Yesterday I elaborated on the importance of assessing the progress on your aspirations, the traits of the person you aspire to be, e.g. becoming healthy, mindful, or compassionate.
Assessing to what extent your goals, values and principles contribute to your aspirations is critical to strategically live up to them. However, assessing progress in this rather ‘fuzzy’ domain is challenging, and I presented the momentum framework for dealing with this.
But when or how often should you re-assess the effectiveness of your goals, habits and principles? How often should you regroup and re-strategise your efforts to achieve your aspirations? That’s what I want to talk about today.
Timeframes for changing life experiences
The higher we move up the foundation of our inner philosophy, the more ill-defined our methods seem to become. Hence, we need to get a little more creative in our design. 🧑🎨
A good source of a potential estimate is in the domain of habit formation. When we ask our AI friend how much time it typically takes for our habits to bear fruit in different contexts, we find the following:
Physical health: 1–8 weeks
Mental health: 2–8 weeks
Productivity: 1–4 weeks
Learning: 12–24 weeks
Social and emotional well-being: 1–2 weeks
Cognitive performance: 4–8 weeks
We can plot these ranges to see how many domains we can or will experience after weeks of implementation.
From this graph, we can extract a useful rule of thumb. Namely: you should assess the progress on your aspirations over a period of no less than 4 weeks, and no more than 8 weeks’ time. 📆
This is, of course, when we presume that you are pursuing various things in various aspiration domains. When you are hard focusing on only one, you can take a more dedicated assessment period from the list above.
Special case: life-changing events
I’d say that a special exception to my rule of thumb is when you are about to experience a life-changing event. Significant events, like moving to a new place, starting a new job, or experiencing a major life transition, act as powerful psychological ‘bookmarks.’
Re-assessing your aspiration state just before, and then again 4–8 weeks after the event, can bring you illuminating insights into how the event influenced you as a person.
What do you think would be a good estimate? Do you think you will still be able to compare your progress on your aspirations with how you felt 4–8 weeks ago? Share your insights below! 👇
