How to create your 2022 goals

2022 is here.

365 days have passed.

It’s time to set some goals.

Instead of New Year Resolutions, focus on themes.

These themes should be so powerful that you innately tackle your goals every day without having to think.

You may be thinking, “What does that even mean AND how do I create my goals as you mentioned?”

Let’s jump right in.

Create Goals tied to Themes

Every new year, we create resolutions.

Some include losing weight, sleeping earlier, lifting more, etc.

The issue with this is there are no powerful motivators for us to start.

What do I mean?

Let’s start with losing weight.

How much weight do you want to lose?
How will will you lose the weight?
How often will you do the thing to lose weight?
WHY do you want to lose weight?
Is the reason powerful and strong enough that you do the thing every day/week to lose weight?

These questions are important.

Ultimately, you need themes.

Themes are things that characterize and personify who you are.

Repeat – who YOU are.

Not what anyone else thinks.

Some examples include:

Lose weight live a healthier lifestyle and be there for my kids
Lose weight to improve overall health and reduce trips to the doctor’s office
Lose weight to be more active and have a sharper mind

So instead of creating goals that are vague and bland, focus on themes.

How to create theme-based goals

First, to achieve any goal you have to have a system and process in place.

For example, I use Notion to create my goals.

Then I create a Clickup weekly recurring task to review and analyze my goals.

I do this every week, no questions asked.

Here is my current 2022 goals:

On top are my themes; below are my goals.

When creating your themes, think about what’s most important to you.

What truly matters to you.

For me, being healthy and passing down my heritage to my family is important.

Once you’ve created your goals, review and assess.

Review your goals

This is straightforward.

Review your goals frequently.

Set up a recurring task to review your goals.

I like to deep dive every month for an hour.

I also track my time using Toggl, which provides me with monthly reports to see if I’m doing the things that get me closer to my goals.

It’s important to complete this step; otherwise, December rolls around and another year of not achieving your goals.

None of us want that.

So review frequently, ask the hard questions, and embrace the wins.

Parting Thoughts

Create goals tied to themes.

Make these themes powerful and specific to you.

In some sense, these goals should make you angry.

Why?

Because you’ll be more likely to tackle them.

For me, being healthy is incredibly important because I want to be able to play with my family.

If I don’t take care of my body, I can’t do this.

And it makes me angry.

So I hope this helped you.

Let me know your thoughts and what your 2022 goals are.

#embracethegrind

The Grind.

*Originally posted back in May 7, 2017 after leaving my corporate job

What is the “grind”?

My definition of the “grind” is the ability, determination, and willingness to push through an obstacle, despite the unnerving challenges ahead.

This can be working hard at your job to finish a project deadline, working through the Nth hour on your small business, or even anxiously pummeling your way to complete your last set of push-ups.

As a wrestler and lifelong martial artist, I’ve sustained numerous injuries, puked my share of times after practice, and generally felt like giving up.

But I would always recall the “grind”.

How could I look at myself and just quit?

How could I allow myself to just stop when the going got tough?

I can’t.

To grind through tough circumstances is what develops character, strength, heart, and dedication.

It can be hard though.

Fear, rejection, and anxiety. We all face it.

But what’s important is to remember we will endure it.

We will get past it.

You can grind through the pain.

And remember, when you do, cherish every moment.

Soak it all in.

You earned it.

Because when you take a step back, you tell yourself, “I did this. On my own”.

Grind through the circumstances.

Grind through the challenges and obstacles that lie up ahead.

You’ll be proud of yourself for having done so.

3 simple steps to being more productive in your life

“I’ll get to it next time.”

“Why are they so much better than me?”

“I really need to read some books.”

“This time, I’ll really save some money!”

Guessing you’ve probably said this at one point, right? I have…for years. ?

But it’s human nature for us to push things back—some fault lies on us, some because we have higher priorities. Either way, it happens and you shouldn’t feel guilty and stop.

So, here are 5 simple steps on being more productive in life and helping live a life that fulfills your goals.

Step #1: Prioritize your goals

First step, you’ll need to prioritize your goals. What makes you happy, sad, excited, depressed, and so on.

