Setting goals

I set goals at a few different levels. I tend to work backwards, from biggest goal to smallest.

I start with what impact do I want to make on the world.

Then some potential 5, 10, 15 year goals or benchmarks. I hold these very loosely, but they help me think about what I actually enjoy versus what I think I’d enjoy in my day-to-day work life. Until I joined faculty at UCSF and had a clearer vision of longer-term situation, I really had no idea how to set these longer-term goals.

Then I figure out what I want to do in this next academic year, as it relates to those longer-term goals. I think about setting goals for both products (e.g. papers) and career development (e.g. learn about a method). I also work on refining these goals to reflect things I have control over. In other words, I used to have goals about “publishing” manuscripts. But now my goals focus on “submitting” manuscripts because often I need to submit each manuscript to multiple journals as it gets rejected a few times, and every journal has a different timeline for reviews, revisions, publication after acceptance, etc.

At some points in my career, especially when grantwriting, I set monthly goals for 6-12 months. This helped me keep an eye on due dates for conferences that may be 11 months before the presentation date, or benchmarks for finishing parts of grants enroute to the whole grant.

There was a time where I made extensive gantt charts to map out timelines for one (read: a handful) of research projects/papers. I’ve moved away from this – it took me too much time and I was always way too optimistic. If you’re adding a time estimate to your to-do list, triple whatever you’ve got so far unless you’ve spent a lot of time in your career tracking how long things take you.

Right now, I’m spending some time every week setting goals for the week. I try to rank them by what’s both urgent and important. To counteract my default to do things based on other people’s needs, and to “feed myself first”, I prioritize my wellness, first-author writing, and grants (which are most important for my professional mission and career advancement). I wrote these in the weekly pandemic letters for the first 9-12 months, and included as my top priority wellness (e.g. exercise, meditation, journaling, therapy etc.)

This summer, I’ve started with daily goals. This is partly to keep myself focused, but it’s also to practice setting reasonable sized goals given what my meeting schedule looks like. I post the goals at the beginning of the day in an accountability forum, and then I check in the middle or end of the day to report back (to myself) about whether I met my goals and evaluate whether my goals were too big, or whether I got distracted by other equally viable priorities. Ideally, I set 3 goals: 1 for wellness, 1 for first-author work, 1 for service.