From Thoughts to Effective Execution: My 2026 Goal-Setting Framework
TL;DR (AI-powered): Instead of vague New Year’s resolutions, I built a deliberate 2026 system: 12 goals split into continuous (follow up with controllable inputs) and event-based, strict WIP limits (1-2 active at a time), explicit priorities/posteriorities, regular reviews, and clever AI helpers—like a GenAI ‘minion’ scouting cheap flights to Brazil. The key: focus on what I control, embed it in routine, and adapt as reality hits.
First things first: Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you had a great end of year break and that a fantastic 2026 is ahead of all of us!
While we are on topic, I decided to do something different this beginning of the year. I guess we can call it my kind of New Year’s resolution. I thought of sharing with you because maybe it is useful to others.
A bit of context first. I consider myself someone who acts (or at least tries to do so) in the world strategically. I am always trying to work towards something, and in fact playing out in my mind different scenarios of how things could turn out. But I have mostly kept that informal, just things that keep going through my mind.
I’ve been persuaded that there’s a better way. One that is expected to lead towards being more effective. More than there’s nothing wrong with it – it’s something I want to pursue.
Long story short: this year I decided to be more deliberate and intentional about my goals for the year, and in fact from a few different angles (more on that later).
Now, knowing myself way too well, I knew I had to come up with some sort of “system” to go about it. So that I can better hold myself accountable for following it through, being disciplined. It’s just how things work for me – they have to become embedded to my routine so that I know it will “stick”.
And that’s exactly the part I thought of sharing with you – not so much (though there will be a bit of it) the “what” but the “how”. Hoping that, again, it might be useful for someone else.
A little system to have a year action plan and execute
In a nutshell (then I will add more later, including examples), this is how my little “system” works:
I’ve written down what I intend to accomplish for the year (let’s call those goals) in all relevant areas I want to follow up on (e.g., professionally, personally/family, investments).
I thought about the type of goals, so to categorize them. For the time being, I only have two types: those that require continuous effort (i.e., daily/regular consistency) and those that function more as event-based (i.e., needs a deliberate decision on what kind of action, activity or task should be taken, so that those can be planned and executed).
For the continuous type of goals, I figured that a more practical way to hold myself accountable more regularly was to translate those into controllable inputs.
To follow through, I thought about what kind of general cadences (e.g., weekly review, daily check-ins) I should put in place (to prioritize actions, but also to allow for dynamic adaptation of the plan, and even eventually goals). A lot of that revolves around the event-based type of goals, but also as a check-in for controllable inputs consistency.
Then I thought about what kind of mechanism I would need to put in place (on top of the general cadences established) to embed things to my routine (e.g., reminders or booking time to the agenda).
Now it’s time to be deliberate in prioritizing and executing. To use the language from Peter Drucker, I not only defined “priorities”, but perhaps even more importantly, I also defined “posteriorities” (i.e., to think of sequence, and what I could tackle now, potentially next and what I am fine leaving for later).
Here’s a good time to remind that WIP limits are also powerful at the level of goals – so I have established that I would only work 1-2 event-based goals at a time. While in principle continuous goals don’t lend themselves so much to a WIP limit, I decided not to immediately focus on all of them – so to observe for a while my consistency in the controllable inputs before having more WIP.
Finally, about time to make all of this a routine. Start regularly reconsidering and reviewing the goals (or at least the actions related to those) as reality hits. By the way, accomplishing something should trigger a full reconsideration, and not to take for granted previously defined “next” to tackle, for instance.
Where I landed – and some example to help with understanding
In the end, this is what it all meant for me, more on the “what” side of things:
I have for now 5 goals related to professional life, another 5 related to personal/family life and 2 related to investments. So 12 in total, which sounded a reasonable number matching the months available.
It turned out that half of them are of continuous nature and the other half are event-based. To be clear, that was not intentional, but it did “sound” balanced to me.
