A few years ago I read a fascinating book by the author Gretchen Rubin. It’s called the Happiness Project, and since reading that book it has always made me question how many goals would be an appropriate number to pursue, because in the book she basically restructures her whole lifestyle by incorporating multiple new activities over the course of a year, in the pursuit of being happier. Now when we are setting goals ourselves, you might consider only setting a couple at a time, because too many can feel too overwhelming, and yet Gretchen managed to incorporate dozens and dozens of new activities across a twelve month period. In this episode, I’m going to explore the question of how many goals is the right amount, and draw on Gretchen’s book and the scientific research that has looked at this topic. It’s going to be a fun one!

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Now if you do a Google search for how many goals should I pursue at once, the standard answer is 1 to 3. Now I have two problems with this answer, one is that no one says in what time frame. Are you pursuing 1-3 per week? Per quarter? Per year? Does each goal take exactly the same length of time? Also, no one is really citing a source for this statistic. Internet articles kind of reference other opinion articles, and so it’s just kind of this number that feels right. I went to the science to answer this question, but first, I want to talk you through this book that I mentioned.

The Happiness Project

The Happiness Project is a fascinating read. It’s the documentation of a challenge that Gretchen set herself to improve her happiness, but she did it by choosing a huge number of activities that she wanted to start doing. If you haven’t read the book, I’m going to explain what she did and how it relates to our topic. She chose a theme for each month of the year, and within that theme, she chose about 4-5 activities to start doing, but she didn’t do the activities just for that month only, she built on them, which means that she started 5 new things in January, then in Feb was doing those five thing plus five new things, and so on, until December where she was doing about 47 new things in her life. Phew! It freaks me out just thinking about that many changes, and yet, she did it.

“When I Have Free Time…”

Gretchen starts the book with the very relatable story of how she had this kind of list of things she wanted to do, but was never really getting around to them, and then she realised that she was in danger of wasting her life. And I think we all get to that point sometimes right? Something profound or unusual happens and it brings to the forefront of our mind that life is short, and we need to start making changes. She writes in the book, that she’ll tackle this issue “when I have free time.” But then of course, straight away she realises that free time never just pops around, she actually writes “I have to make time” and this is exactly the attitude that we all need when we are changing our lives. She said “My life wasn’t going to change unless I made it change.”

Twelve Virtues for the Year

For Gretchen, she decided that she wanted to be “happier,” even though there was much about her life that made her happy already, but she didn’t really know how to do that, and so like the author and former lawyer that she is, she dove into the topic of happiness, reading all about research and philosophy and opinion pieces, and she decided that to make her life happier, she would come up with a list of virtues, or areas to work on, and then for each of these she made multiple resolutions. She would address one virtue or topic every month, and the list for her was Vitality, Marriage, Work, Parenthood, Leisure, Friendship, Money, Eternity, Books, Mindfulness, Attitude, and Happiness.

After she came up with resolutions or actions to take for each one, she made a chart where she could see what they were and tick them off. Now Gretchen made a really interesting observation here, where she looks at her list of resolutions and noticed that they’re not necessarily grand scale things, they were mostly small scale actions like “go to sleep earlier” and “tackle a nagging task” and they weren’t radical, but I want to emphasise here that they don’t need to be radical.

You can make big or small changes to your life, because the magic comes in improving your current life, not wishing for a totally new one. You can find happiness in the everyday moments of your life. Gretchen says at the end of the book that “I could change my life without changing my life,” and I think that this is a really important idea that no one talks a lot about – you really can make changes to your life, it is possible.

Highly Personal Resolutions

She also noted that her resolutions were highly specific to her – your resolutions should be about you and come from your own values, there’s absolutely no point in getting them from anyone else. There were two other really insightful observations that Gretchen made. She says that the quest to become happier is not a selfish one, when you’re happier the people around you are happier, and interpersonal skills like patience, generosity and lightheartedness would improve the lives of others too. And the other point that Gretchen makes is a little bit of a warning. She says we can’t wait for a crisis to kick start us into improving our lives. Now is the time to make changes, before it’s too late.

Some Barriers

So how did Gretchen go by the end of December with about 47 new activities? Throughout the book she talks about not being able to tick everything off perfectly, about missing days, and certainly there were times when she actually didn’t feel like doing the activity, but she persisted. She kept trying. She says that following through was the hardest part of the challenge, and the chart or tracker that she used was the most important part of the whole thing.

Two interesting things come up here.

Perfectionism

The first thing is about the topic of perfection. Gretchen notes several times in the book that she was trying to do all these things perfectly, and the idea of getting it all perfect was daunting, and of course that just wasn’t possible – she fell short of all her resolutions constantly. Looking at the chart meant that the gaps were glaringly obvious; however, even though she didn’t do them perfectly, she explains that it all worked much more effectively than if she hadn’t set the goals or used the chart in the first place.

