How have others dealt with setting goals, and how did they achieve all of them?
Here's the thought process, at a high level:
Goal - I need to shed 5 kgs in 3 months.
System - Everyday I eat healthy and do some exercise with no specific focus on what to accomplish. I work toward a healthy living and at some point further, I may shed X amount of weight. Important thing is that I do this activity daily (or whatever frequency I decide upon).
Read the scott adams article on this.
Once you have the goal and the plan, design a process for it. It should excite you. If it doesn't, you simply don't have faith in the plan and need to fix the plan until it's something you're excited to do.
Sometimes plans are hard, and so get a mentor. A mentor can be as simple as a book. Or sometimes pay to have an hour long chat with someone. But you need to trust the process.
Then ditch the goal. Don't look at it. A runner doesn't look at their stopwatch. Just have faith in the process and keep at it.
If you didn't do well that year, then you rip apart your process like a machine and analyze what you did wrong or could do better. You're doing that now. Just keep at it.
Basic theory is: Don’t focus on goals. Aim for processes which are easy, repeatable and rewarding. Before you know it you’ve blown the goal out of the park.
I had a job where an aspect was handling internal tickets for our team, a shared responsibility. I paired my habit of making a coffee with reading an open ticket. I also added a bookmark to make getting to the ticket list easy. Team’s open tickets quickly reduced and I didn’t even make _closing_ them part of my process... it just tended to happen.
Get the book though, it’s a quick read and packed with solid advice.
For work I have “must do”, “should do”, “would be nice” goals. For personal goes I do the same, but I tend to set fewer musts and more “would be nice”.
I do it that way to capture stuff on paper without incurring guilt.