Surprisingly, we don’t spend enough time on ourselves to ask why we do what we do. Rather, we’ve been trained to do as we’re told.

In your job, you have a manager and that manager gives you tasks. They pay you in exchange for your services.

Well, it’s really easy to prioritize this because we’re getting paid. The hard thing is to do the stuff when no one is looking around, while you’re at home and when there’s no immediate incentive.

So, prioritize your goals by taking the following actions:

List out a matrix in a word document with the columns:
- What makes me happy
- What makes me sad
- What would I regret if I didn’t do this
You’ll need a system to track and measure your goals
- I recommend Clickup—a free productivity tool to track your goals, tasks, and so much more
- You can learn more about how to set up your board in my last post here.
Add your goals to Clickup using their Goals function to remind you of your goals.

Step #2: Create your productivity schedule

It’s not enough to write a bunch of goals and tasks; you’ll need to also create your schedule to become more productive.

The way to achieve this is review your goals and prepare a plan (doesn’t have to be detailed) on how you want to achieve those goals for the year.

Most of us struggle to achieve goals because we’re either exhausted, don’t see immediate results or things change. Whatever the reasons may be, creating a schedule like that of on a calendar can remind you why you’re doing what you’re doing.

In my case, it’s learning Mandarin Chinese. My wife and my in-laws are Chinese, but I’m Korean. Rather saying I’m not going to learn, I made it a priority to learn so that I can communicate effectively with my in-laws.

Because listing Mandarin Chinese as a priority, punching it in in Clickup and creating a schedule, my Chinese has improved dramatically.

Now when I speak to my in-laws, the communications are much more effective. 有意思!

Step #3: Track and measure your productivity

Now that we’ve covered steps #1 and #2, it’s time to track and measure to ensure we’re being productive and achieving our goals.

Otherwise, we go back to bad habits, lose sight of what’s important and fall back into our slump.

Well guess what, we ain’t letting that happen. ☺

To measure yourself, I recommend a tool called Toggl—a simple time tracking app that has a beautiful interface with charts, tags and more.

Within Toggl, you can create clients and projects to associate with your goals and projects. This could include things like reading, working out, building a side hustle, etc.

Whatever it may be, you can create in Toggl. Here’s an example from me tracking my reading below:

Create a new client

Create new project called “Reading”

Track your performance

March was a rough month given the whole coronavirus. ?

To recap everything

To recap, you’ll need 3 steps in order to achieving productivity and living the life you want. Here it is below:

Prioritize your goals
Create your productivity calendar
Track and measure your productivity

That’s it.

By listing out everything and really questioning why you want what you want, you’ll have a much better understanding of your goals and priorities. It gives purpose and a reason to work on your goals.

But remember, goals are hard. Life is hard.

But if you set out to live a life you want to live, you’ll be happier, more productive and more satisfied in the long run.

As always, feel free to reach out if you have questions. Enjoy and stay safe!

2019: A Year in Reflection

As you can tell, this post is long overdue…. But better late than never!

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking about how the 2019 year went and what I hope to achieve in 2020. Although there were some great things that happened like the birth of my son, there were also some not-so-great moments.

I’ve listed just a few of those great and not-so-greats below:

Great

Ended year for my business beating our budget
Welcomed my son, Caius, to our family
Had a chance to take a small vacation earlier in the year
Read a handful of books
Listened to too many podcasts (used to track this data, probably should again)
Rekindled my love for brazilian jiu-jitsu
Continued developing my Mandarin language skills

Not-so-great

Unable to build a recurring business (Growthier was still stuck in one-off projects)
Did not meet minimum hour threshold for Mandarin skills
Slacked on my Korean studies
Wasn’t able to code my first program
Lost 2 customers

Though the year had its ups and downs, I’ve learned a lot from them. My goal is to take these learning opportunities and apply them for 2020. For every down, I’ve put together a process map to determine how I can improve these areas and parts of my life, then applied them to the goals in clickup.