Being Intentional With Your Time

The second thing is that she notes that her resolutions absolutely took more time overall, but she doesn’t really discuss what she was doing less of. She was adding in tasks like tidying in the evenings, and write a novel, and doesn’t really mention how she fit this all in. Many times though, it was actually about doing something in a different way, so that it didn’t actually take up more time. An example of this is “sing in the morning” where she would sing to her kids in the morning to prevent her from getting grumpy with them.

And sometimes her resolutions were about choosing how to spend her time with more intention than she otherwise would have, again, not using more time, but about deciding how she wants so spend her time. These were things like deciding which types of books she wanted to read, so that she wasn’t reading books she felt she should read because they were popular or had been recommended.

How Many Goals Should You Set?

So I think that this book raises a few questions for me. The big one is how many resolutions or goals is an appropriate amount? 47 seems like a lot. And how do we fit all this into our busy lives? And do we have to do them all perfectly?

Let’s now take a look at the science.

It’s All Relative

There is an article by Dalton and Spiller in 2012, that looked at whether making a plan to achieve a goal was helpful for times when you have one goal, or times when you have six goals at once. It’s well known in the literature that making a clear plan to get to your goal means that you are more likely to succeed than having no plan, but these researchers wanted to look at what happens when you have six goals on the go.

Now six might seem a lot, but if we just think of goals for the day as activities, then this type of research is actually mimicking what is actually happening in real life, because if we think about any given day, we probably have several goals, like drink 2L of water, exercise, reply to emails, cook a healthy lunch, do a grocery order, spend time with the kids, etc right? So in this research study they found that when people had six goals, making a plan meant that success went down, and that was because seeing the plan undermined people’s commitment to carry out the goals, and goal pursuit was abandoned. So on the face of it, it seems like having six goals on the go at once is a bad thing.

But they also found this cool effect. They found that if the participants were led to believe that six small goals over the course of one day was achievable, because other people were trying to pursue 10 goals, then making a plan for six goals actually went back to being effective. What the heck is happening here?! They found that the participants didn’t lose any commitment when they knew that other people were going after 10 goals, so they could still plan for and achieve 6 small things in a day. How cool is that?! So if you can maintain your commitment even if you lay out a big long list of new plans, or create a large chart like Gretchen Rubin did, you can absolutely still achieve your goals.

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Not Enough Time?

Now, there is a lot of literature on the pursuit of multiple goals, but the other single article that I want to mention in this episode is by Kung and Scholer, in 2020. This article is a good summary of a lot of this literature, and there are some really important takeaways that are helpful for our own everyday goal pursuit.

This first idea that I want you to understand from this article is the really important idea of “not having time” or “finding the time” to do many more new things. Any given activity uses resources. Usually when we talk about goals, the activities that we are choosing to do are taking up some amount of time, of energy, and of money. If you are spending your resources, specifically your time on something, it usually means that you don’t then have that time to pursue other goals, right (makes sense). This is a type of “goal conflict”, and we want to avoid situations where goals compete for resources like this.

When you Google how many goals to pursue, it says that your shouldn’t do more than 1-3 because you want to avoid multitasking, which is exactly this issue of not having enough time. If you are trying to pursue more, then the assumption is that you would have to multitask to fit it in, and that would be bad because we can’t actually multitask effectively. However, this assumption is not true, and let me explain. There are a couple of kind of “loop holes” with this issue of taking more time.

Doing Things Differently

Sometimes, one of your goals actually doesn’t use up more time, like when we talked about some of Gretchen’s resolutions like “sing in the morning” – this is just about doing something differently. And it may be that you are using a different amount of energy or money instead (which are different resources), or it requires a change in mindset, so these types of goals don’t really need to stick to the general idea of only pursuing 1 goal at a time.

The other way you get get around this issue of time is understanding that different goals are done in different settings and at different times of the day, and so don’t interfere with each other across the day or week. You might decided to have six goals of drink more water, take a salad for lunch to work instead of buying takeaway, read on the train into work instead of listening to music, do a painting class once, and hire a cleaner to help you around the house. These don’t interfere with each other, they are done at different times of the day and week, one of them is a one off event, and hiring a cleaner actually saves time while using more of a different resource, which is of course money. So don’t automatically assume that more goals = more time used.

