This is a special post for quick takes by Tricular. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I'm obsessed with planning and organizing my life, and I also tend to overthink and analyze things. Goals are a fundamental piece of organization for me. I try to make a substantial part of my life focused on achieving goals: I work out to keep my body healthy, and I work to earn money and feel secure. But I often feel anxious, and I ask myself if there is any other way of organizing life that avoids the concept of goals altogether. I also think it's useful to imagine living a life without some crucial concept.
It seems that it's quite hard to avoid thinking about goals in general when you define goals as anything that you plan and decide to pursue. It might be possible with some activities when you just try to follow your curiosity and do not think about the long-term effects of your actions. Does art need goals? But then it seems that following curiosity just becomes your next goal.
Looks like a pretty good alternative, thanks! But I just realized that goals actually have some properties that I care about that themes don't have - they really narrow your focus.
There is a bunch of news/articles on the internet which are describing "Elon Musk's rules for productivity" I don't know if Elon Musk really wrote them, but it's not the point. One of the rules usually goes like that:
6) Use common senseIf a company rule doesn’t:
- Make sense
- Contribute to progress
- Apply to your specific situation
Avoid following the rule with your eyes closed.
I really don't agree with it. I think that Rules are usually put into place for some very specific reason that might be hard for us to see, but it is there nevertheless. I'm a software developer and I think that if I listened to some of my colleagues telling me about rules like "don't try to optimize it when you are still figuring out what you actually want to do" I would be a much better developer right now, but I usually didn't and spend a lot of time figuring how to optimize things that didn't really need it.