Editor's Note: One Goal at a Time, Nine Years Later
Last updated: February 2026
I wrote this article back in 2017. The Wheel of Life tool I share here is still one of the most powerful exercises I use with clients. But I've learned a few things since then.
The biggest lesson: “one goal at a time” doesn't mean “one goal forever.” It means one goal for the next 90 days. That's it. When I worked with Jaime (the coaching client I mention below), she focused on her side-business goal for one quarter. After she hit her revenue target, she shifted focus to health the next quarter. By the end of the year, she'd made real progress on four of her five goals, one at a time.
I've also refined how I pick which goal to focus on. The Wheel of Life gives you a visual score for each area of your life. I now look for the area with the biggest gap between where I am and where I want to be. That gap usually has the most energy behind it, so you'll have natural motivation to close it.
One mistake I see people make: they pick the goal they “should” work on instead of the one they actually want to work on. If your health score is low but your gut is screaming to focus on your side-business, go with the side-business. Motivation matters more than optimization when it comes to goal selection.
Watch the video below and download the Wheel of Life worksheet. It takes 10 minutes and will give you instant clarity on where to focus your energy this quarter.
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[Original article starts: “At AE, we don't believe in work-life balance…” and continues]
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At AE, we don't believe in work-life balance but in something much better.
The short version is: there's no such thing as work-life balance. It's a myth.
When people say they want work-life balance, what they are really saying is “I want to be happy at work and at home, and be in control of how I spend my time”. It usually means having multiple goals at once and feeling confident that you can achieve them all.
The productivity nerd in me goes, well…how do we make that happen?
That's where I want to introduce you to a simple tool you can use today.
You probably have 3-5 goals at any given time. You might have one or two goals you want to have accomplished at work, and then a couple for your personal life.
When most people say they want “work-life balance” what that would look like is that they can accomplish all of their goals (without having to endure any form of stress and anxiety).
That's where the big work-life balance myth comes in.
You cannot accomplish all of your goals at the same time without enduring any form of stress.
To put it another way: if you want to accomplish more than one goal at a time, be prepared to make (significant) sacrifices.
The ugly truth is, most people don't want to give up things to accomplish a goal. When you want to get fit, you have to be willing to change your schedule and give up certain foods. When you want to save money, you have to give up certain things you want to buy or cut down on things you'd normally spend money on.
In my experience, when you want to achieve a new level of growth, in the short-term you usually have to give something up in order to grow. And not everyone is willing to do that.
That's okay. Luckily for you, we've figured out a way for you to accomplish all of your goals without “sacrificing” anything.
All you have to do is implement this tool that we use and teach all of our private clients.
The premise is very simple: out of all the goals you have, be prepared to postpone all of them except for one goal. In other words, you have to be willing to focus on just one goal at a time.
When you have more than one goal, your chances of achieving any goal decreases exponentially.
I was working with Jaime (not real name) 1-on-1 as part of our private coaching. She worked a 9-5 corporate job and was happily married with two kids. It was mid-2016 when we started working together because she felt stuck on achieving her goals and she knew she needed help.
This was her list of goals:
1. Make an extra $100,000 in my side-business 2. Read more books 3. Lose weight 4. Have a great relationship with mom and dad 5. More free time for myself
Are you seeing what I'm seeing?
The first thing I noticed was that she had too many goals. There's no freakin way a normal person can accomplish all that in one year.
(I think you can actually do it, but more on that in a bit.)
Second thing: notice how the last four goals are really vague. What does “lose weight” mean? Is it a couple pounds/kilos? Is it fitting in your jeans from college? Is it visibly seeing your abs? Is it weighing 90 lbs?
When your goals are vague, it's easy to feel like you can never accomplish your goals….because you can't measure success. It feels like you're trying to hit a moving target.
Having a great relationship with mom and dad is a great goal, but again very vague. How do we actually know if we've accomplished it?
Same goes for “more free time for myself” and “read more books”?
We need to make it concrete and measurable. That's usually the easy part and what I spent time on working with Jaime.
The hard part is deciding which one to focus on…and which one to ignore for the time being.
When I first told Jaime that we could only work on one goal, she immediately fired back at me that all of her goals were important to her.
I told her that it's very unlikely that she'll achieve any goal because she was unfocused and her goals were vague. She was scatter-brained, had 5 goals at the same time, and wasn't laser-focused on getting just one goal done at a time.
I'm fairly confident that if she solely focused on her side-business, she would make more than $100,000 that year (which we ended up choosing as the goal to focus on).
I'm sure you can relate. You probably have a bunch of goals you want to achieve. How do you know which one to focus on first?
When everything looks equally important, that's a sign that you're missing a clear priority system. I taught Jaime a simple tool that allowed her to see which goal was most important to her.
Now I want you to have this tool too.
