3 Alternatives to Goal Setting in 2024

It’s early January and your inbox is stuffed to the brim with emails suggesting it’s time to set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) goals for the year ahead. Friends and colleagues are eagerly sharing new year’s resolutions.

How’s that going for you? For many of us it’s a yearly struggle. Goal-setting, resolutions, five-year plans — what if “life happens” and then you feel you’ve “failed”, because you chose a different path?

Some of us set goals but forget to carve out a path to make them possible. Without a strategy, what’s the difference between a goal and a hope?

It’s time to ditch goal-setting and replace it with alternatives that will send us in the direction we want to go.

We’ll explore 3 alternatives in this article: systems, visualisation and word of the year. First, systems.

Focus on systems, not goals

The Atomic Habits author advocates system-setting over goal-setting. Where a goal sets direction, a system helps you progress towards it.

He gives the example of a musician who wants to play a new piece by heart. If that’s the goal, Clear believes you’ll get there not by making it SMART but by putting the right systems in place. The system can be how often you practice, how you break down tricky parts of the piece and how you receive feedback from your teacher.

He also believes that you can go so far as to ignore the goal and still succeed. The basketball player aiming for championship will get just as far as the basketball player who forgets they’re aiming for championship and focuses on training to the best of their ability every day.

Systems also solve some of the common pitfalls of goals. Above all, they encourage us to “fall in love with the process, not the product”. They encourage us to enjoy a healthy lifestyle, rather than fixating on a number on the scale, to enjoy the process of writing every day rather than obsessing over the end goal of authoring a book.

They also result in lasting change: Clear shares the example of a tidy room — the fleeting joy of a goal well-accomplished. But without proper systems in place to keep it tidy, the goal soon rears its head again. “You treated a symptom without addressing a cause”.

Goals are also less flexible than systems: they create what Clear refers to as an “either-or” mindset. Either success or failure. Yet it’s very unlikely that the goals we set for ourselves become exactly what we accomplish. Otherwise we’d all be the astronauts we dreamed of becoming aged 5. Systems accommodate changes in direction without disrupting the journey. When a goal is accomplished, the systems remain as our motivation wanes, keeping us going steady.

Finally, we’re making an implicit promise to ourselves with goal-setting: “once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” We forget to enjoy the journey and live in anticipation of the destination, putting happiness off until the next milestone. Falling in love with the process allows us to be happy today.

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How to put systems in place?

Break down what you want to achieve into smaller steps and find a place for them within your daily routine. This might look like pairing them with an action you do already, such as brushing your teeth or adding a smaller action to prime you to take a bigger action. You might lay out your yoga mat first thing in the morning so that you virtually trip over it when it’s time to do your daily yoga, for example.

Track your progress as well as what’s working or not working and make changes over time to ensure your system keeps you heading in the direction you want to go.

Visualise your dream

Sounds woo-woo doesn’t it. Michael Phelps and Tiger Woods would disagree. Professional athletes have used this technique to achieve success after success.

Rather than setting and forgetting a resolution or a goal, visualisation helps you work towards your desired direction even when you’re not training.

Early in the Beijing Olympics 200m butterfly, Michael Phelps’ googles leaked and fogged up. By the last 50 metres, he was racing blind. How did he win and secure his 10th Olympic gold medal? He’d visualised the course so many times, he didn’t need to see to move forward.

And it’s not just for Athletes: a study of Accident & Emergency doctors by St Michael’s Hospital revealed that medical professionals were more successful when they imagined how they would deal with challenging situations before they happened.

In music, this study shows that participants who visualised a 5-finger sequence on an imaginary piano for two hours a day had the same neurological changes as the participants who physically practised on a piano. Their mistakes also reduced by the same amount.

So how do you do it?

Mental mapping allows you to picture the future with detail and clarity. Experts encourage the thinker to imagine sounds, textures, smells as well as how you might overcome setbacks and challenges. View your situation as if you are a spectator, watching a show unfold. These detailed mental maps also help you to identify where you will need help or support, so you can bring people in at the right moments in real situations.

Why does it work?

Experts believe it works because you’re “mentally preparing your mind” for when you encounter a real-life situation of a similar nature, meaning you will be “primed to respond and take the right action.” With goals, you’re “plotting steps that unexpected events might derail”, but with visualisation, you’re imagining a “fully realised picture of the future”, not a to-do list.

Swap your resolutions for a single word

If you can’t remember last year’s resolution, this one’s for you. In 2021, The New York Times put a spotlight on the “word of the year” and the concept went viral. It’s one I’ve kept up for a few years now.

Pick a word that represents the change or focus you want for the coming year. One year I was recovering from an injury and picked “strength” to build a weight training habit.

The best part is that your word can have multiple meanings: you might pick “breathe” to remind you to take a deep breath in stressful situations, but also to relax and pause.

One journalist picked “dance” to remind her to maximise little moments of joy.

Whatever your word, keep it to one single word (I’ve tried multiple and forgotten them), make it simple and commit it to memory. This year, my word collected dust in a mental cupboard after February, then came back to me in September and I mastered the new behaviour I was seeking to create. This is testament to the power of a single word over a resolution — any resolutions I’ve made are long-forgotten, but the word was lodged in the back of my mind and came to me when I was ready to set the habit.

If goal-setting isn’t getting you to where you need to be, give one of these a try and tweak as you go. As James Clear says “winners and losers have the same goals” — what sets the winners apart is finding a system that works for them.

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