Have you just tried setting clearer objectives?
People love to say “Have you just tried setting clearer objectives?” as if the sentence itself is a solution. The tone is always the same. Calm. Reasonable. Business-as-usual. As though the only thing standing between you and a successful year is a little more precision, a bit more focus, and the discipline to commit properly. The implication is that clarity is always available, that the future is stable enough to be described in advance, and that if the objectives do not hold, the failure lies with the person who wrote them rather than the conditions they were written into.
This piece is for people who suspect the problem was never ambition or commitment, but being expected to promise certainty in a system that was never that predictable to begin with.
For many years, setting objectives felt like writing a Christmas list. I would sit down and think through all the things I might do in the year ahead, with very little regard for physical cost or feasibility. Long lists of projects. Skills I would finally master. Improvements I would make if I just applied myself properly. Polished and clear. On the face of it, they often met every formal requirement. Specific. Measurable. Relevant. Timebound. I was never entirely sure about the achievable part, largely because I could not sense time or cumulative load, but that was a problem for future me.
Once written, those objectives largely disappeared. Not avoided. Not resisted. Just absent. They did not sit in the background shaping daily decisions. They exerted no ongoing pull. They were out of sight and therefore out of mind, object impermanence at work in my ADHD brain. Then, partway through the year, usually as a mid-year review approached, they would abruptly reappear. Fully formed. Fully charged. Panic would arrive, not because I had suddenly failed in the moment, but because I was confronted with a version of the year I was apparently supposed to have been living all along.
For the first seven years of my career, one objective appeared almost every year in some form. Get better at project management. It looked sensible. Critical for advancement. Reasonable. I tried to make it work. I read books. I adopted tools. I took courses. I told myself this was just part of growing up professionally. In reality, I did not want to be a project manager. I was an engineer. I was good at designing systems, solving complex problems, and thinking laterally across domains. Project management required a different kind of attention and a different skill set, neither of which came naturally to me. I failed at that objective every year, and each failure quietly reinforced the belief that I was falling short of a standard everyone else seemed to manage.
The change came when I finally rewrote the objective. Not to something softer, but to something more honest. Instead of trying to become a better project manager, I set the objective to find a good project manager to work with. Almost immediately, things improved. Delivery smoothed out. Stress reduced. My strengths were used properly. The organisation still got what it needed. The only thing that changed was the assumption about who needed to change. It was also the moment I began to understand what leadership actually means. You cannot do everything yourself. To scale, you have to build systems and teams that allow people to do what they are genuinely good at, rather than trying to be competent at everything at once.
Looking back, I can see that I was setting objectives in isolation. I was describing outcomes without considering the system they would have to live inside. I wrote them as if time, energy, attention, and people were static resources, available on demand and unaffected by everything else happening around them. In reality, those were the very things under constant pressure. Time was already heavily allocated before objectives were written. Energy fluctuated with stress, health, and workload. Attention was fragmented by meetings, interruptions, and context switching. People moved teams, priorities shifted, and external deadlines regularly overrode internal plans. None of that was accounted for. When the system changed, the objectives did not bend. I did.
This created a particular kind of discomfort because I cared deeply about not letting people down. Even as I was writing objectives late under pressure, I could already feel that priorities would need to change throughout the year. I knew that re-evaluation was not a sign of failure but a rational response to new information. But the system wanted a clean snapshot taken at an arbitrary point in time and then treated as instruction for the rest of the year. That put me in an impossible position. Either I froze uncertainty into a plan I already suspected would become wrong, or I delayed and compressed the process, cascading stress and unrealistic expectations onto my teams. The guilt was not about missing targets. It was about honesty.
There was another assumption baked into how objectives were often set that caused repeated problems for me. The idea that effectiveness comes from narrowing focus down to a single most important thing. I have been told more than once that I should drop everything else, step away from non-priority work, and give one objective my full attention. On paper, this looks sensible. In practice, it has rarely worked well for me. My brain does not do its best thinking when it is forced into a single channel for long periods of time. I need multiple threads in play, not because I am distracted, but because my thinking happens across layers. While I am focused on one thing, other problems are being worked on quietly in the background. Ideas surface later. Connections form when I switch context. Progress in one area often unlocks movement in another.
Around the same time, I found a very different kind of parallel work that changed how effective I was elsewhere. I founded, and led the neurodiversity network at my workplace. On paper, this was not part of my core delivery objectives. In practice, it gave me immense satisfaction. It helped people. It allowed a different kind of creativity and thinking. Crucially, it did not place the same cognitive demands on my time or energy as my day-to-day leadership work.
