Set Goals to Do the Work That Matters.

[This is part 1 in my goal-setting series. Here’s part 2.]

Time for another “Jeff gets real” session.

I spent years doing the job but not the work.

Allow me to explain.

I showed up. I delivered what was asked, and honestly, a lot more. Clever creative. Solid design work. Annual campaign planning. People were happy and loved what I delivered. So nobody pushed me. Not my boss, not my colleagues, not my team. Year after year, by every visible measure, I was kicking ass.

But I wasn’t kicking ass. More importantly, I wasn’t growing. Ok, I was growing but not really. I just hadn’t noticed, because nobody was making me look. Then one day I finally realized I had fallen behind, I faced the fact that the only person who was ever going to challenge me was me, and I hadn’t been doing it.

So I committed to setting annual goals. Not the vague kind, the kind that move something. But you know what? Setting goals is harder than it looks.

As a matter of fact, it took three years of starts and stalls, baby steps and big stumbles to get it right. In year one, I set lofty-yet-undefined goals with no real plan or framework or accountability behind them. They were doomed to fail, and they did. In year two, I shored them up with structure, a SMART goal framework and I even built a tool to track them. Adoption and completion jumped. But some goals still fell short because they failed to satisfy three criteria I failed to notice. In year three, I finally cracked the code: good goals require that you define your constraints, your leverage, and the drivers you choose for how you’re optimizing your career.

In this post, I’m going to focus on career optimization (don’t worry, I go over the other constraints and leverage next week).

Because it’s the question you have to ask first, and it’s the one nearly all goal-setting advice skips entirely.

As I struggled to figure out where my goal-setting process kept falling short, I came across Todd Henry’s piece about optimization drivers. In 30 minutes, he gave shape to the goopy stuff that had been sloshing around in my head for over two years. There are eight drivers people choose when optimizing their careers: stability, recognition, autonomy, craft, efficiency, meaning, income, comfort. Everyone runs on one or two. I could finally name mine.

Now when I conduct a goal-setting session, I name the driver first. Then I audit my constraints and find my leverage. Then – and only then – I build the actual goal.

Eight drivers, one truth

If you don’t decide what you’re optimizing for, something else will decide for you.

When you don’t set goals, you’re essentially being reactive and not proactive. You end up focusing on output instead of outcomes. Naming your driver is your first step on your road to impact. And regardless of the road you’re on, they all lead to the same place.

If you’re optimizing for stability, output doesn’t protect you. Impact does. Busywork is the first thing cut when budgets tighten. Work that moved a real number is the thing that survives.

If you’re optimizing for comfort, impact is what actually reduces the demand on you. Low-impact requests don’t stop coming because you cleared them fast. They stop coming because you proved the work you choose to do matters, which earns you the standing to say no to the rest.

If you’re optimizing for efficiency, impact is the whole point. Waste isn’t just burning time and cash on a half-baked knee-jerk ad campaign. It’s the deliverable nobody needed in the first place.

Every driver gets better served by impact than by effort. It’s the reason naming it matters. Once you know what you’re protecting, impact is how you protect it.

Naming your driver won’t make you proactive by itself. It just tells you where to aim before you build the plan.

Four ways to start naming yours

1. Write down the last five things you said yes to. Look for the pattern. Maybe all five were things you could clear fast, that’s efficiency. Maybe all five were things someone would notice and thank you for, that’s recognition. Either way, that pattern is your driver, whether you’ve named it or not.

2. Ask what you protect without being asked to. Whatever you defend automatically is the tell. If you’d rather redo a flyer yourself than hand it off wrong, that’s craft. If someone questioning your process makes you bristle before they’ve even finished the sentence, probably that’s autonomy.

3. Ask whether you chose it or inherited it. Some drivers are yours. Some are just the job’s default settings you never questioned. If an unforeseen grenade gets lobbed your way and blows up your meticulously-thought-out plan, that’s stability. If you can point to something that continually performs well and you’d still resist touching it even with a good reason, that’s comfort. Either way, the test is whether you’d still choose it if nobody was grading you on it.

4. Build your next move around your driver, not against it. If you’re optimizing for meaning, that’s usually the clearest one to spot. You love the project that felt like real work way more than the one that just checked a box. The hard part isn’t naming it. It’s picking yourself for the next meaningful one without waiting.

Name it before you can use it

It’s worth repeating: if you don’t decide what you’re optimizing for, something else will decide for you.

I built an assessment to help you figure it out. Eight drivers, the tells for each one, and two questions that push past what sounds good to what’s actually true right now.

Ten minutes. Do it before your next goal-setting exercise.

Learn your driver and set your goals with me on July 28

This assessment is one piece of my new tool that helps you design your growth for the year.

I’m debuting it during a free live webinar on July 28.

Goals That Actually Get S* Done – Architect Your Growth with SMART Goals

Name your driver. Audit your constraints. Walk out with tools you can use today to build goals grounded in both, instead of drafting guesswork dressed up as a plan.

Come with a desire to grow and you’ll leave with a better understanding of why past goals failed and a have a road-tested goal-setting process you can run any time on your own.

You’ll leave already knowing what you’re optimizing for. That’s the half most goal-setting skips, and it’s the half that decides whether the rest of the process is even worth running.