The Art of Weekly Big 3 Goals: Declutter Your To-Do List

Narrow your focus to what’s timely, what’s aligned to your larger goals, and what will move your needle

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Admit it. Sometimes you’re looking at 47 or 89 tasks on your to-do list, and they all look important. You know it’s impossible to finish that many tasks or achieve that many goals. Yep, been there, done that! But six years ago (even before I became a certified Full Focus Pro), I decided to abandon my massive to-do list and focus on only three things per week. But how do I identify them? I ask myself — and I ask members of my small group coaching group — these three questions about each of the too-numerous goals on our to-do lists:

Will it move the dial for me?
Is it the best use of my time now?
Does it align with my longer-term goals?

I whittle down and prioritize until I have three goals that answer each of those questions with a resounding yes. These become my weekly Big 3 goals.

I promise, when you reduce your list of dozens of goals to a weekly Big 3, you’ll feel less overwhelmed, more able to focus on what actually matters, and more likely to celebrate your wins. Let’s run through the three criteria for a weekly Big 3 goal to see how you can focus on what matters by cutting what doesn’t.

It’s a high leverage goal

Week after week, I remind members of my Accountability Mastermind Group to choose high leverage goals. When I hear someone identify a weekly goal that I know won’t move the dial, I say in my most respectful voice, uh, yeah, that’s admirable, fun, and maybe even gratifying, but I’m not seeing how it’s a high leverage goal.

To help my clients — and now you — understand the concept of leverage, I did some digging.

Tony Jeary defines high leverage activities as:

“… those actions that will result in the most valuable outcomes and advance your vision faster.”

He has an excellent article on high-leverage activities (HLA) that includes several learning exercises.

I suggest you ask yourself: Can I write some examples of HLAs in general, and pick from that list when I’m struggling to get ideas about what to do today? What will move the dial for me?

Jeary gives these examples:

Coaching and nourishing your team members
Impacting those you serve
Planning your day
Sharpening your skills/learning

Using those suggestions as a guide, identify some specific activities for yourself, such as:

Help my team learn the correct procedure for [fill in the blank] more effectively.
Donate excess office equipment to [name of organization].
Schedule an hour a week to complete the Preview in my Full Focus Planner.
Register for [a course].

Here’s my challenge to you: Get Jeary’s article and do the learning exercises he suggests.

You might also ask yourself these questions:

Will this task be a baby step or a giant step towards making my life better, or seeing my vision manifested sooner?
How will the time I spend on this task today multiply my reward tomorrow?
Is this task a habit that must be regularly repeated to achieve a bigger goal? (For example, going to the gym.) (Consider the power of a small goal that compounds over time — such as getting 1% better each day!)

It’s the best use of your time

When setting your weekly Big 3 goals, you want your effort to make the best use of your time. You have 168 hours in the week. Of that, you’ll be sleeping about one third of the time. So make sure you’re using the remaining hours for the greatest good.

At this point, you are not asking yourself whether this is a worthy goal. Rather, you’re asking yourself: Is this the best use of my time now? Think about this for a moment.

If you’re having trouble deciding if it’s the best use of your time, see this short video which explains the Eisenhower Matrix. The matrix was developed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and popularized by Stephen Covey in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It addresses what’s important, unimportant, urgent, and non-urgent. Ideally, you want to aim for prioritizing whatever is urgent and important.

Are you still questioning if something is the best use of your time? Ok, go in another direction. Consider the 4 Ds:

Do. Do now. Do it yourself. (It’s important, and a good use of your time, now.)
Delay. This is important, but not so urgent. (It’s a good use of your time, but it can wait.)
Delegate. This is urgent, but less important, and can be delegated to someone else. (It’s a worthy endeavor, but you don’t need to do it yourself, especially if someone else has the time, skill and willingness to do it for you.) In some cases, maybe you could automate the task.
Delete. This is neither important nor urgent. (It’s not worth anyone’s time right now.)

Here are some other questions to ask yourself:

What did I leave undone yesterday that has become more urgent today?
Even if this task doesn’t feel “urgent,” would skipping it now block the next step in my workload, or my teammate’s workload?
Might this task have been totally overtaken by events (OBEd) since it was created?

Here’s my challenge to you: Review that fat list of the gazillion things on your to-do list. Mark each task thus:

DO (do now)
DLA (delay)
DGT (delegate)
DX (delete)

Hopefully, that short exercise will help you to gain some insight into the tasks you’ve already identified.

It aligns with longer-term goals

This is a tough question if you haven’t yet identified your longer-term goals. But the fact is, it’s hard to focus on what matters this week if you haven’t at least pondered what your longer-term goals might be.

