Green Where You Water It

If you’re the kind of person who wants to do everything, this might sound familiar:

You start the year excited. You list out all your goals. You try to move a bunch of them forward all at once. Progress is slow, scattered, and somehow exhausting. Eventually, you lose interest—not because you don’t care, but because nothing feels like it’s getting done.

As the saying goes, the person who chases 2 rabbits, catches none.

You’d think then that the easy fix would be the usual, focus on one thing and you will find all your dreams come true. That works for normal people.

But we, my friend, are not normal.

Nope, we complicate things because we like having multiple goals. Choice gives life meaning. Possibility is exciting. A single focus starts to feel boring. But then…many focuses burn you out.

So now what?

A Simpler Way to Carry Your Goals

Here’s a structure that works especially well if you deal with FOMO, boredom, or mental overload. I’m currently calling it Now & the Horizon (yes, the name is still in beta testing).

Put your goals into three buckets:

Now – what you’re actively focusing on
Background – what’s moving quietly without demanding attention
Later (the Horizon) – what you’re excited about, but not ready to focus on yet

Every quarter, you choose one “Now” goal. While that’s the only thing you owe real focus to for that quarter, nothing else disappears. All your other hopes and dreams (i.e., your goals) are not cancelled. They just stop fighting for your attention like toddlers in a grocery store aisle.

They remain visible. Available. Calm.

Why This Feels So Much Better

You get freedom plus direction, which is a rare combo.

You don’t wake up wondering what you should work on. That decision has already been made. You don’t feel guilty about ignoring your other goals because you know it’s on your list and you’ll get to it when it’s their turn.

At the same time, you don’t get trapped in boredom. Your other goals still exist and you can dip into them for novelty or energy. Bonus: when it is time to focus on them, you won’t be starting from zero, you’ll already have some work under your belt.

It’s focus without deprivation. Productive procrastination. Which, honestly, should be the slogan for most things in life.

The Role of Background Goals

Some goals don’t need intensity. They need awareness to remain consistent.

Background goals are basically the goals you track, not obsess over. You check that they’re moving along as expected and call it a day. You don’t need to engage with them for hours every week.

For example, my goal is to finish paying off my debt by Jan 2027, provided nothing goes wrong. (Spoiler: every year, something goes wrong. But if we’re being optimistic, the overall timeline keeps shrinking, so I’ll take it.) With goals like this, I just check in quickly on a bi-weekly (every paycheque) or monthly basis to ensure payments are going to the right places and the balances are decreasing. That’s it.

From experience, I know that if I focus on it too much, I just get frustrated by how slow it feels. So instead, I monitor it lightly. If something looks off, I fix it (e.g., subscriptions I haven’t used in a while, weird spike in spending habits, etc.). If the numbers are moving in the right direction, I leave it alone.

Minimal effort. Awareness of spending. No emotional spiral.

Later (Horizon) = Permission to Keep Dreaming.

The “Later (Horizon)” bucket exists so you don’t have to shut parts of yourself off. It’s where your dreams wait without creating pressure.

You’re allowed to want a lot of things. You’re allowed to be curious. You’re allowed to change your mind.

The Horizon is where ideas wait without creating pressure. When you need a spark, it’s there. When you’re ready to focus on them, they’re ready for you.

Establish a Baseline Before You Raise the Bar

One of the most helpful things you can do is spend a year simply noticing what you actually get done without forcing it. That gives you a baseline. Once you know what’s realistic for you, you can focus it. Compress it. Finish it earlier. Then build on top of it later.

For example, I learned that I can publish about 26 blog posts a year, even when I’m just noodling around.

So this year, I decided to frontload the work in Q1 so that it’s done and out of the way and not lingering over my head for the rest of the year.

That doesn’t mean that I won’t add to the blog for the rest of 2026, that just means I’ve secured the baseline early. The rest of the year becomes bonus territory.

For more depth. More experimentation. More curation. More reflections. Anything I want. That kind of future freedom is exhilarating.

Focus by Quarter. Freedom by Year.

You don’t need to plan the entire year in perfect detail.

What I love about this approach is that I can list all the dreams I have for my life—then come back to the present moment and ask:

What am I working on right now?
Is it leading me where I want to go?

If not, I scrap it. Or pin it for later.
If yes, I ask: What’s the next reasonable step I can take this year?

For me, this year looks something like:

1. Publish 26 posts on GWUWI (Q1 focus)
2. Pay off most of the debt with 1 month remaining (Background)
3. Read the Quran at least once (likely Q2)
4. Declutter and resell most of my belongings (most likely Q2)
5. Finish writing the discovery draft of Biosphere (Q3)

Q4? Maybe I’ll plan it out. Maybe I’ll leave it open as a buffer. We’ll see. I didn’t know this is how my year would look until I wrote this post. And it’s still subject to change. So having things up in the air is allowed, Now & the Horizon method enables flexibility.

Break It Down Further If Needed

For me, I wanted the whole quarter to focus because I know I can and so I know it’ll work for me. But if that’s too long of a time span for you, then please by all means feel free to bring it down to a monthly or weekly focus. Experimentation is always encouraged. Within reason. Might not want to test your latent ability to fly by jumping off a cliff unless you have a parachute. Or there’s water underneath. But then the water may have sharks. You see the problem. But you’re an adult. You’ve got this. I trust you.

You Don’t Need to Know How Every Quarter Will Look

You can assign your focus as you go along. I only indicated mine above as tentatives based on my own personal logistics. Truthfully, I had no clue that’s how I wanted my year to play out (i.e., which quarter to assign what task) until I was writing this post out. And they’re still subject to change.

So feel free to finish a quarter and then decide on your next quarter’s focus.

Conclusion

This system lets you finish things without losing your sense of possibility. Perfect for those who suffer from FOMO, want to get everything in the world done, but know that time is hopelessly finite. Thankfully, with Now & the Horizon method, you can have it all. LOL what a salesy way of wrapping things up. Luckily I’m not selling you anything. Phew.