Episode 091: Goal Sprints - 80% of New Year's Resolutions Fail within 1 Month

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All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley, running solo again today. Today, talk a little bit about, you know, we're 3 weeks into the new year, want to see how everybody's doing. Hopefully, you know, you're probably like a lot of people at the beginning of the new year, you turn around and set some goals, set some New Year's resolutions. Steve actually just wrote about this on a, on a blog we had. But I'm curious about, you know, how many of you are still sticking with those New Year's resolutions that we had had every best intention of following through on, and this year was going to be different. Dang it. Don't feel bad if you're one of those that, you know, maybe you slipped on one of your resolutions or two of them. Heck, maybe it's, you know, it's just a few weeks in and you've totally lost any sign of progress. And you're wondering, man, should I just start over? Or should I just scrap it? Don't feel bad if you're in that category, by the way. Because here's the deal, only 20% of resolutions last longer than a month. That's right. They just don't last that long. I don't know if it's just human nature or what it is about us, but some reason we just can't quite stick with a program. So I'm just, you know, like, how do you fight odds like that? How do you fight human nature in that kind of way? Um, so that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about some of the things that you can do to help be more successful in your goals and in your habits. Um, the first, I mean, like, let's talk about this, uh, this blog post that Steve threw up there. Uh, awesome blog post, by the way. Uh, those of you who don't know who Steve Saltskiver is, wonderful insight into who he is as a person. Uh, just an absolute wonderful man, really reflective, you know. And as I read it, I thought it was, it was was very, almost pensive is maybe the right word. You can definitely tell he's just kind of reflecting on life. He's had a lot of changes and a lot of challenges this last year. Very open and vulnerable, which was just refreshing to kind of go through and read. Not something you would typically associate with goal setting, but Steve kind of finds himself in this mood where he's reflecting on the last year and all the changes that he's gone through and thinking about how do I use that to inform my my goals for next year. So first, a few of the tips that he gives in that article, just kind of give you a little bit of a glance into that. Start big picture, right? Look at the current state, look at how things are today. He recommends doing like mind mapping exercises, which I think are really, you know, fun and helpful, especially if you're a visual person. I really like to get all my thoughts out on the paper, right? And, and I use tools that kind of help organize and visualize my thoughts. So things like, um, like SWOT analysis, right, where you're doing strengths, weaknesses, looking at opportunities and threats. There's so much written on those, and I don't have time to break down a SWOT analysis in this episode, but that's something that we've used for years, basically every quarter, every trimester, as part of our annual planning process. You know, we do a fresh look at our SWOT to see, you know, are there any new things that have popped up? Are there any new blind spots, any new weaknesses, anything that we've been really working on that's no longer a weakness and it's become a strength? And so we just constantly are focused on, you know, where we're at today, and that helps inform where we want to go tomorrow. One of the more recent models that I've seen, and we actually just did this for the first time last— yeah, last month, month or two ago. For our annual planning was this 3I activity. And we got this from Chris Ronzi over at Trainual. And it basically, it says there's 3 I's. So if SWOT is like just, it's a little bit too vague for you or it's not quite clear, like, well, is that a weakness? Is it an opportunity? Is that a threat? Trust me, we get it. We've been there. We've had those same discussions. Uh, this new one is ideas, issues, and inefficiencies. Um, and basically it's like, well, what ideas do you have? What's the positive thing? What things could we do that we're not doing today? What are some things that just, you know, they're possible, we're just not doing it right. And so this is like the fun, you know, big picture, imagine-if kind of scenarios. The issues are the easy ones. These are the things where it's like we're not doing this at all and it's a problem, or we're not doing it really well, or like it's causing pain, right? That's an issue. Inefficiencies is kind of in between the two, right? It's things that we do And it's effective, it gets the job done, but it could be done a lot better. Right. And so we kind of solicit the whole team and we figure these things out. Uh, but you can also do this personally, right? Like what are things that are inefficient for you in your life? Uh, maybe your morning routine. Yeah. You get up and you get moving, but it could be a lot better. Right. So maybe you have an inefficiency around your morning routine. Maybe at night you have an issue where you're on your phone way too much. Maybe an idea you have is, you know, you're not really a big bike person, but these new e-bikes seem like a lot of fun, and it might get you out on your bike, right? And it might get you out and exercising more than you are today. That's kind of the breakdown, right? Is ideas, or what are some things that you could do that you're not doing today? Inefficiencies, where could you improve a current process that you're already doing, but it needs to be better? And then issues, like what's just plain broken? Right. It needs some attention. Once you have kind of