Setting the right outcomes during the outs process means being very clear what your goals are. You have to understand your goals if you are to properly prioritize on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. Goals are always an important part of the time management process. They're not about being productive and efficient. They're big. They're about being effective, and doing the right things.

Now, one of the questions people ask is, are goals really valuable? Yes, they help us decide what outcomes we want. But does it make a difference to the outcomes we achieve? And my answer to that is that all the evidence is pointing towards the fact that Do In fact, we can go back to some research done by Albert Bandura and Daniel Travon a looking at the effect of goal setting and feedback on the performance of university athletes. They had a cohort of around 80 athletes, they divided them randomly into four groups, and they put them all on static bicycles, and measured their baseline performance. One group, they asked to continue to practice until the end of the experimental period.

Second group, they asked him to continue to practice with a gave each one their own goals for performance improvement. The third group, they didn't give them goals, but they did give them constant feedback on how they were doing so they could measure their performance improvement session after session. And the third group, the fourth group, might policies. The fourth group, they gave them both a goal and constant performance feedback. What they found was a stark difference. The group that had no goals and no performance feedback, underperformed in terms of their performance improvement compared to the group that either had goals but no feedback, or feedback or no goals.

Both of those groups did approximately the same in terms of their performance improvement during the period. But the biggest improvement in performance was clearly in the group that both receive goals at the outset, and performance feedback throughout. I don't think it's a coincidence that clear and demanding goals and constant performance feedback are also conditions for falling into flow state. So goals clearly do work. And I have a hypothesis phocis as to why that is and has to do with a part of your brain called the reticular activating system, the r a s. Although, I think of the reticular activating system as your serendipity organ, because the drop of this part of your brain is to survey your environment. Your senses are constantly taking in information, sounds, sights, smells, feelings, temperatures, tastes, and movements of your body.

And all of that information is far too much for your brain to process until your brain cuts out vast amounts of information and focuses on what's most salient was most valuable to you at the moment. It is the job of your reticular activating system to constantly scan your environment for information that is important to you that you're not paying attention to. And if it finds that kind of information, then what it will do is if it finds information or it finds events that are important to you, it will activate your awareness hence reticular activating system. Its job is to find useful, valuable stuff and hence my preference for calling it your serendipity organ. It's a bit like one of those children's toys with different shaped holes in and different shape blocks. If you can program it, to know what you're looking for, it will constantly scan across your environment, looking for the right shape block in your environment to fit in the hole that was created.

Consequently, when we set goals, we program our reticular activating system with the right shaped holes, and it contains scanning environments looking for those lucky coincidences that serendipitous opportunity to say, Look over there, there's an opportunity that gives you the choice as to whether to stay seize the opportunity or not. If you hadn't set goals, that opportunity would have been there, but you may not have noticed it. So I fundamentally believe that goal setting makes it more likely to achieve what you want. Therefore, it's critical that we do it well. What I'm going to do in the next video is show you the eight criteria for particularly good go.