What surprised me was the effect it had on everything else. Having this additional thread running did not dilute my focus. It sharpened it. It gave my brain another place to move, another way to think, another channel for background processing. With that in place, I found it easier to concentrate deeply on the complex systems my teams were building. The parallel work was not a distraction. It was a regulator. Removing it would not have freed up capacity. It would have taken away one of the conditions that allowed my thinking to work properly.
There is a neurological tension underneath this that took me a long time to recognise. When my attention locks onto something meaningful, it tends to lock on hard. I go deep. I lose track of time. I want to stay with the problem until it resolves. Monotropic focus. That depth is a strength, but on its own it can become narrowing. At the same time, another part of my mind needs novelty and movement to stay engaged. New inputs. Shifts in perspective. A sense of motion. When I am forced into a single objective for too long, the depth becomes suffocating. When I am spread too thin, the novelty turns into noise. What works is not choosing one or the other, but holding a small number of connected threads in parallel, allowing depth and movement to coexist.
I see the same pattern at much smaller timescales as well. Traditional advice says you should pick one task, set a timer, and work on that thing alone until the time is up. That approach has rarely worked well for me. What does work is something slightly different. I choose a small set of the most important things and set a short timer. During that time, I can work on any of those things, switching as often as I like, but nothing else. The constraint matters. The choice matters too. What this gives me is novelty without chaos. Movement without derailment. My attention stays inside the boundary of what actually matters, but I am not forced into a single channel. From the outside it can look unfocused. From the inside, it is often the only way sustained focus is possible. This small example mirrors what happens at the level of objectives. Parallel priorities are not dilution for me. They are regulation.
All of this sits inside a deeper tension I did not have language for until quite recently. One part of me needs structure to function at all. It wants clarity, rules, and a sense of order. Another part needs freedom to adapt, respond, and stay engaged. Annual objectives tend to privilege the first voice and silence the second. When that happens, the urge to pivot gets framed as unreliability, even though it is often a rational response to a changing system. I was not just struggling to stick to the plan. I was struggling with the fact that I wrote the plan myself, and it no longer fit who I was or the system I was operating in.
It took me a long time to realise that I was not bad at planning. I was planning as if the system had infinite reserves. I was not accounting for stocks like time, energy, attention, and goodwill, all of which deplete under pressure and do not replenish automatically. When those stocks ran low, the objectives did not adjust. The cost was absorbed by me instead, through overwork, self-blame, and a constant sense of being behind. From a systems perspective, that is not a personal failure. It is a predictable outcome of designing goals without modelling the environment they depend on.
If I were coaching someone on this, I would not start by asking them what their objectives are. I would start by getting curious about the system those objectives would need to survive in. I would want to understand what resources are actually available, what tends to get pulled away unexpectedly, and which stocks are already under strain before the year even begins. I would be less interested in what they want to deliver and more interested in what kind of conditions they are assuming will hold.
I would also be cautious about starting too far in the future. Questions like “where do you want to be in five years, or even a year” often create paralysis rather than motivation. For many people, that distance is too abstract to engage with honestly. Instead, I treat the long term as a direction rather than a destination and work backwards in a way the nervous system can tolerate. What this direction means this year. What would need to be true in six months. What experiments make sense this quarter. What is the next small step that fits the current state of the system.
Crucially, I would not treat this as a one-off exercise. One of the reasons objectives disappear is that the future fades from lived experience. So part of the work is deciding when we will meet the plan again. Not to judge it, and not to force compliance, but to renegotiate it in light of what has changed. I often suggest scheduling reminders months in advance to revisit the objectives and rework them at shorter time horizons. The reminder is not there to nag. It is there to bring the right part of the future back into view at the right time.
Over time, this turns objectives into something alive rather than something you either succeed or fail at. The structure holds the memory of the goal so the person does not have to. Reminders replace willpower with timing. Reprioritisation becomes maintenance rather than betrayal. Instead of trying to carry a year’s worth of intention all at once, you are only ever asked to work with the part of the future your system can actually reach.
This year, I’m setting objectives that are achievable in the real system I work in, with its limits on time, energy, and goodwill, so I can look back at the end of the year having met them instead of realising too late that they were never achievable at all.
I write about these experiences because I spent years thinking I was broken, when what I actually needed was language for how my nervous system works.
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Barkley, R. A. (1997). ADHD and the nature of self-control. The Guilford Press.
Hedley, D., Uljarević, M., Cameron, L., Halder, S., Richdale, A., & Dissanayake, C. (2016). Employment programmes and interventions targeting adults with autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review of the literature. Autism, 21(8), 929-941. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361316661855 (Original work published 2017)