an idea and you've got this on paper, you're going to start seeing some themes, right? And this is a part of the exercise where we'll actually start grouping things together. And this is the mapping part of his exercise that he talks about, mind mapping. And what you're looking for is kind of a constant between the areas, groups, groups of issues, groups of inefficiencies, groups of ideas. And the reason we want to group them is we want to try to like make a lot of progress in one area. Right? Like, if you're doing things all across the board, it's going to be hard to make progress. And so instead, what we want is focus. So we kind of group them together. You may need to collaborate. Maybe this is a team goal. If this is in your personal life, maybe you and your spouse need to sit down and do this. I know, you know, some of the, the execs in my office, like, they have yearly planning meetings with their spouses. You know, or they sit down and they plan out budgets and financial plans and things like that. So, you know, those are some things. Collaborate if it's a team goal or versus a personal goal. If it's a personal goal and you have a mentor, that's a great time to talk through some of your personal goals as well. Um, I really like to kind of group them together until I come up to themes and key focus areas. And then the really key thing is to narrow this list down. If you're like us, you know, or like me, I've come up with lists before and they've been just forever long because there's no shortage of issues and things that we can do. There's no shortage of good ideas and things we could do better or things we can implement that we haven't implemented yet. And so the idea is to really try to narrow it down and figure out like what's going to have the biggest impact, what's going to make the biggest difference in your life. Right? What's going to be— maybe look at things that, yeah, this is definitely more accomplishable, if that's a word. It's easier to accomplish than, you know, than another on the list, right? Like what's in your wheelhouse. The idea is that you really want to take that list and get it from the really big long version, you know, this huge aspirational thing, and chunk it down. You want to get it down to your top 3. At most, right? And the reason why we want to try to do the top 3 at most is because if you have too many areas to focus on, you're not going to do any of them. And you're going to be like all these people with their resolutions who are already busted and it's 3 weeks into the year, right? It's because you're trying to do too much. Focus is the superpower, right? Focus is the key for any kind of progress. So narrow it down to the top 2 to 3 If you're doing personal goals, I'm going to shatter this even more. One, right? Focus on the one and figure out like just one thing. You can always come back to this list if you finish this one thing, right? This list ain't going anywhere. You're still the same person in a month that you will be today outside of this one thing. Focus on the one. So really get it narrowed down. If you're in a team, 2 to 3. Like we have 4 this trimester and I'm already feeling like this is a little bit too much. We're too spread too thin. I'm even trying to get us to narrow that down a little bit because it's, it's a lot. Now mind you, I've got a solid team, we've got a solid bench. And so they're ready and they're eager and they're going to hit 4, right? Like that's their goal. But you've got to stay on top of it when you're at that level, right? If you get down to 3 and 2, it becomes a lot easier to manage. And that's why I say if you're doing a personal goal, one, what's your one right now? Uh, once you kind of get that one, come up with a, come up with a fun name, make it fun, make it engaging, make it memorable, right? Like have it be kind of a theme or like a, you know, like something that you can get out of bed and you're like, all right, that's the mission, right? Like this is the objective right now. This is where we're at, right? Uh, so like if you want to lose weight, Maybe the theme for you is skinny me, right? Like, okay, I got to work on skinny me. I got to work on, I got to work on this, right? This is, this is the initiative is a skinny me. Right. And that becomes kind of like your little rallying cry. And the idea is you want to make it memorable enough that you can wake up in the morning and remember what your goal is, right? You don't have to remember the specifics of I want to drop 60 pounds in the next 6 months. You just need to make it about like, hey, what's the theme? Right? I like phrases. I like alliterations, you know. So like if we wanted to clean up some things in our marketing funnel, we called it Foggy Funnel, right? Because we want to get some clarity into our data. We had another one years ago. Oh, what did we call it? Like Must Go Faster, right? Like from Jurassic Park, you know, you got the, you know, the T-Rex coming behind you. I must go faster, must go faster. And we remember those things, right? So make it memorable, make it easy, and you might start get— you might be starting to get a fighting chance at accomplishing your goals and not having it be like everything else where, you know, a month in you're like, what happened? Totally derailed, right? So that's kind of the foundation. Now I'll tell you, is there are so many books on goal setting and creating the goal and SWOT. I mean, we talk about this in the Fleet Success Playbook. That's only beginning, right? Like, we set our goals back in December. That's, that's almost the easy part, right? We take some time away, we step away, we think about it, we come up with a goal. Fulfilling the goal, that's the hard part. It's the hard part to sustain momentum and to sustain effort, right? So now what? Here you are. It's almost 3 weeks into the new year. What are you doing? Right. And maybe you're listening