Values, goals and the to-do list

Now the time for New Year's resolutions is safely over, I can start thinking about what I want to do with my life. Some time ago, I decided that my life needed debugging, and uncharacteristically read a book on time management (John Adair's How to Manage Your Time). This is rather like George Bush reading a book on conflict management. I devour time like some apocalyptic Hindu deity, and as for "management", that is a word which has as many negative connotations for me as "Windows" or "bubonic plague". But something had to be done, so I started from the bottom up with a daily to-do list, each item coded alphabetically for importance and numerically for urgency (e.g., E1 means it's no big deal, but if I'm going to do it at all, I need to do it today, while A4 means I have a week or two, but if I don't do it, I'm screwed).

Now it's time to go top-down and think about my whole life. I'd always thought of "life goals" as only suitable for people at the extremes of the self-actualisation scale: Olympic athletes on the one hand, and on the other, the kind of sad people whose greatest goal is to be Head of Marketing by the time they're forty. Somewhat to my surprise, Adair agrees. A goal is something you score (or fail to score), and life is not a football match. Goals may be good things to have in the short or medium term, but life should be guided by values, not goals.

Of course, asking someone like me "What are your values?" defeats the object of time management. It is a month since I read the question, and I am starting to think that given a couple of years, I could come up with an approximate answer, or at least a good working definition of "value". But I need to remember that clarifying my values is just the first step on a road that travels through goals and strategies before arriving at my to-do list, just like principles of software design should eventually result in lines of code. So here is an attempt to put some values in an array.

0. Wisdom

Wisdom has to be the number one (or in this case, number zero) value. What am I, if I have not wisdom? Stupid, that's what. Arguably, there are worse things to be than stupid, such as miserable or evil, but stupid people are more likely to be miserable or do evil things. Wisdom is a virtue that defines other virtues: courage is wisdom applied to danger; justice is wisdom applied to distribution of benefits and harms; prudence is wisdom applied to desire.

1. Good Feelings

This encompasses a range of internal states including the eupatheia of the Stoic sage, the bliss of mystics, the "positive affect" of psychologists and straightforward enjoyment. Happiness, according to Aristotle (and indeed most Greek philosophers), is not just a matter of feeling happy, but who would want the kind of eudaemonia that didn't at least involve happy feelings? More pertinently, the elimination of bad feelings - fear, misery, anger, craving etc. - has to be a major goal.

I'm not sure whether to include physical pleasure here: my inner Epicurean says "yes"; my Stoic superego says "no". I like physical pleasure, and I certainly prefer it to physical pain, but I'm not sure if I would place primary value on it.

2. Right Relations

This is a rather odd term I've borrowed from my friend Jan Garrett. I'm taking it to mean that whatever my relationship with a person, I behave in the way appropriate to that relationship: to be a good husband to my wife, a good teacher to my students, a good friend to my friends, and even perhaps a good enemy to my enemies. Of course social relationships cannnot be formulated as simply as this (which is, in my humble opinion, a weakness of Stoic ethics and of systems such as Confucianism) and there are some relationships for which there is probably no right way to relate (e.g. master/slave). Nevertheless, such labels stand for a context of relating in which we can behave (and feel) well or badly. It's also nice if the other people involved reciprocate, but the really important thing is my behaviour: other people's behaviour comes, I think, under goals rather than primary values.

3. Power

I don't mean I want to rule the world, but it's good to be able to kick ass. As a value, it's on a lower level than the others, but the ability to overcome obstacles (including human ones) is surely worth having.

4. Creativity

To find solutions to problems, to express thoughts and feelings, to discern hidden patterns, to create beauty ... that's what makes life worth living.