Forget goals. Just follow your energy.

So here’s a contrarian idea: Forget about goals.

Goal-setting. Vision. Mission. North Star. Objectives and Key Results. Key Performance Indicators. Deadlines. Accountability. Everything. Forget them.

Just follow your energy instead.

Consider this radical question:

What if I cast aside all plans and deadlines into the wind, and just followed my energy instead?

What if you really did that? Doesn’t it sound like an intriguing and formative experiment?! I feel enthused just by thinking about it.

There’s this one time I really did. I had a month with no gigs lined up, no deadlines, no plans. A blank slate of a month all ahead of me, all to myself. For my own projects. So I decided to discard. all plans aside, and experiment with learning how to spark joy in my work. I learned how to follow my energy, curiosity, excitement, instead of a plan:

I followed where my energy flowed, and avoided where my energy stalled. Often, I would conduct mind-body scans at the start of the day, and then I followed my energy for the day. That energy can be curiosity or excitement, or it can be fatigue or indecision. When there’s excitement, I ride the wave and work with it. Productivity often improves without trying. When my energy stalls, I often walked it out - “solvitur ambulando” - or work offline.

And that month because I didn’t plan anything or have deadlines, I went on to make two products. In ONE month! With NO plans and deadlines! On the other hand, when I did have plans in the month after, I didn’t come up with anything, and struggled to finish up stuff on time. How strange.

This is so counter to how I am used to working, yet the results seems to speak for itself. It could just be a coincidence of course, or it’s easier starting projects than running them. Hard to tell unless I repeat the experiment again, to follow my energy.

What does following my energy mean anyway?

• If I feel eager/excited/enthused/curious to explore something, I go for it.
• If I feel tired, sleepy or stuck while working, I stop.
• If I’m hungry, I stop working and eat.
• If I feel restless while working, I stand up or walk around.
• If I’m unsure what to do for a particular task or project, I walk and think.
• If my eyes tire from staring at the screen for too long, I work offline.
• If there’s something else more important besides work happening, I give it my fullest attention instead of work.

The list is reminiscent of a Zen story I came across, about aimlessness and the practice of non-practice:

A student once asked his teacher, “Master, what is enlightenment?”
The master replied, “When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep.”

I can’t say we’re going to be enlightened from doing this experiment. The objectives are a lot more profane than sacred.

But we can certainly do “when hungry, eat”, “when tired, stop work”.

Follow your energy.