For the last few years, I’ve followed the January cliché of writing down my objectives for the new year. All I usually do is picking up a notebook and filling a page with all the awesome things I would like to achieve that year. Despite experiencing some results with this method, I usually found out that my goals were too generic and scattered. They would give me no information on how to achieve them or how was my progress in doing so. For this reason, I would often forget my goals for months at a time.
So, this year I’ve decided to take things a little further and define my goals in a more thoughtful way. This led me to create a framework that I believe has made my objectives for 2026 much more meaningful by forcing me to think about what I deeply want, and how I can achieve it.
The RPMM Framework
RPMM stands for Roles, Priorities, Milestones and Metrics, which are the key concepts that we will use to cascade from high-level ideas into actionable tasks and ways to evaluate them. The objective definition process is divided into 6 steps:
🔑 RPMM Overview:
- Define your timeframe
- Define the roles you prioritize in your life
- For each role, define your main priority
- For each priority, define the individual milestones that will allow you to achieve it
- Define measurable evaluation metrics for priorities and milestones
- Start tracking!
In the following sections, we will dive deeper into each of the steps, explaining the rationale behind them, and providing a running example that builds into a deeper version of the “get in shape” new years resolution. Keep in mind that figuring out what you want to prioritize is part of the process, so although you might already have a preconceived notion of your goals, it is good to explore them as you go. We are simply using the “get in shape” example from the start so you, the reader, already know what to expect.
Feel free to grab a piece of paper and follow along, using your own goals, as we explore RPMM. Some sections also include key questions that will help you tailor the step to your own life.
Step 1: Define your timeframe
Despite seeming obvious, binding our objectives to a clear timeframe allows us to reason about the work volume we can realistically handle before our deadline. It is easy to mindlessly dump everything we would like to achieve in a year into a page without deeply reflecting on how many of those things we can work on during that time. This leads to a lack of focus, an objective achievement killer. How are we going to know what to work on if we want to improve every single aspect of our lives? How do we know what to prioritize when resources are lacking? I have fallen in this trap many times.
We start by defining a timeframe in order to think about what we can achieve until the deadline, so it is very important to keep that in mind when going through the next steps and pick a realistic amount of problems to solve for the time we have.
🔍 Example - Getting in Shape
Timeframe: This year (until the end of 2026)
Step 2: Define the roles you prioritize in your life
It is very common for us to have many aspects of our lives competing for our attention. Be it work, family, social life or hobbies, there is always something that is constantly demanding our attention. We often struggle to find balance in the dedication we give to each aspect of our lives, often becoming disappointed when we have to sacrifice one responsibility for another. The reality is that we cannot focus on everything at the same time, and we have to accept that when setting our goals.
So, we need to choose the roles we want to prioritize for the timeframe. Choosing what is most important to us and letting go of the rest is a big step in succeeding at those important things. For the timeframe of 1 year, we should not focus on more that 3 or 4 roles.
The idea of dividing responsibilities into roles comes from Stephen R. Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which suggests that being aware of the several roles we play in our lives is a good way to organize weekly tasks. I found success with this division, which allowed me to successfully manage multiple responsibilities, so I decided to extend the concept into my long term goals.
🔍 Example - Getting in Shape
Role: Personal Development
🔑 Key Questions
- What aspects of my life do I want to improve?
- To what responsibilities do I want to dedicate myself?
- What areas in my life are demanding too much of my attention? (it is a reasonable priority to scale down on what’s not important to you anymore)
Step 3: For each role, define your main priority
The priority is the main goal you absolutely want to accomplish in the selected timeframe. It needs to be realistic, but it can be something relatively high-level, since we will break it down in the following steps.
It is reasonable to define more that one priority for a given role, especially in longer timeframes, but the total count should be kept low. If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.
🔍 Example
Priority: Achieve good physical shape
🔑 Key Questions
- What do I want to achieve in this aspect of my life?
- What would contribute to my long term goals?
- What would make me feel most accomplished?
Step 4: For each priority, define the individual milestones that will allow you to achieve it
This step consists in breaking down the main priority into smaller tasks, so that we can work on them separately. This will allow us to reflect on the individual steps we need to accomplish in order to to achieve our priority. This reflection forces us to establish a roadmap towards the achievement of our goals. This is what turns our priorities from wishes into objectives, and where we take responsibility for their accomplishment. Here, we define what we really need to work on in our daily lives.
