Make a PACT, Not a SMART Goal
Anne-Laure Le Cunff · 2019
"SMART goals fixate on an outcome you do not control. Le Cunff's alternative, the PACT — Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable — commits you to a repeatable output for a set period, turns the result into data, and is the unit of what she later called tiny experiments."
'Get 5,000 subscribers in 25 weeks' is a SMART goal: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound. It is also almost entirely outside your control, and for ambitious, long-horizon aims — learn to code, write a book, change careers — the framework quietly discourages you from starting at all, because you cannot know how long it will take or whether it is 'achievable'. Anne-Laure Le Cunff's replacement is the PACT: 'Publish 25 newsletters over the next 25 weeks.' Same ambition, but every part of it is an action you can take this week and mark as done or not done.
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Interstitial Journaling
"Logging a few sentences at the exact transition point between tasks — what you just did, how you feel, what's next — reduces cognitive load and counters procrastination more effectively than either rigid daily planning or end-of-day review, because it intervenes precisely at the moment attention is most likely to drift."