One of my biggest fears in life is staying stagnant, not learning, not growing. Because the day I can’t learn is the day I’ve become complacent. That can’t happen.

So everyday is a day for me to embrace new challenges and learnings. Don’t get me wrong–there are things I still hate to do.

But its those very things that I hate that I know I have to do right away.

Anyways, 2019 was an interesting year and overall I was happy.

Now onto 2020. Let’s get it together. ?

Being intentional and more productive with your time

There’s 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week, and 8,760 in a year.

If we think about it, we spend most of our time either sleeping or working, with the rest of it spent on frivolous things like video games or watching tv. Not much productivity there.

After my backpacking trip in 2017, I wanted to be more intentional with my time, specifically around accomplishing goals. And not just any goals, but goals I’ve had for years (as far as back as college even).

So what did that mean?

I needed a system, something to hold me accountable, and something I could measure with data.

There’s two tools I use today and everyday to track my goals and tasks. They help me measure whether or not I’m doing the things I need to do to get to my goals, to live the life I want to and to be extremely intentional with my time.

They are: Clickup and Toggl.

With Clickup, I set up my goals under the goals tab in addition to creating a folder like this:

This system has allowed me to constantly review and track what I’m doing to ensure I’m getting a) the most out of my time and b) getting me closer to the life I want.

With Toggl, I’m able to integrate time tracking directly with Clickup and measure how long each tasks takes. Take a look below:

So to wrap it up, being intentional with your time is extremely crucial in being able to accomplish your goals, being more productive, and living the life you want.

Tools like Clickup and Toggl help us to hold us accountable and measure our progress.

We’re in 2019, and it’s already October. Still time left to set out your goals and accomplish them. ?

Using ClickUp to organize your life

Table Of Contents

Using ClickUp to manage tasks, goals and projects
How I use Clickup today
Other awesome features Clickup includes such as goals, reporting, box views
Use ClickUp to accomplish goals and stay organized

**Note: When I made this originally, it was made using Clickup 1.0. So much has changed since, and for the better. I’ve updated the images below based on 2.0. Enjoy!

With today’s standards of getting more done, it’s become crazy in this day and age of staying organized and completing everything that needs be completed.

Get work done, clean the dishes, take care of the kids, meet with friends, call the plumber…the list goes on and on and on.

So what is the best way to manage everything that goes on?

An organization tool, that’s how.

Using ClickUp to manage tasks, goals and projects

I use a tool called ClickUp, a productivity platform that can virtually handle everything related to projects, tasks, productivity, etc.

I love this tool in how it’s made a huge difference in both my life and productivity. The saying goes, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”.

By using ClickUp and using the GTD (getting things done) framework, I can see everything that needs to get done in my personal, professional and family life.

This is hugely important to me because I don’t want to ever slip the ball on my goals (e.g. learning Chinese!)

How I use Clickup today

Let me first add, there is no right or wrong way to use ClickUp or any productivity tool — it comes down to your own system and habits.

No tool can overcome those, so if you’re facing issues of staying consistent, try to start with a habit and doing that habit for at least one month.

Okay, so how do I have my ClickUp software set up?

Spaces

First, I set up my spaces, which are individual pieces of my life: personal, professional, family.

I keep each of them as separate as possible, otherwise, it becomes overwhelming. See below:

As you can see, here are my spaces as they’re set up today. I prefer this set up as I can laser focus in on areas that require my attention.

Projects & Lists

Next, once the spaces are created its time to create projects and lists specific to your spaces. Think of them as very specific goals within your space, e.g. your job.

Here is an example of how I set up my personal space:

As you can see, I have a project labeled “Yarty GTD”. It encompasses all the stuff I need to get done, some of which are personal and goal-oriented.

This helps me to stay focused so that I never (or least try to never) forget the important stuff (e.g. my wife ?).

Tasks

Like any project management system, you’ll need actual tasks to complete.

For many, we use the traditional pen and paper method. I personally love leveraging software like ClickUp because I can always access my projects and tasks via their web app and mobile app.

Essentially, it’s always with me. ?

