How to Design Better Goals for 2026
Introduction
I’ve had the idea to create a new system of designing effective life goals for a while now.
I’m deliberately publishing it at a time when I think people will need it.
The Christmas season has come to an end; you have probably returned to work this week, and you’re thinking about making this year different and more successful than the last.
You may have had previous goals going into a new year that never materialised or didn't get off the starting line, but you want this year to be different.
This guide will help.
About Me
I’m a Leadership Coach who works with high-performing professionals within a large, global organisation and with private clients outside of work.
Before this, I spent 13 years in various engineering roles from design, projects and engineering management, including on some of the UK’s most ambitious technical projects.
I’ve taken my analytical design experience and turned it towards lifestyle design and helping ambitious people achieve their dreams inside and outside of work.
Why Better Goals Matter
80% of New Year’s goals and resolutions fail within the first two months.
People have good intentions to better their lives, but the way they go about designing them often means they are destined to give up before February arrives.
Having a goal almost always means that you want to improve some aspect of yourself, your life or the lives of those around you. With that in mind, it is a real tragedy that people fail to attain this improved version of themselves.
We’ve all had those token New Year’s intentions to ‘get healthy’ or ‘go on our phones less', but then it gets forgotten about as soon as we go back to work after the holidays.
If you take the time to design your goals and the strategies required to actualise them, then it means that you are more likely to make better progress towards them, and ultimately, live better lives in one way or another.
How To Use This Guide
Read through this guide, and once you have some rough ideas for goals, apply each section as a filter to stress-test how robust said goal is.
If it doesn’t stand up against a given design aspect, make some tweaks and review again.
Each of the below design aspects may not be relevant to each of your goals; if so, move on to the next.
I promise that this isn’t going to be another post about having SMART goals...
1. Design Goals as Identity Experiments, Not Targets
Most goals focus on a fixed endpoint as a default; instead, try changing the frame of the goal to be more oriented around the type of person you want to become.
Instead of having a goal that says “I want to achieve X in 2026”, it can be transformed into an identity goal such as “In 2026, I am becoming the type of person who…”
Achieving goals focused on metrics or achievements can feel great because there is an obvious endpoint where you can see that you have reached the finish line.
After achieving it, the excitement and contentment can fade, and you may want to jump to the next target-based goal.
Identity-based goals may be harder to know when you’ve accomplished them, but when you have, the results can last a lifetime. If you have fundamentally shifted, changed or improved a part of your identity, then you take that with you wherever you go. It’s a part of you.
Why This Works:
People stick to goals when they believe “this is who I am now.", not when they believe “this is something I should do.”
By writing and talking about the goal in a positive identity frame, you are already beginning to live the change.
2. Design for Constraints
People often fail to achieve their goals because they create them based on ideal conditions.
They ignore fundamental parts of their lives that can become potential obstacles or limitations to what they want to achieve.
Life is often messy, complicated and not conducive to the perfect conditions we often assume we will have when creating our goals.
Instead, define your immovable constraints first:
Family Rhythms - How much time do you spend a day or week with your family?
Work Seasonality - Does your career get busier at certain times in the year?
Energy Patterns - Are you tired in the morning or evening?
Physical Limitations - Is there anything about your body that could be an obstacle?
Capacity Across the Year - Does life get busier at certain points of the year, e.g. Summer holidays?
Once you have listed your constraints and have an understanding of how they may affect your goals on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, you can start to add a sense of realism to your goals.
Why This Works
This method creates realistic goals and already considers potential obstacles.
Then design goals around reality.
This leads to goals that survive into February and beyond.
3. Design for the “Minimum Effective Dose”
A Minimum Effective Dose (MED) is defined as the smallest amount of an input required to achieve a desired outcome.
You don’t need “bigger goals” and you don’t need “harder goals”.
What you need is to define the smallest repeatable action that moves the dial.
This could look like:
10 minutes of skill development a day
1 difficult conversation per week
A 20-minute deep work block a day
60 minutes of movement a week
Why This Works:
By defining the MED, your goals become easier to maintain and more regenerative. You don’t waste physical and mental energy trying to maximise your goals.
People can become obsessed with increasing what they can achieve, when really it pushes them over the point of diminishing returns.
The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman is a great example of understanding what your MED is.
By understanding what the MED is, you can achieve your goals or emotional needs efficiently (time/energy/willpower) whilst being able to divert the rest to other goals or other aspects of your life.
4. Design Goals Around Your Season of Life
This is a huge coaching insight most people ignore.
“Seasons of life” is a metaphor which is used to describe the varying stages of human existence (childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age) or personal phases of growth (growing, reflecting, surviving).
Your goals should look different at:
22 with energy and time in abundance
32 with a young child
42 with a leadership career
52 with eyes on the next phase of life
Similarly, you should understand what season of life you are going to be heading into in 2026:
Growth Season - You are in a position to focus on your development and to expand things at a fast rate.
Maintenance Season - You are happy where you are in life, and need to focus on keeping it that way.
Survival Season - You are going through challenging times, you can’t focus on growth right now, you just need to keep your head above water.
Recovery Season - You’ve just come out of the other side of hard times and need to focus on rebuilding. This could be recovering from an injury, relationship breakdown or financial stabilisation.
There may be other seasons of life that I have missed, or maybe different aspects of your life are currently in different seasons.
Each one demands different types of goals, which are aligned to the season.
If you try to have too many rapid growth style goals, but you are in a season of Survival (maybe with a young baby) then you will soon become disheartened that you don’t have the capacity to work on them.
Practical Step:
Think forward to what the next year may have planned for you. Are you expecting a baby? Do you plan to move house?
How could these plans affect your energy levels, commitment or focus on other goals? Do you feel ok with deferring other goals?
5. Design for Leverage
I’m sure you’ve heard the famous quote from Archimedes:
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”
This is something that should be applied to your yearly goals, too.
Which goal, if you achieved it in 2026, would provide you with the largest lever for the rest of your life/year?
If you have a large number of ambitions, once you identify which of your goals has the highest leverage, then that is the one that should be prioritised.
This could be around becoming healthier and fitter, which would then give you more energy to pursue other goals.
6. Design for Motivation Momentum
The problem with having large, long-term goals across the year is that you often have to wait until towards the end of the year to accomplish them and reap any rewards.
This can lead to motivation dropping off as the months go by, to the point of you abandoning the goal halfway through the year.
To combat this, here are two options:
Split large goals into smaller milestones, ideally, equally spaced throughout the year.
Have a mix of large and small goals throughout the year.
These two options provide a way of staggering the dopamine rush of achieving something over a longer time horizon, which will help to keep you motivated for longer.
As you achieve one goal, it will give you the momentum to then focus your energy on the next goal.
Soon, you will have built enough goal-achieving momentum to be able to crush all of them.
A Final Reminder.
Designing your goals is just the beginning of the process.
The real work comes when you start building towards achieving the goal, putting in the hours, creating new positive habits and making yourself uncomfortable to do something you have never done before.