In their book Bold, Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis introduced the concept of goals related to a massively transformative purpose (MTP). The MTP is basically the mission statement for your life:

Massive. It’s large and it’s a lifelong endeavor.
Transformative. It brings significant change to an industry, a community, or the planet.
Purpose-driven. It sets a vision that gives your life meaning.

Ideally, your weekly Big 3 goals will be aligned to your life plan, i.e., your MTP goal.

I was very much inspired while reading Bold, but Kotler and Diamandis’s approach isn’t for everyone. You might want to look at other resources, including Simon Sinek’s book Find Your Why or Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. (Although I’ve devoured the former, I haven’t read the latter — but others have raved about it.)

I liked Michael Hyatt’s book The Vision Driven Leader. But I wrote a 2-star review for his book with co-author Daniel Harkavy, Living Forward, which is about creating a life plan. It just didn’t speak to me.

I’m also a big fan of the Ikigai model, conceived in Japan decades ago. This model integrates your personal and professional aspirations and talents.

Perhaps the most inspiring resource I’ve ever found for any of this “life plan” stuff was Donald Miller’s podcast interview with Curt Richardson, who is most well-known as CEO of OtterBox. As I listened to it, it occurred to me that all of us could aspire to a personal and professional life as fulfilling as Richardson’s.

As you consider MTP goals for your professional life, you might immediately think of famous people who have achieved them, including Michael Phelps, Henry Ford, Marie Curie, Steve Jobs, or Martin Luther King Jr. Yet, “ordinary” people set and accomplish MTP goals.

Ask yourself what you’re aiming for. Bob Proctor always warned that you’re trading your life for the achievement of some goal. Do you want to…

…win a Nobel prize?
…land on Mars?
…build an empire?
…leave a financial legacy?
Something else?

You should also consider personal MTP goals, because an incredibly successful career will feel hollow if you’re not satisfied with your life outside it. I’d say that getting married fits the definition of an MTP goal. It is, ideally, a lifelong endeavor that creates a transformation (especially if you have children) and gives meaning to your existence.

Your life is like a mosaic. The world will see the finished picture, but you’ve been putting those tiles in place for years through what Kotler would call high hard goals and clear goals.

High, hard goals (we might call them yearly or quarterly goals) could be giving a TED talk, losing 50 pounds, or giving $100K to a charity. Or perhaps starting a business, becoming a NYT best-selling author, or getting elected to a senate seat. These all qualify as high, hard goals.

Clear goals might be more akin to something you’d name as your daily or weekly Big 3 goals: writing a chapter, launching a new product, or walking 10,000 steps each day.

The question for all of us is, will our clear goals support our high, hard goals?

I’d understand if you said, “Marie! Wait! You promised to help me set weekly goals!” Yes. And I know it will take some time and brainpower to think about those bigger goals. But for the moment, please allow me to give you a short exercise that will help you to get in the right ballpark. Ask yourself these two questions:

What am I most dissatisfied with in my life? What is it that will continue to make me miserable if I don’t have it in the next (month, quarter, year, decade)?
If I were on my deathbed in the next (month, quarter, year, decade), what would be my biggest regret?

By and large, all of your bigger and smaller goals will swirl around Florence Scovel Shinn’s framework:

Health
Wealth
Love (or relationships)
Self-expression

To write weekly goals that align with your yet-to-be-clearly-articulated longer-term goal, ask yourself these three questions:

What is most dissatisfying about my health, wealth, love, or self-expression that I could improve at least a little this week? What could I start doing today to breathe life into that hoped-for improvement?
What are the rewards? How will the time I spend on this action multiply my rewards tomorrow or this week?
What are the consequences of NOT doing this activity? That is, if I do not accomplish these Big 3 this week, how will it make me feel? And what longer-term consequence will it have?

Your weekly Big 3

When you focus on your weekly Big 3 goals, you no longer feel overwhelmed and under-organized. This is a simple model, but after working with dozens of clients, I’ve never met one who can master it immediately. Furthermore, it works only when it is done consistently. For a limited time, if you sign up for my small group Accountability Mastermind Group (Fridays at 2:30 PM Eastern), I will send you one FREE Full Focus Planner (a $49 value) just for signing up, attending the first session, and having the opportunity to e-meet you!

Cutting down a huge to-do list to a weekly Big 3 that are high-leverage, timely, and aligned to your goals will keep you focused on what matters. If you’re spinning your wheels or stuck in the weeds, try focusing on a set of weekly Big 3 goals today.

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