We call it the Wheel of Life. Use this tool today and you'll instantly know which goal you should focus on first.
It's all explained in today's video. It includes a free worksheet that you can download and use right away.
This video is part of our Finisher's Fastlane course, but today you're going to get access to one of the most powerful tools we teach our clients.
Watch the video now and download the worksheet (while it's still available). Don't wait until the time is right. Watch it right now and get clarity on your number one goal.
You can have multiple goals, but research and coaching experience show that focusing on one goal at a time dramatically increases your chances of achieving any of them. When you split your attention across five goals simultaneously, each one gets a fraction of your energy and focus. A more effective approach is to prioritize one goal per quarter (roughly 90 days), give it your full attention, then shift focus to the next goal. Over a year, you can make meaningful progress on four different goals this way.
The Wheel of Life is a visual goal-setting exercise where you rate your satisfaction in key life areas (such as health, career, relationships, finances, and personal growth) on a scale of 1 to 10. You plot these scores on a circular diagram, creating a visual representation of balance across your life. The area with the lowest score or the biggest gap between your current and desired level is typically where you should focus your energy first. It takes about 10 minutes and provides immediate clarity on priorities.
Use the Wheel of Life exercise to score each area of your life from 1 to 10. Look for the area with the largest gap between where you are and where you want to be. That gap usually carries the most natural motivation to close. Also consider which goal, if achieved, would create a positive ripple effect on other areas. For example, improving your health often boosts energy and focus, which helps career goals too. Trust your gut if two goals score similarly and pick the one that excites you more.
Perfect work-life balance where every area of your life gets equal attention at all times is unrealistic. What most people actually want is to feel happy at work and at home and to feel in control of how they spend their time. A more practical approach is work-life integration, where you intentionally shift focus between areas based on what matters most in a given period. Some months your career gets 70% of your energy. Other months your family or health takes priority. The key is making deliberate choices rather than trying to do everything at once.
The two most common reasons are having too many goals at once and setting vague goals. When you have five goals competing for attention, none gets enough focus to move forward. When goals are vague (like “lose weight” or “read more”), you cannot measure progress and you never feel like you have achieved anything. The fix is to pick one specific, measurable goal at a time. Instead of “lose weight,” set “lose 10 pounds by April 30.” Instead of “read more books,” set “read two books per month for 90 days.”
90 days (one quarter) is the ideal focus period for most goals. It is long enough to build momentum and see real results but short enough to stay motivated. After 90 days, evaluate your progress: if you have hit your target, shift to the next goal. If you are close, extend for another 30 days. If you have made little progress, reassess whether the goal is truly a priority. This quarterly rotation lets you address four major goals per year without the scattered feeling of pursuing them all simultaneously.
Thank you so much for this advice. I will begin immediately to implement your teachings. I am a 75 year old woman who still have dreams, desires and goals to achieve. I want to Finish Strong in the last miles of my life. Thank you again and again!
As for determining your score, given the goalposts of 10 being mega-satisfied and 0 being hyper-UNsatisfied I usually start with the first number that pops into my head and then asking myself higher or lower, if an obvious answer from my mind isn’t forthcoming, then I pay attention to my gut and my mouth if i feel “weak” or “wobbly” or “coming apart” in my gut then the answer’s likely “no” if there’s a slight uptick or inclination to smile the answer might be yes. A lot of the time I fill these out as a spectrum, because it’s likely to vary given the type of day you had, the time of day, what’s going on in general. An example might be for Fun&Rec, my answer might be shading in between 4 and 6 because I get some me time, but not enough and the quality isn’t great either. If other details occur to you, scribble them in there cos that’s extra data. Also, though you’ve got 8 criteria there, there might be something that occurs to you as a separate area, and though it’s likely to fit in to one of the other criteria that might also be THE thing that you need to focus on. The exercise as it is is just the start, and then it’s up to you to use it as far as you can and make it work for you. Using all the data comes up, trying to sort it in the order that feels right will give the answers you need. Until the next time you do the exercise. The vid doesn’t state how often you should take the exercise, but an obvious answer is every time something feels wrong, otherwise set an arbitrary time, do it when the time comes and then decide if you should do it more often or not. The narrator mentioned Jim Rohn, Jim Rohn once also mentioned keeping your old goal lists, might be worth keeping these Wheel’s and reviewing them, maybe every time you do them, maybe not, just see where you’ve been and where you might be heading. I remember Tim Ferris mentioning that he spends 40% of the first 6 months of his year doing this sort of “meta-work”. You’ll probably not be able o give this sort of stuff the same priority, but it seems like it’s worth doing something. And to paraphrase Jordan Peterson, better to do this badly than not at all. Also some Mark Twain; The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
Is there a written explanation for using the Wheel of Life? And ideas for determining where you fall in each category?