Stronger Leaders. Deeper Impact - Looking Ahead to 2026
Designing the Week for the Long Run
Like many people, I’ve spent the past few weeks thinking about goals for 2026.
At Milestone Leadership, we have goals, including Attraction goals (who sees the company, our values and our approach), Activation goals (who engages with us), and a small number of deeply aligned clients. Those goals aren’t just aspirational; more importantly, they inform what has to happen every week if we’re going to reach them. And they are also so that we can sustain our own balance, and not trade short-term progress for long-term cost.
Because endurance is such a big part of my schedule, I need to be equally thoughtful about those aspirations. This year, I’ve settled on three specific goals:
Break a 3:45 marathon
Run my first 100k
Participate in 500 miles’ worth of events over the year
Last year 2025 reinforced something I already knew but needed to be reminded of relearn: when things get busy, I have a tendency to be less intentional, and it becomes easy to confuse activity with progress. For me, this can show up as missing a workout and/or deciding to make up a workout on a rest day or checking lower priority stuff off my list because more checkmarks feel like progress, or by having multiple meetings because I didn’t prepare enough for the first one.
Endurance training exposes lack of intention really quickly; miss a few foundational workouts or skip recovery and your body responds accordingly. Leadership isn’t much different; procrastinate tasks or working long hours or taking on too much, typically can result in lower quality output. In both cases you tend to get exactly the results that you train for.
In both business and in endurance, results don’t happen because of one heroic day. And results aren’t sustainable unless they are balanced against physical, mental and social health.
That framing matters, because it helps how I think about goals more broadly. Goals aren’t useful only because they’re ambitious. They’re also useful because they require intentionality. Asking questions like:
When is a good checkpoint to evaluate whether I am on track to achieve this specific goal?
What do I need to see at that checkpoint to know that I am on track toward meeting that goal?
What specific things do I need to do daily or weekly in order to meet the next checkpoint?
What resources do I need in order to do those specific things? (people, time, etc). And have I set aside those resources (connected with people or blocked my calendar or allocated that budget)?
Am I able to do the above while remaining balanced?
With that in mind, here’s how I’m thinking about 2026.
The goals, both business and endurance, are still ambitious. What’s changing is how explicitly these goals being used to design the week, and how intentionally they’re being pursued without compromising balance.
To support that, I’m continuing to use FLARB, not as a checklist, but as a way to notice whether I am making unsustainable tradeoffs earlier. FLARB helps surface when progress in one area starts coming at the expense of fitness, relationships, reflection, or learning.
I’m also being more deliberate with calendar constraints: No meetings on Tuesdays or Fridays or after 1pm on Wednesdays. This isn’t a productivity hack; it’s a capacity decision to protect the kind of work that long-run goals actually require.
This mirrors the focus at Milestone: helping leaders elevate their impact, do so without compromising their health or relationships, and, when needed, help to streamline the clutter that distracts them from their best work or pushes them into unsustainable patterns.
Goals don’t demand more effort. They demand better weeks.
And better weeks don’t come from trying harder. They come from deciding what the week is focused on and protecting it accordingly.
I’d be curious how clearly your week reflects the important goals that you are focusing on in 2026.