The key to good milestone definition is to deeply understand how our priorities can be achieved. This might require some research and reflection, but it is better to do that work beforehand so that we can focus on the achievement starting from the moment of commitment. This way, we avoid getting lost in the uncertainly of not knowing what to do, and can immediately work towards our goals. Its is perfectly acceptable to briefly pause objective definition in this step for research purposes, so that milestones can be as accurate and actionable as possible.
🔍 Example - Getting in Shape
Milestones:
- Establish a healthy diet
- Enrol in a gym
- Loose weight (Reach 67Kg)
- Develop a regular training schedule
- Run 5 Km
📝 Note: Keep in mind that I’m not a fitness expert, so this example is for illustrative purposes only.
🔑 Key Questions
- What are the individual steps I need to take in order to achieve my priority?
- How do I break down my priority into smaller goals?
Step 5: Define measurable evaluation metrics for priorities and milestones
The problem with most high-level goal definition in the lack of measureability. Without a way to to keep track of our progress, we have no way of knowing how far we are along the path. By defining clear evaluation metrics, we can monitor that progress and adjust our daily life in order to correct our course if things are not going as planned.
Some goals are relatively straight forward to achieve, while other require a lot of experimentation to find out what works. This step will allow us to regularly assess if our process is really contributing to our success, so that we can change it as needed. Progress tracking also has the advantage of allowing us to visualize our growth and feel rewarded for seeing it.
Evaluation metrics will also give us a clear view on what we need to accomplish in our daily life in order to succeed. If we know that we need to average 3 times in the gym by December, then we know that we have to adjust our weekly routine to accommodate and facilitate those 3 training sessions.
🔍 Example - Getting in Shape
Evaluation metrics:
- Eat 28 home cooked meals per month (only eat out 2x per month)
- Reach June with 13% body fat (to bulk after)
- Average 3 times per week in the gym in Q4
- Reach 67Kg by the end of the year
- Be able to do 3 sets of 6 pull ups
- Run 2.5 Km without stopping by June
- Successfully finish the local 10Km race in December
🔑 Key Questions
- How do I evaluate my progress towards my milestones?
- What to I need to achieve by the end of the timeframe in order to consider I succeeded?
Step 6: Start tracking!
The final step of RPMM is to define where our results will live. It can be a spreadsheet, an app, a notebook page, a whiteboard or some text file. The format doesn’t matter as long as it does not present any friction towards tracking. It should be easily accessible and maintainable. I personally use spreadsheets because I’m a very data driven person, but I have used simple notebooks in the past.
Then, for each metric we define our tracking method. It is usually some monthly number, but other formats are also reasonable as long as tracking them does not become a burden. For example, some people might be able to track how many calories they ate each day, but that requires a reasonable amount of effort. So it is better to simplify tracking (like to one measurement per month for yearly goals) than to do no tracking due to excessive ambition and lacking the discipline (or the memory) to collect the necessary data.
🔍 Example - Getting in Shape
Metric January February March … Times Eaten Out 2 1 3 … Body Fat % 17% 16% 16% … Training Sessions 12 15 11 … Max Pull Up Number 2x4 3x3 3x3 …
The problem with new year resolutions
The new year can be a great time to reflect on the course of our lives, as it provides a tightly bounded timeframe in which to reflect about. Furthermore, the return to normal after the holidays usually gives us a sense of “new beginning” that can be very motivating to get started. However, both common knowledge and research suggest that “new year resolutions” are very quickly abandoned and usually don’t produce any meaningful results.
That’s why I view setting milestones and priorities as a better alternative. The difference might seem subtle, but it is deeper that we might think. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the term resolution implies a promise you make to yourself, while an objective is something that you plan to achieve and a priority is something that must be dealt with before other things. While a resolution is simply a decision, objectives and priorities imply more self responsibility.
When we write down some resolutions, we are not forced to think on how we will achieve them, and while we might stick to them for the first few days of the year, propelled by the motivation they give us, when routine starts to become the norm again, and the problems of daily life start start demanding our attention, resolutions quickly fade away, awaiting for next year, when everything will magically go as we imagine.
The key to goal achievement is not motivation, but discipline. It’s not how we handle the good days that counts, but how we handle the bad ones. By knowing what our priorities are, and how we can achieve them, we are laying the foundations that will allow us to stay committed in the long term, and also taking responsibility in making them a reality.
I’m not promising that following this process will magically make you reach all your goals. Some things are really hard to do, and can take years of dedication to achieve. However, I do believe that investing a little bit more time in the process of goal definition, can make all the difference and increase our chances of success.
Wish you a great 2026.