So, what do tasks look like? Here’s a few of mine below:

Its super simple to add a task as well. You can create tasks through the large green button in the upper right corner or you can create within your lists.

Another awesome feature of ClickUp’s is being able to see which tasks are coming due, what’s on hold, etc.

This is great because you can quickly decide which tasks require your immediate attention and which can maybe be pushed off till a later date.

ClickUp’s filters function comes in handy for these purposes. I use them every day. Sample below:

Other awesome features Clickup includes such as goals, reporting, box views

Personally, this is what makes ClickUp so amazing compared to other alternatives I’ve tried.

The goals, reporting and box views are just simply awesome.

Want to hold yourself accountable to those New Year’s goals? Want to ensure never missing an anniversary?

ClickUp’s the answer. ?

Here’s an example of each below:

The possibilities are endless, and I use these functions every day to stay on track with my goals, projects and more.

Use ClickUp to accomplish goals and stay organized

With ClickUp, I found myself accomplishing so much more than I ever have prior to using the software.

Being able to capture all my projects, tasks, goals in one place is hugely valuable.

Because everything is sync’d with their web app and phone apps, I have my tasks with me wherever I go.

There are a lot of things I want to accomplish, and by having a system in place like ClickUp, I don’t feel anxious or frazzled that I might let something slip.

I’ve used a number of systems over the years like Trello, Excel, Google Sheets, pen and paper. But none of them come close to ClickUp and their functionality / ease of use.

To anyone looking for a tool to manage their lives or to stay better organized, I highly recommend ClickUp. Because there’s a forever free plan, there’s no risk in trying it out either.

Feel free to use this link to sign up today. If you have any questions on setting your board up, feel free to reach out to me as well.

The Regret Minimization Framework and how to apply it to your life

“The framework I found, which made the decision incredibly easy, was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a “regret minimization framework.” So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Where the regret minimization framework came from

In 2017, while backpacking through Southeast Asia and wondering what I wanted to do next in my career, I came across a book called “The Everything Store”.

My wife and I perched at the top of one of the islands next to Komodo Island

The book details Jeff Bezos’ story and how Amazon became what it is today. And there was a line said by Jeff that completely changed my life.

Regret minimization framework.

In a nutshell, he explains that he would regret this decision, or any decision, in 80 years if he had not taken it.

For most of us, we can’t imagine what 80 years feels like–let alone 10. But imagine that for a second.

Close your eyes for one minute, and ask yourself, “What things do I regret not having tried, and would I be willing to try them today?”

How I applied the regret minimization framework

For myself, there were so many things I wanted to try but just never got around to do. Some reasons were timing, work schedule, and sadly, pure laziness on my behalf.

But that was just it.

When I realized it was up to me and only me, and that if I didn’t take any action to live up to my goals and dreams, nothing would change. No action = no change = regret.

So in 2017, with both my wife and I, we decided to take a huge risk and set off to go backpacking.

We had some savings, but backpacking meant taking time off work, making no income and not building up the resume.

But when we thought about the flip side, “What if in 80 years we look back and hadn’t backpacked…Would we regret it?”

And so off we went.

Everything packed and ready to go for 4 months!

What its been like since 2017 and using the framework

It’s now 2019, a near two years since we trekked through Vietnam, visited the Angkor Wat temples, almost got run down in Indonesia (that’s a story for another time ?), and relaxed by the most beautiful Asian beaches.

Most of us tell ourselves, “Well, I can’t just leave my job” or “I don’t know, I’m unsure”.

Trust me, we said the same.

But it always goes back to Jeff’s regret minimization framework. In 80 years, will you regret this?

This line is the backbone to every decision I make now because without it, every decision is an indecisive one. I’ll constantly worry, regret, fret; but by asking myself if I would regret it in 80 years, the decision is much more clear.

So what are the things you want to try?

So I ask you, what are some of the things you’ve always wanted to do but just haven’t yet? Want to learn to code, try a side hustle, start a blog, go try your hand at mixed martial arts (ok, ok…maybe not this)?

Because every day that passes is another day that slips by, another day filled with regret.

So jump out there, have fun and make the best decisions for yourself.