This week, my team flew into Hong Kong for our quarterly offsite 🥳 We pulled up the Notion doc from January where we’d excitedly mapped out 18 quests for Q1, and then checked what we actually completed.
We finished 4. Just 4 out of 18. That’s a grand total of 22%.
Not great.
Quick sidebar – we call our goals “quests” because it just sounds more fun and slightly less corporate. It adds a bit of a Feel-Good vibe to what would otherwise be a dry planning document. But still… 4 out of 18 quests?
At first, it felt a bit embarrassing. We had such a clear plan. What happened?
But then I remembered something from Traction by Gino Wickman (honestly one of the most useful business books I’ve ever read). Apparently, when companies do structured goal-setting for the first time, they typically only hit around 30% of their targets. Which, now that I think about it, makes us… almost average?
Still. It stings. But also, it makes total sense. The reason is super simple: we all just set too many goals.
Especially when we’ve got a growing team. It’s so tempting to think: “Well, we’ve got 18 people, so surely we can do 18 things.” One quest per person. Perfectly logical, right?
Except, that’s not really how it works.
More people doesn’t mean more output. It means more coordination, more communication, more updates, more ambiguity… And that translates into more meetings, more Slack threads, more Loom videos to watch, and more decisions that need to be made before anything actually ships.
Every new goal introduces a hidden tax: someone has to define it, track it, push it forward, check in on progress, loop others in, unblock issues… and before you know it, half your time is spent talking about work rather than doing the work.
This happens in my personal life, too. The more goals I set, the less likely I am to complete any of them. I tell myself, “It’s fine, I’ll just work on these in parallel.” But what ends up happening is everything moves forward by 10%, and nothing ever quite finishes.
The same principle shows up at the team level. When we took a closer look at our Q1 quests, we realised that for most of them, we’d made decent progress. A lot of them were around 60–80% done. But as Traction puts it: “90% done is still not done.” And once we see that, it’s hard to unsee.
So this quarter, we’re changing the way we approach things.
We’ve got three main departments (Content, Software, and Courses), and in the spirit of boiling each department’s progress down to one measurable goal, we decided to go with the following numbers:
- For Content: Grow the email list
- For Software: Increase monthly recurring revenue
- For Courses: Grow revenue
And under each of those goals, we’re only allowing ourselves up to three major projects. No more trying to spin nine different plates at once. Just three key things, scoped tightly enough that we can actually finish them within the quarter.
It’s surprisingly hard to do. There are so many exciting ideas floating around—product updates we could build, content experiments we could try, partnerships we could explore. But this new system forces us to ask: “Of all the things we could do… what’s the one thing that would move the needle most meaningfully?”
If we’re honest, we already know what the big levers are. The hard part is committing to them. Saying “no” to all the other shiny ideas that might feel urgent or important in the moment.
22% completion isn’t something to be proud of. But I actually think it’s a really valuable data point. It’s a reminder that it’s easy to get distracted by moving in many different directions instead of focusing on what would make the most meaningful progress to the business.
We even talk about it repeatedly in LifeOS, including in the Spring Reset that we hosted last Saturday. Funnily enough, we don’t follow our own advice. It’s a lesson we keep having to relearn: the more goals we set, the less likely we are to achieve any of them.
Have a great week!
Ali xx
