3 Key Takeaways for Goal Setting After Reviewing My 2024

Today is the 1st day of 2025. Time for 2025 goal setting.

After a year end review of my 2024, I have 3 key takeaways about Goal Setting. I hope this will help both myself and anyone who is now looking to set goals for 2025.

On Jan 1 2024, this was what I wrote down for the 2024 goals and my traffic-light grading on how much I have achieved.

Green = achieved; Yellow = partially achieved; Red = Not completed.

I generally like how I structured the goals, from "WHY" to "Key Results" to the "Daily Systems" I need to put in place to help me achieve them.

I will continue to use this format for my 2025 goal setting.

However, overall, I am not too happy with how I ended up with these goals. Many of them were red.

So I dug a bit deeper on why I wasn't able to achieve more. And here are my 3 key takeaways.

Takeaway #1: Focus on 1 or 2 goals max

I definitely felt overwhelmed looking back at this list of goals I intended to achieve. It's not very realistic.

Many highly effective people have pointed out the importance of FOCUS.

Peter Thiel, Formal CEO of PayPal, famously said: "Don’t divide your attention: focusing on one thing yields increasing returns for each unit of effort."

Even if we can't distill to that 1 single goal to focus on, at the most we should only have two "top-of-mind" goals.

Focus is not about controlling your mind to not get distracted, but about removing distractions. By removing other goals that are secondary, we allow our mind to have no other options but to focus on what remains.

Takeaway #2: Align the daily systems to my key results

Although I did write down some daily systems to help me achieve my goals and key results, I noticed that they don't always align.

For example, I thought by "going to art class everyday", I would be able to complete a "draft of an illustration book with 100 learnings from my daily reflections". It was a convenient choice. I knew I was going for my weekly art class. But taking these weekly art class doesn't help directly in creating this illustration book.

Some goals also should focus on the Output, instead of the Outcome. E.g. for a fitness goal, instead of focusing on achieving my ideal weight, I could focus on my completion rate of hitting the gyms 3x per week. As long as I hit the Gym regularly (the Output), I will definitely see improvement towards my ideal weight (the Outcome)

Takeaway #3: Review my goals monthly if not weekly

Writing down my goals was a great first step.

The next step is actually to review the goals regularly to make sure that they remain top of mind and fine-tune what works / what doesn't.

At Google, OKRs and performance are evaluated and discussed at a quarterly basis to make sure that employees are still progressing well on the most important goals.

If I have reviewed my 2024 goals more often and made tweaks to the "process" and "systems" more often, I believe I would be able to achieve more by the year end.

With these 3 key takeaways in-mind, I hope 2025 will be a more fruitful year realizing my goals!