How to Lock in with your Goals - A Manual to Success

1. Reflection Stage (Week 1)
2. Goal-Setting Stage (Week 2)
3. Preparatory Stage (Week 3-4)
4. Locking In: Earlier Stages
5. Locking In: Plateau of Latent Potential
6. Locking In: Mastery

In this stage, you reflect towards your current lifestyle and if it is aligned with your long-term goals. In this stage, you reflect on your past wins, failures, and habits and what you could learn from them. It provides you a reference point to help you evaluate your progress in life. You could do it through a journal or through Notion app.

Why is this effective? It prevents you from making hasty decisions as your experiences will be translated to insights, helpful for achieving your goals. When you feel down, the notes you've written in your journal gives you inspiration to continue.

Begin with the end in mind!

In this stage, you set specific goals that you want to achieve, how large it may be. At the same time, you list actions to achieve that goal. It is much better that the goals and actions are quantifiable to identify your progress. Include the reason/passion why you do it as it would be helpful later on.

For Example:

I want to lose 5 kg of weight in the span of 3 months.

How? 

1. Balanced diet and less calorie intake.
2. 30 minute moderate-intensity anaerobic exercise, 30 minute cardio.
3. 16-hour fasting

This way, it provides you a clarity of your goals and the means to do it.

In this stage, you will focus on 3 key principles before implementing your goals:

A. Overall Health Recovery

B. Creating Systems for Habits

C. Reducing Friction 

These are equally important, and if you compromise one for the other, you're bound to repeating your progress of integrating habits to day 1.

Indeed, health is the largest asset we could ever have. You prioritize your health and energy before starting your goal. "You can't pour from an empty cup." couldn't be more important here as you would need stamina for you to start implementing your goals and enduring the struggles that you might face in achieving your goals.

Practice journaling, meditation, attitude of gratitude, or read books or watch favorite movies. You may even try arranging your bed, as even though you might not be able to achieve your goals, but the look of an arranged bed feels like you still have control in your life.

B.1 Tracking Systems

In this principle, you create tracking systems that will assist you in achieving your goals. For example, if you want to save money, you will try creating Excel for tracking money or even use the readily-available money tracking apps for you to classify and list the amount spent or saved. 

B.2 Second Brain

It is apparent that our brain has limits in retrieving and storing information, which may impair our progress in achieving our goals. The concept of second brain helps you decongest the knowledge and insights you gain such as notetaking from Notion, Evernote, and the likes.

B.3 Scheduling Apps

If you are aligned with rigid forms of skill acquisition such as time blocking, apps such as Notion, Google Calendar are best for you. You may try to adjust the schedule however you want, but the rule of thumb is to schedule as fewer goals daily and shorter amount of time for you to adapt from a sudden change in behavior.

B.4 Identity Change

Whenever you say words like "I'm trying to...", it seems like it is forced as it is not aligned with your current identity. Instead of that, repeatedly say "I am a ..." to wire your brain into acting in accordance with your statement.

C.1 By Making it Obvious

Make sure that the tools for your habits are readily-available, so that you could focus on habits (e.g. before the day you study, make sure you have books, notebooks, and pens in your study table).

C.2 By Reducing Distractions

In this contemporary society, we couldn't completely eliminate technology because of its great significance in making our lives easier. However, we could combat distractions such as setting a limit.

Example of Apps:

1. Forest and other Time Limit Apps
2. Digital Well-being on Android
3. Settings > Screen Time Limits > App Limits > Add Limits for Apple

C.3 Make habits so easy that you'll feel embarrassed if you didn't do it

In this principle, since you are only establishing your habits at first, your focus is to make it easy. You're initial goal is not to be that master who performs skills for prolonged hours, your just a beginner in this stage. You will focus on consistency in a way that when you have already established it and programmed in your mind, the next focus is mastery.

For example, you could do 1 push-up daily and do it repeatedly. Once you adapt, you'll do progressive overload until you fully adjusted from that change.

Potential Problems: Overthinking and Perfectionism, Unorganized thought, Impatience

Potential Solution #1: Overthinking and Perfectionism - How planned you may be, it will not be compared to imperfect actions. This means that you should understand that the one who you considered as a master or a genius started as a beginner who experienced the highs and the lows. Act now and throughout your journey, learn and reflect from the challenges by tracking the systems you've created during your preparatory stages.

Potential Solution #2: Unorganized thought - There are times we are overwhelmed with the ideas we compiled inside our minds. Accept this situation as this is completely normal as your brain is adjusting from the information overload during the earlier stages of skill acquisition process. In this case, write everything down, especially in a journal and group the ideas based on urgency and importance, also called as Eisenhower Matrix. After separating the ideas, break down ideas into much simpler and actionable chunks of tasks.

Potential Solution #3: Impatience - We also experienced the situation where it feels like it is not showing visible progress. Yes, it is also completely normal as our mind is still wired to actions that trigger instant gratification rather than delayed gratification. In this case, write the small wins as it helps you track the progress, how small it may be. Furthermore, the tracking system you've made beforehand is a great representation of the progress you've made. You may also include a reward system, such as playing a game, as you could associate it when you accomplished a task/habit.

Potential Problems: Doubt, Boredom

Potential Solution #1: Doubt - In James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, he mentioned the existence of the Plateau of Latent Potential, showing that large outcomes do not result in one events, but continuous actions done overtime. But the results of these individual actions are often invisible. In this case, you reflect on your passion or the whys you wrote before. This will help you in fueling your motivation. Include as well revisiting the reflection you've made from your journal during your journey to identify your growth now compared to your starting point.

Potential Solution #2: Boredom - Once we start to get used to a habit, we often experience being bored while doing it and it is completely normal. For this scenario, you could gamify these habits or spice the habits with a twist. For example, you could use gaming systems such as Habitica to simulate your experience as RPG, a gaming dashboard for Notion, and streak systems like here in Deepstash. 

Potential Problems: Complacency and Lack of Challenge

Potential Solution #1:  Complacency and Lack of Challenge - Since we are in this part, we are prone to become more complacent because we achieved the original goal. In this case, we should still have a beginner's mindset and curiosity. You could scale the goals up to encourage yourself to continue after accomplishing the original plan. One could spice the habits up to engage yourself during the process of mastery. You could also repeat the Locking-In process by creating more effective systems for your much more ambitious goals.

1. Leveraging established systems during the preparation period to save time.
2. Often reflecting one's clear passion and purpose in life.
3. Checking and revisiting one's whys to fuel one's determination in times of doubt.
4. Knowing that facing problems are normal and reframe these challenges into a source of improvement
5. Iterate to yourself that every master started as a beginner, and focus on identity-based changes.
6. Nonstop grind and grit for your passion, but don't compromise rest during the process.