When your goal is really a “twofer” — two benefits you think you can get for the price of one project — it often turns out that you don’t get either benefit. That’s because a “twofer” doesn’t guide action the way a properly integrated goal does.

What makes something a twofer

It’s not always easy to detect that your goal is a twofer. The test is: can you name your deepest motivation for the goal in one word?

For example, I have a goal I’ve titled “Life in Order.” My statement of the goal is:

Health fostering activities, social activities, business fostering activities, recreation, and writing smoothly integrate into days, weeks, and months of happy productiveness.

This may sound like five or more goals. Someone else with a similar goal statement might be trying to juggle five initiatives at once. They’d have trouble stating their deepest motivation in one word because the goal statement was just a way to cram several desires into one sentence.

But it is one unified goal for me. My deepest motivation for this project is: systematization. My goal is to systematize the work I’ve already done in each of these areas. I’ve already identified how to balance these areas of my life at a high level; I’ve already figured out what is most important to me in each area; I’ve already created sleep and exercise routines, business systems, writing processes, and boundaries to protect work and social time. To systematize my life means to get these different aspects to fit together seamlessly. I still need to tweak specific systems from time to time, but mostly I need to monitor how they are meshing, nudge parts into alignment, and automatize what works well.

This is individual. Your statement of your goal needs to capture your motivation in a way that is meaningful to you. It does not need to pass someone else’s test. But if there is any doubt, any hint that some elements are pulling in different directions, it is worth checking to make sure you can explain how it’s integrated. For example, one of my clients has a goal to create great art. My question for him is, is his deepest motivation one thing such as self-expression? This would be the case if he’s confident that in expressing his values, the resulting art will be some degree of great — and ever greater as he grows his skills. On the other hand, if he is trying to combine a desire for greatness with a desire for self-expression with the hope that they can be achieved at the same time, he has a twofer.

If it seems like more than one benefit is involved in your goal, check to see if it’s a “twofer.” Can you name in one word what your deepest motivation is for pursuing it? Can you explain the different aspects of the goal in terms of that value?

How a twofer can backfire

Eliminating twofers is critical to your success. The more ambitious and life-changing your goal, the more important it is to ensure your goal is unified. Otherwise, it will not fulfill its purpose, which is to guide and motivate action to the achievement of the goal. There are at least two reasons for this.

For one thing, a twofer gives you no guidance in the critical moment when the two most important benefits are in conflict. It creates pressure and exacerbates conflict between the benefits. It can seem that you can’t achieve one except at the expense of the other.

For example, suppose you had a goal similar to mine, but you held it as a twofer: you were both trying to meet deadlines more consistently and sleep more regularly. Your goal amounted to “do both at once.” What would you do if you had unfinished work that was due the next day, and you didn’t see how to finish it without interfering with your sleep schedule? Your goal doesn’t help you with that. You would need to decide ad hoc based on the particulars of the situation. If you do this repeatedly, sometimes you will decide one way, sometimes another. As a result, you will never get your sleep onto a regular routine or smooth out your productivity so that you meet deadlines more consistently. One will always interfere with the other.

In addition, a twofer glosses over the difficulties involved in achieving a potential goal. That distorts your decision to commit to the goal in the first place, and then makes it hard to judge your progress.

For example, imagine someone sees his choice of goals as “start a financially successful consulting business” or “find another high-paying job at a company.” Formulated like this, he might be attracted to the autonomy of consulting and decide to start a consulting business. But is that the actual choice he faces? Let’s assume he already had a track record getting high-paying jobs, so that is a viable option. However, if he has never been a financially successful consultant, he literally doesn’t know whether that’s a viable option. He has two goals: to create a new consulting business and to make money from it. In the short run, these will likely be opposed to one another as he invests money in education and marketing. In the long run, he may discover that he dislikes marketing so much that he doesn’t want to be a consultant. He’d rather work at a company where someone else markets him. In the meantime, he could waste a lot of time and effort struggling on a mistaken path.

The sooner you can catch that you have a twofer, the better. You do not want to waste your effort or delay gaining the important benefits!

How you integrate a twofer

If you discover your goal is a twofer, the remedy is to face the fact that the two elements will sometimes be in conflict. Only then can you decide how you will manage that conflict. This always involves clarifying your priorities.

Sometimes you will decide that one part of the twofer is not as important as you thought. For example, I used to be in a hurry to figure out certain psychological fundamentals. I wanted results fast. Discovery and speed. Eventually I realized that my hurried mindset created pressure that sabotaged critical intellectual work. By then, I also had good evidence that identifying fundamentals was harder than I had thought. Since I was making important progress and loving every discovery, I decided I would figure out those fundamentals eventually or happily die trying. Some 20 years later, I have a body of work and have identified some important fundamentals — because I addressed this conflict.

Other times, you will conclude that you absolutely need to find some way to gain both benefits; it is not an either-or choice. An example is the kind of work needed to both meet deadlines consistently and sleep regularly. Ultimately, you need to resolve this conflict. The first phase is to treat these as separate problems. Meeting deadlines requires developing productivity and concentration processes. Sleeping regularly requires learning about sleep hygiene and may require changing some routines for eating, exercise, and winding down at night.

After you have worked on these individually, you can set a systematization goal like my “Life in Order” goal. You create a system that has internal priorities built into it to help you integrate the different areas of your life. In my case, sleep time is sacrosanct; work time always needs to fit around sleep. But within limits, other activities may be pre-empted if I have unfinished top-priority business work. For example, I will never cut my one-on-one time with my husband to zero, but I might cut it in half to finish high-priority work. If I run into a conflict despite my existing routines, that’s a spur to work on my system as a whole to ensure I gain both benefits in the future.

For example, I ran into this exact problem writing this article, which took longer than expected to draft. This impacted other plans (though not my sleep, my exercise, or my essential time with my husband). But I simply viewed it as evidence that my systems for coordinating work needed some adjustment. So I worked on my systems in conjunction with writing the article.

The extra work on my systems contributed to the work taking longer than expected. But I had committed to doing such work when I set my “Life in Order” goal. You can’t figure out this kind of system problem in a vacuum; you need a real issue with a full, detailed context to identify where your plans went awry and/or what you need to learn. This is especially true if you are changing an old pattern. My “Life in Order” goal is my top personal priority — so figuring out what was causing my problem and how to avoid it in the future was more important than the various activities I canceled to spend extra time on the article. I don’t begrudge one second of the extra time because I spent it all doing what mattered most.

The bottom line

The bottom line is that you can’t avoid prioritizing between top priorities. If you want two benefits very much, you can’t just set a goal to get both. In order to get both, you need to build systems to help you address the inevitable conflict between them. What rules of thumb will you use to resolve the conflict? What other parts of your life need to be adjusted so that they conflict less?

This is individual thinking work. It is exactly the kind of work I coach people on in my Launch program so they can achieve a major goal in 8 weeks — without getting stuck in conflict by a twofer.