to this and it's 6 months after, after New Year's. Uh, how are you doing on those new year goals? How are you doing on your strategic initiatives? And the idea is it's not enough just to set the goal. You've got to do things that help reinforce that goal in your life. So here, here's a couple of tips that I have for you. The first one is, is you've got to get into a rhythm, right? Now, this is part of our, you know, Patrick Lencioni calls it the meeting rhythms. Elite Entrepreneurs said the same thing, right? This is the meeting rhythms. And you get into kind of this rhythm, you know, like every quarter we do our offsite, every month we're doing strategic ad hocs, every week we're doing our weekly tacticals, right? And so like we get into these, these rhythms. Where you just kind of get the, get the boat rocking a little bit, right? You get a little bit of rhythm and then things kind of start, they can go almost like a metronome, right? Just click, click, click, click, click. And it's just, it helps set the time, right? Once you start setting the time, now you can play some music, now you can dance to it, but you got to get into that rhythm first. Because if you're on a different rhythm than your spouse, or you're in a different rhythm than your team, uh, you're going to be, you know, kind of all paddling in different directions, right? There's a whole reason why every piece of music typically has a drummer in the back, and it's to keep the beat, it's to keep the rhythm. Meetings and your business are no different, uh, your fleet's no different. So get into the weekly rhythm, and that's, you know, just the base unit. Forget about strategic ad hocs, forget about annual planning and all that. Get your goal, and then kind of get into a weekly rhythm. Now, what do I mean by weekly rhythm? This is the fun part. In software development, there's this whole method of, you know, designing and delivering software, what we call part of the software development lifecycle, SDLC. And it's all around this, this principle of Agile, right? And the idea is that you break work down into chunks and you group those chunks together into something called a sprint, right? And you think about a race, and what's a sprint? It's basically versus like a run or a marathon, right? The sprint is this very short, very short distance, focused, high-intensity, high-energy burst of speed, and then it's done, right? And then you look back at the race and say, okay, what did we do well? What do we need to improve? And then you line back up on the starting blocks and you do it again. Right. But the idea is not that it's this big, long sustained thing with never, you know, you don't get any breaks. There's no moments for reflection. It's this idea that, you know, you have this big burst of energy and effort and you like, it's, it's concise, right? It's, it's not an infinite race. It's 100 meters or it's a 400-meter dash. Right. Uh, and you break it down into these small little chunks. And that's kind of the idea behind software development, or at least Agile anyway, is that they take this big old project and they say, okay, let's break that down into a bunch of points or story points, or we call them velocity points. But it's basically how do we break this down into a small piece of work so that we can just focus on that one thing, right? And we don't have to get distracted by all the things that we're going to do just for this sprint, right? This period of time. We're going to focus on this one thing. And that's what you have to do with your goals. You have to basically look at your goals and maybe your goal is skinny me. And you might have a goal that I want to lose, you know, 60 pounds in 6 months or whatever. I want to get down to my wedding weight by the time— by 12/31/2023, whatever. And again, those are all good elements. You've heard of SMART goals, right? There's specific, specific, measurable, They're actionable, they're relevant, they're time-bound, right? And the idea there is that you want to make sure that you take that goal and you don't get overwhelmed by it, so you break it down. And the way I like to do this is with the sprint, is you look at it and say, what's the one thing I can do this week, right? And that's as simple as it has to be. What's the one thing I can do different I'm going to do this week to make progress on that goal, right? And you break it down that far and you don't have to worry about all the things and how am I going to lose all this weight or how am I going to go and make all these changes? Maybe you have a goal that you want to get your PM compliance from 35% done on time to 80% done on time. Cool. That's daunting, right? I'd even push back that, hey, how actionable is this? But if you were to break that down, you say, okay, well, what's one thing I can do differently this week to help drive that number, right? Maybe the one thing I'm going to do different is I'm going to schedule a meeting with every department head, right? Or I'm— better yet, oh, this is better— I'm going to schedule a meeting with one department head, and I'm just going to start there. I'm going to do that, and then I'm going to Basically what we call in Agile is a retrospective. I'm going to look at that and say what went well in that process, what didn't go well, what do I need to do different next time, right? I learn and then I do it again, right? And the idea behind this is that if you have a bias for action and you say what's the one thing I'm going to do this week, and then you go out and do it, and then you figure out what went wrong— because a lot of us get stuck in the planning phase, we get stuck in this moment of Ooh, what do I need to go and do, and how am I going to go tackle all this stuff? And well, I could sit here and do this, or what's the right questions to be asking this person, and how often should I be meeting with them? And you spend all