Maximizing Goals and Satisfaction Goals

Like most people, I have goals that pull me in multiple directions. I have life goals, professional goals, and goals relating to other people. I use the GTD system, which encourages me to write down a list of all the projects that I’m working on. When I write that list down, it feels overwhelming! There are easily dozens of goals that I care about and that in theory I’m actively pursuing. This is a post about how I think about those competing demands.

First let me talk about prioritization. There’s a lot of productivity advice that tells you to prioritize your goals and then work on the most important ones. This is part of the advice that’s given in the Eisenhower matrix, which encourages you to focus on tasks that are both Important and Urgent. This advice leaves a big question for me: When a goal has been prioritized, how far should I pursue that goal?

I split up my goals into two types:

• “Maximum Effort Goals”: These are goals that I want to really excel at. Typically they relate to a change that I want to make in my life or in the world. Examples: Getting into a good school, Being a good spouse/partner.
• “Satisfaction Goals”: These are goals that I just need to do a good enough job at. They’re often maintenance tasks. Examples: Stay in shape, Keep my house clean.

Satisfaction goals aren’t necessarily less important than maximum effort goals. In fact, sometimes they’re more important!

As an example, consider the goals of eating healthy and doing a good job at work. Which of those is more important? Arguably eating healthy comes before doing a good job at work. If you don’t maintain your health, you won’t be able to put in the effort at work. But eating healthy is a much more achievable goal. You can put in an hour or two of effort every week to buy healthy foods and cook meals, and call it good. It’s not even clear that it’s possible to improve the health of your diet with additional hours of work. But in contrast, the goal of exceeding at work can eat up an almost unlimited number of hours each week. Depending on the job, there’s always room to prepare more, to pay more attention to detail, or to add features to the product.

I like to think of satisfaction goals as goals that relate to Homeostasis. They relate to areas of my life where I just want to keep things running smoothly. They say: I want my car to keep running, I want my house to stay clean, I want to pay the bills on time.

My maximum effort goals are about being the best that I can be. It’s the different between staying in shape and being an athlete. It’s wanting to be a great chef instead of just being able to cook for yourself.

I only have room for one or two maximizing goals in my life. Any more than that and they start to conflict with each other. For me, in this moment, I have two maximizing goals: I want to do a great job in my career, and I want to find a long-term relationship. Everything else is just in maintenance mode. But that doesn’t mean that maintenance mode stuff is unimportant! I do want to stay in shape, to keep a nice home, and to maintain strong friendships.

Sometimes I think of this as the distinction between maximizing goals and minimizing goals. Some things I want to maximize the quality of the work. And other things I want to minimize the distance between the actual result and the space of acceptable results.

One of the benefits of this system is that satisfaction goals can be taken care of with a realistic amount of effort. Twice a day I brush my teeth, and every year I go to the dentist, and that’s my teeth taken care of. I put more effort into other parts of my life, but they’re like that, they can be accomplished. But these goals have a certain kind of priority. I’m not willing to skip showering; it has a senior claim on my time. I know that if I don’t get 7.5 hours of sleep or if I don’t eat enough vegetables, that I’ll feel bad and my whole life will suffer.

So I spend my first hour on the basics, but I put every last hour into what’s truly important.