More Time Upfront

The other loop hole with this idea of using up finite amounts of time is that we might spend time learning a new task, like learning a new healthier recipe which you would be slower at when cooking for the first time, but with practice, you become better at it and it becomes more automatic, and so it’s then taking less time compared with when you first started it, so you need to commit to using your time in this way initially, but then it’s just taking the same amount of time as other meals, which frees up your time again to focus on a new goal. This is possibly what was happening for Gretchen in her book – she was learning new ways of doing things, and then making tasks automatic or more habitual before moving on to new things in the following month.

Sequential Goals

Now, if you do find that your goals do conflict and compete for the same resource of time, then one of the best ways to solve this problem is to do one after the other. The Kung and Scholer article mentions that one solution to goal conflict is to do your goals sequentially. If you want to train for a marathon, and take a painting class, then you could train for the marathon, run the marathon, and then start a painting class. Neither of these activities will take a whole year, so you can see how limiting yourself to 1-3 goals for the year would not really be necessary.

Mindset Matters

In the Kung and Scholer article, they make a really interesting observation about how different people have different perspectives on goals and that this can influence how many goals you pursue. They say that people who think it’s possible to have multiple goals seek different solutions to achieve those goals, for example, they might do one after the other, or they might multitask effectively, like call their mother while going for a walk, and that people who think that they can’t pursue multiple goals may not seek to pursue goals flexibly. So the point here again is about how you see your situation, just like one of the ideas in the previous article I talked about, the Dalton and Spiller article. If you believe that multiple goals are achievable, then they are.

So this issue of “finding the time” is a really interesting one, and it totally depends on the type of activity you are wanting to do. Just remember that new goals don’t always require more time, which means you could possibly do more than you think. Sometimes instead it’s just about changing your mindset, and choosing to change, and this can feel hard because your brain doesn’t like to change, but don’t let your brain tell you that you don’t have enough time.

The Relationship Between Multiple Goals

There is one final idea which is discussed in both articles that I’ve mentioned, and that is around how people might think about how their multiple goals are related. The science seems to find that if you can make your goals related to one another, then you see these multiple ideas as integrated and more acceptable.

Think about a mind map or a network diagram. If you can see that some of your goals are working together in service of a bigger idea, then pursuing multiple goals feels so much easier. For example, if you have goals about painting and joining a choir and doing more craft with the kids and learning calligraphy, and you see these as all related to bringing more creativity into your life, then pursuing all these goals will feel easier, you’ll be more committed, and you’ll be more likely to succeed in them. I love this idea, and I also think it might be another reason why Gretchen was able to do so well in pursuing her 47 goals and feeling happier at the end of her year – she focused on one idea each month with multiple related goals, and all of those ideas came under the umbrella of feeling happier.

How to Set Multiple Goals

So, how many goals should you pursue? Let’s summarise the ideas that I covered in today’s episode and turn them into strategies that you can implement. The first is that you can absolutely pursue more than 1-3 goals – if you believe that it’s possible, then you are already improving your chances of success. Keep that commitment, find goals that are meaningful to you by listing out your virtues or priorities like Gretchen did. Then, consider if there is one or more over-arching ideas that you can link your goals to – can you draw out a mind map or network diagram? Then, write down whether your goals actually take a lot of time, or are they just new changes. Drinking 2L of water a day isn’t going to take more time really, it just might take you setting up a routine or reminder system.

If your goals do take more time, what can you stop doing? Can you stop watching TV or scrolling social media, or can you outsource some tasks? You can get around the issue of goals taking time by doing them sequentially, so that over the course of the year you might do 5 or 10 or 15 different activities, one after the other. It’s a great idea to use a chart to keep track and not forget your goals, but don’t worry at all about any gaps in the tickboxes.

Now I am encouraging more goals than 1-3, but there is also a tipping point. Kung and Scholer do emphasise that you do have limited resources, so it’s not “the more the better”, so consider your own resources and plan accordingly.

Truly know that change is possible, and pursuing the goals you have in your heart is a worthwhile use of your time. It’s absolutely worth trying, because you will still get further along the path than if you just kept doing things the same unfulfilling way.

So, will you set just one goal this year? Or will you choose a 47-goal life overhaul like Gretchin Rubin? Or maybe it’s somewhere in between, with a mix of goals that take time and some that don’t take more time. As long as you are committed to your goals, and don’t let “thinking small” hold you back, then you can pursue as many goals as you like.

In the words of the poet Mary Oliver, “tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” See you next time.

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References mentioned in the post:

Gretchin Rubin’s book is called The Happiness Project. You can get it using my Amazon Affiliate link where I earn a small commission: https://amzn.to/4gTCUpB

Dalton, A. N., & Spiller, S. A. (2012). Too much of a good thing: The benefits of implementation intentions depend on the number of goals. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(3), 600-614.

Kung, F. Y., & Scholer, A. A. (2020). The pursuit of multiple goals. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 14(1), e12509.