Focus on Systems, not your Goals.

Achieving any worthwhile dream requires setting Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound goals. Goals are essential, but even more important are the systems and habits that make them easier to achieve. As Greek philosopher Aristotle once quipped, “We are what we repeatedly do; excellence is then not an act but a habit.” Your system makes staying consistent and showing up daily easier. As we all know, setting New Year resolutions doesn’t usually work, as most of us don’t follow through. Discipline is staying consistent with your goals even when the motivation has waned out; it is doing things that you necessarily don’t feel like doing. By focusing on the right systems, achieving your goals would be far more manageable. The beginning of any journey is usually smooth; the middle is messy, and attaining the goal is gratifying.

Systems for achieving your goal could come in different forms, such as time scheduling, batching, habit stacking, community goal setting, and using an accountability partner, among other strategies. Here are some ways I have been using these systems to achieve some of my goals.

Habit Stacking

I have been averaging 60-90 hours of exercise time every month. I have been able to stay consistent with my fitness goals because I have been habit-stacking my exercise routine. It involves using one routine to work on multiple habits.

Basketball shooting reps: I listen to an hour of French podcasts during my daily basketball shooting time.
Weight/resistance training: When I am lifting weights, I use the time to listen to a non-fiction audiobook. With this strategy, I can listen to at least two audiobooks every week.
Swimming: When I swim, I use a water-proof MP3 swimming player, and I listen to French learning audio materials.
Running: When I run, I usually listen to music, audiobooks or a French podcast.

By using these various habit-stacking strategies, I am able to consistently go to the gym and work on my exercise routine daily.

One Routine + Multiple Habits = Habit Stacking

Time Scheduling

One of the most important positive changes that I have made in the past 365 days is my morning routine. Mid-last year, I read Robin Sharmas’s book –The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life, and it changed my early morning routine. Since reading the book, I now wake up and 4 AM every day. During my morning routine, I try to follow the SAVERS framework recommended by author Hal Elrod in his book, The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8 AM). I schedule my meditation time, journal entry writing (five-minute gratitude journal), long-form writing, reading from my Kindle, and morning exercise among other activities.

Having a time scheduling sequence that makes executing my set goals easier has made all the difference. Having these systems in place is not easy to execute but with baby steps and consistency, you will achieve your goals. Here are some the ways these systems have changed my goal-setting and achievement strategy.

Daily Meditation – 15-20 minutes daily meditation using the calm app since December 27, 2021

Canadian Marathon Running Challenge

Earlier in the year, to mark my tenth year of running marathons; I set a goal of running a marathon in the ten Canadian Provinces. As of today, I have run eight full marathons in 8 of the 10 Canadian Province: Toronto, Ontario, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Alberta, Calgary, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Regina, Saskatchewan, Quebec City, Quebec, Victoria, British Columbia. Eight down, two to go. Running these marathons requires a lot of training and consistency. In the month of May, I ran four full 42.2 KM marathons in a month, and it is by far one of the hardest things have ever done.

Earlier in September, I reduced my full marathon personal best by 24 minutes by running a time of 3 hours 20 minutes at the 2023 GMS Queen City Marathon in Regina, Saskatchewan. My previous personal best was a time of 3 hours 44 minutes, which I had set at the Beneva Montreal Marathon 2022 -1st sub-4 hours Marathon (PR).

I am trying to qualify for the Boston Marathon and it is going to require that I run a 3 hours marathon time to qualify. I am getting closer by the day, and it is a great feeling when you see your hard work begin to manifest. I still have a long way to go but I just have to trust the process, focus on the systems that helped me achieve the earlier set goals and replicate it. As the saying goes, “How You Do One Thing is How You Do Everything”. We play the way, we train.

In his book, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, author James Clear made some great observations about the benefits of focusing on the systems that would make achieving any goal easier. He asserted: If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.

Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.

Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement. We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem.

True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.

What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.

Habits are like the atoms of our lives. Each one is a fundamental unit that contributes to your overall improvement. At first, these tiny routines seem insignificant, but soon they build on each other and fuel bigger wins that multiply to a degree that far outweighs the cost of their initial investment.

Meditations

Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Milky Clouds
The freedom found in giving up control. Something unique happens when we give up our need to control others when we get out of the way and let life be.

Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Be Yourself
People will have their perception of you, but you have to try to accept that. Focus instead on who you are, your values, the things that matter the most to you, and acting in alignment with them. Doing that will make you less stressed and more able to tune out the noise.
Too much concern for what others think leads us away from ourselves.

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