this time planning, and we never spend any time doing. The idea behind the sprint is to, you know, like, you're not waiting, the gun just fired, you have to get moving down the track. You can reflect and learn all you want once the race is over, right? But for this week, Monday through Friday, what am I going to do different? What's the one thing I'm going to focus on? Right. So focus on the one. What's the one thing you can do this week to make progress? And then this is the thing I want you to remember is fire, aim, fire. Do something, adjust your aim, and then do something else, right? Do something again, do something else. And the idea is that as you break things down and as you start just making little by little progress, right? You start turning this flywheel. Jim Collins talks about this flywheel, and basically the way the flywheel works is as you put a little bit of energy into it and you keep applying the same level of energy, eventually that flywheel starts gaining momentum, and the little bit of energy that you're putting into it keeps making it go faster and faster, right? And, and that's what you start building is this momentum. But you got to get out of the rut. You got to get off the block because if you're still stuck on the block, you're not ever getting momentum. You're just stuck, right? You're fighting inertia. So break it down. Take your big goals, take your BHAGs, narrow it down to your top 2 or 3, or if it's a personal goal, narrow it down to your one. But don't, don't stop there because otherwise you're going to end up with all these resolutions that are broken at the end of the year. Just focus on the sprint right at the beginning of your week. And make this part of your weekly rhythm. Every Sunday night, Monday morning, whatever you want to do, sit down and just ask yourself, what's the one thing that I'm going to do this week to make progress against that goal? Right? Don't do it all, because you're just going to get overwhelmed by it. Do one thing different. Look at the impact, and then you can keep doing it and keep working towards it. Or you might get to the end and remember that big old long list that I said, don't worry about. You might get to the end and say, I did it. Now you can work on the next thing. Right? But focus is what's going to set you free. Focus and discipline equal freedom. One of my favorite quotes from Jocko Willink. And that's, you know, what he's talking about there is like getting into that rhythm, getting into the cadence where you can just stay focused on one thing and you're not trying to do one thing in 60 different categories. Because that's not discipline. Discipline is finding that one thing that's going to make the biggest impact and then doing one thing each week to make a move or move the needle on that thing. Right? If you find, like me, maybe you get stuck, it's hard for you to get into a rhythm, it's hard for you to set habits, it's hard for you to stick with habits, right? The idea here is, if you haven't read this book, I think this is an awesome book. It's called Atomic Habits by James Clear. And, and he talks about this concept of habit stacking. I'm not going to get into it here, but the, the principle is essentially, if you're finding it hard to get started with a habit, try inserting it in the middle of habits you already have, right? And the idea is that you can habit stack and kind of put something— maybe it's, you know, something less desirable. You need to work out for 20 minutes, right? Put that right between eating dinner and watching TV, right? Like, whatever your current habit is, just insert it right in between there. Like, before I can watch TV, I need to work out for 10 minutes, right? Or I need to do 20 push-ups. And just again, focus on that one little thing. What's one little thing I can do different this week to move the needle? You know, you don't have to sit here— and I love weight loss because I think it's probably the easiest one for all of us to relate to— but you don't have to sit here and say, I'm going to run a marathon by by Friday. No. What's one thing you could do different? I could do 10, you know, 10 pushups a day. I could do 10 pushups today. How about that? Break it down, make it small. Microsteps. Microsteps get that flywheel moving. Uh, before you know it, you're not going to be one of those 80% that failed with resolutions. You're going to be one of the 20% that went out and, uh, and owned the world. So with that, uh, that's going to do it for our episode today. Uh, thank you guys for, for tuning in, listening. If you guys have any questions, I'd love to hear them. You can email podcast@rtafleet.com. Just as a reminder, we've got the Fleet Success Summit coming up. Go out to fleetsuccesssummit.com, give that a look through. Would love to see you guys there. We've got some amazing speakers lined up for that. Some of my own, you know, personal friends. We got Sam Bradford, Mike Pitcher, Anita Grantham's coming out, Christine Rogers. These are people, again, the whole point of this event is to bring people together with diverse viewpoints, different backgrounds, different experiences, and apply those to the world of fleet, right? Give us in fleet the kind of lessons and leadership mentorship that we've needed and deserved for so long. And we just, we've been neglected way long. We've been neglected long enough. Uh, the idea is that we need to invest in ourselves and grow ourselves as leaders, uh, in the industry because, you know, the world depends on, on an operating fleet. No matter what walk of life we are in, you know, if we're in trucking, in municipal, right, the world depends on us to keep those vehicles running and keep our operators moving. So with that, that's going to do it. And I'm going to sign off. I hope you all have a great week and look forward to hearing from you.

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