Trying to Stay on Top of Goals? This Helped Me.

Before I get properly stuck in, I just wanted to mention that a lot of these ideas are from YouTuber Ali Abdaal.

2024 was the first year I actually set goals for myself. I started with the ‘Wheel of Life’ which provides a helpful audit overview of everything. If you’ve never heard of it before, then you basically:

1. Grab a sheet of plain paper
2. Draw a circle and split it into thirds
3. In those thirds, you will now add two lines to make three smaller segments (making 9 in total)
4. The three main areas are: Health, Career, & Family
5. You then label each segment: body, mind, soul, romance, family, friends, mission, money, & growth
6. You grade yourself 1-10 in where your actions align to the goal. It’s important to remember you don’t grade yourself on whether you’ve reached the goal, but on whether your actions align with that goal.

You’ll end up with something looking like this:

This is something Ali Abdaal explains excellently in this video:

I continued down this path and made plans to review every quarter. Some people warn you of the challenges of setting yearly goals and these are:

1. You forget what they are 
2. There are so many goals that it becomes daunting/overwhelming
3. A lot of these goals take far longer than a year to complete
4. Ultimately, they become hard to maintain

I still think there’s a place for the Wheel of Life, but it’s not in goal-setting, it’s for auditing, checking-in or tracking.

So now what?

Ali runs a course called LifeOS and as part of this, he hosts quarterly check-ins with an online community. I managed to attend one at the beginning of 2025. (they’re completely free btw, and I highly recommend joining one)

In this weekend of planning for the year, the idea that Ali proposes is multi-layered and easier to handle. This is the crux of his course that he teaches this system to implement. The core layers are:

• Quarterly level: Quartlery Quests
• Weekly level: Weekly review
• Daily level: Morning Manifesto

I believe there to be more to this that he reveals on the course. One day Ali, one day!

Quests

You’re only allowed to set two, one in personal and one in work. ‘Side Quests’ are optional, but you’re not allowed more than three, and they’re meant to be much smaller goals than your main quests.

Essentially, you treat these as projects and break them up into smaller steps so that you can tackle them on a weekly basis. An example would be “I want to increase my reading” and therefore “I will commit to finishing one book a month and reading 3 hours a week.” 

Weekly Review

I think this needs a better name to be honest. This is the part I like to adapt the most, and the part I look forward to most. In essence, you figure out how you felt about last week and become more self-aware for the week ahead and the decisions you’ll face.

It’s at this stage where it becomes more like journaling. You can ask simple questions like “What went well?” but you can also ask things like “What am I excited about?” or “What’s draining me?” to get a better picture of what’s going on in your life.

The crucial part that ties this in with your Quests is asking yourself what they are, and how they’re going. Unless you have quests in a place in front of you, you’re likely to forget what they are. This helps everything keep on track.

Here’s the weekly review V1 questions:

1. What went well this week?
2. What didn’t go as planned?
3. What’s one thing I can improve next week?
4. How have I been working towards my Quarterly Quests?
5. What are my focuses for the upcoming week?

I didn’t feel these questions were particularly inspiring, and I didn’t like the flow in relation to positivity. End on a high note and all that!

These prompts also just feel like being in school. 

I experimented with answering these questions as voice notes one week, and AI suggested alternate questions.

My V2 Questions:

1. ⏪ What were last week’s goals? How did they go?
2. General Thoughts on the Week 🧠 (short paragraph)
3. Struggles this week (bullet list)
4. Wins this week (bullet list)
5. How have I been working on my quarterly quests?
6. ⏩ Next Week’s Goals

I then came across a YouTuber’s weekly review with very different questions, that were probably my favourite to date!

1. On average, how have I been feeling this week?
2. What’s exciting right now?
3. What’s draining me right now?
4. Do I have any exciting or profound ideas?
5. What can I do to make it a good week next week?

I like these as an addition to the AI-suggested ones, as they don’t work well enough on their own. I really love the idea of pulling in questions focused on energy. It’s almost like this was the ‘emotional weekly review’ and the other was the ‘goal weekly review’.

Through the questions so far, the aim is to figure out the next three things you want to focus on next week. Which leads perfectly into…

Morning Manifesto

It’s literally two questions to make it as pain-free as possible:

1. What are my goals this week? and how are they going?
   1. Goal 1
   2. Goal 2
   3. Goal 3
2. What’s the single most important thing to complete today?

I do this every day and BOY, that last question reveals a lot. In fact, if you were to only take away one thing from this, it would be that daily question:

"What's the single most important thing to complete to day?"

It will do one of two things; reveal that you have so many ideas that you can’t decide and you cut through the noise OR make you realise you’re a bit lost and have no idea what the focus is and therefore you make one (success).

My average tends to be the latter, which I find really frustrating, but once I pick it, I know I have to do it.

Your daily goal can be as big or small as you want AND as abstract as you want as well. My most common daily goal tends to be to “get on top of my todo list” or “maintain a level of required focus”. I will then indent below my plan, or the tools I can use to help achieve the goal, like this:

• Maintain a level of required focus
  • Take more breaks or one much longer break

On some days you may find there are more than one. Go with it. Write them down, but make sure to order them in priority. 

Summary

I keep track of all of this in Notion in a simple calendar database view. You don’t need to do the same, but it’s really helpful to track the days I missed. Remember that any medium or format is fine so long as it works for you. It could be a notebook, a simple sticky note, an elaborate part of a second brain system. Whatever works. For me, it’s helpful to have these 2 elements:

1. A template feature
2. A calendar view

The ultimate benefit is in the process of thinking and being reflective, not that I have a collection of daily/weekly entries.

When I first started, I really looked forward to the morning when I’d start a new entry. I really hope that this continues through 2025 for as long as possible. We’re one quarter in and still going strong 🤞

If you struggle with goal-setting, try this system for a month and see how it changes things!

Speak soon,
Will