Respecting the WIP limits that I put to myself, only 2 event-based goals are in “now” for the time being, but another set of 4 continuous goals are also ongoing (while two I deliberately parked but I might pull up as I feel more confident on the consistency with the controllable inputs of those I am focusing on now).
Let me give you a couple of examples, to also elaborate a bit more on the “how” side of things.
Personal goal: Stay health across the year: get to target weight by end of January, be out of dependency on cholesterol medication by end of Q1; stabilize my weight across the year (within 5% margin)
I have been in a journey towards the above goal for about two months. I’ve lost more than 12kg by following a daily disciplined approach combining diet and exercise. It’s working – but now I want to get to stabilizing it across the year. That brings me nicely to what are the actual things I can focus on, what I control (since this a continuous type of goal, so I translated them into controllable inputs) and that I believe ultimately lead me to get to the actual goal:
Keep daily cardio cadence
Keep following eating protocol
Keep wine drinking under control (~2 bottles per weekend at most)
As I get to the target weight, I might review some of the controllable inputs (e.g., maybe by then 4-5 days of exercise would be enough). But this is for now what I want to control – meaning that I am also taking notes how I am doing on daily or weekly basis, depending on the case.
Here’s another one…
Professional goal: Make my networking efforts to yield some concrete advantage (job leads, opportunity to speak, give advice, etc.)
That’s another thing I’ve been doing for a while, regularly joining meetups and things like that. But I realized not a whole lot of concrete things got out of it (some did, to be fair, and a lot intangibly). So I want to take a stab at being more deliberate about it. Now, this is an interesting one because it obviously has an element of continuous nature as a goal. I decided to categorize it as event-based though, since that’s what it is more fundamentally – you look at opportunities and deliberately plan activities related to that.
Now, it turned out that I decided to flag this one as a “posteriority”. I just have “bigger fish to fry” at the moment, and being respectful of the limits I set to myself, I am not going to be deliberate about it for now. It is effectively parked – but that doesn’t necessarily mean I will not join any kind of meetup, or take an opportunity for networking. It just means that as those emerge I will look at them critically and decide on a case by case basis.
Whereas if or when it becomes a “priority”, I will be much more deliberate about looking for opportunities, and plan activities around pursuing ultimately the goal.
Final note: an opportunity for AI
There’s one more thing worth sharing. Something I also figured out was to sensibly leverage and apply current AI capabilities to help me out. Here’s a simple example…
Another personal/family goal I have is that we (as a family) want to travel to Brazil (my home country) this year. It’s in fact one of the priorities for now in the event-based category. So I have configured a small task using GenAI to monitor flight costs opportunities. I have established a threshold cost and boundary conditions (e.g., from and to options, how many stops at most, total travel time) – a very important one is a range of dates we could travel and what’s the span of the time range (how many days) we want to be there, so that the search can sensibly accept a level of “fuzziness” (just like we would sensibly do as human having some flexibility on the actual dates and how much time in total to be out).
Maybe here you might be thinking – but there are already some services out there that offer those capabilities (e.g., Google Flights, Kayak, Skyscanner). To be clear, I also have alerts on those, but in my experience they all have some limitations. For instance, that combined level of flexibility I just mentioned – date range along with the range of how many days of total travel span – it’s something I only found a rather manual way of doing in Google Flights. So this is a bit of an experiment to see if GenAI can provide an additional edge.
I have other sensible examples, but I guess you get the spirit… Trying to get GenAI to be a kind of “minion” to find relevant patterns and pull information linked to the goals I want to accomplish. In principle, having that more passive approach for goals not yet a priority could be a trigger to adapt the plan by the way, so to act upon an opportunity.
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That’s all from me this time around folks! Again, wishing you a great 2026 – and happy planning and executing to be more effective!
By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect, I’m happy to engage and interact. I’m passionate about leading to achieve better outcomes with better ways of working. How can I help you?