not dependent upon the whims of other people”
“my average goal completion rate for the past 15 years is hovering right around 65 and I love that number”
From the episode
Someday Is Today: Achieve Your Goals And Live Without Regret - Matthew Dicks
Matthew Dicks