Why Do Some Professional Goals Feel Like a Chore?

Why do some professional goals feel like a chore?

A goal tends to feel like a chore when it leaves out one of three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, or relatedness. This is the core claim of self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Goals that let a person choose how they pursue them, show them getting visibly better, and connect to people who matter tend to feel energising even when they are hard. Goals missing any of the three tend to feel draining even when they are easy.

This matters for development plans because the usual advice — make it specific, make it measurable, write it down — addresses whether a goal is well-formed, not whether it is motivating. A perfectly specific goal can still feel hollow.

What are autonomy, competence and relatedness, in practice?

A founder told to "improve leadership" by a board, with no say in what that means or how progress is tracked, is missing autonomy and competence at once. A professional athlete repeating the same drill with no sense of why it matters to the squad is missing relatedness. Neither goal is badly written. Both are likely to feel like a chore.

How does this differ from just picking a hard goal?

Locke and Latham's goal-setting theory shows that specific, difficult goals generally produce better performance than vague ones, provided the person has the ability and accepts the goal (Locke & Latham, 2002). That is about goal structure. Self-determination theory is about the experience of pursuing it. A goal can be specific and difficult and still feel like a chore if it is imposed, unmeasured against the person's own sense of progress, or disconnected from anyone they care about. The two ideas work together: structure the goal well, then check it against the three needs before assuming low motivation means low effort.

A quick way to check a goal against the three needs

1. Autonomy check. Did the person choose this goal, or at least choose how to approach it? If not, what one decision could be handed back to them — the method, the pace, or the first step?
2. Competence check. Will they see evidence of getting better within weeks, not months? If the only feedback is a year-end review, competence has nothing to attach to in the meantime.
3. Relatedness check. Is this goal connected to a person, team, or craft the individual cares about, or is it an abstraction ("improve stakeholder management")? Naming the actual person or situation often restores the connection.

If a goal fails all three checks, the problem usually is not the person's discipline. It is the goal.

How does this show up for athletes, founders and performers?

A professional athlete working on recovery habits may resist a coach-imposed sleep target but respond well to tracking it themselves and discussing it with a training partner — same goal, restored autonomy and relatedness. See a development plan for professional athletes for how this plays out across a season.

A founder converting a revenue target into a development goal often finds the target itself satisfies none of the three needs — it is imposed by the market, offers no sense of personal skill growth, and is pursued alone. Breaking it into a capability (negotiation, hiring, pricing) the founder chooses to build restores competence and autonomy; discussing it with a co-founder or mentor restores relatedness. This is the approach taken in a founder's development plan.

A performing artist rehearsing for a specific audience, rather than "practice," tends to find the relatedness need automatically met — the work points toward people who will see it.

How does this interact with having too many goals?

Running more than a few live goals at once tends to dilute all three needs: less real choice per goal, less visible progress per goal, less attention per relationship it touches. Keeping a small number of live goals — the approach discussed in how many professional goals should you have at once — is partly a self-determination argument, not only an attention one.

Where Jobulary fits

In Jobulary, every live goal needs a reason and a first step chosen by the person within seven days, which keeps the autonomy and competence checks built into how a goal starts rather than left to afterthought. Check-ins take about three minutes and report growth only when it is larger than measurement error, so competence has honest evidence to point to rather than vague reassurance. The plan belongs to the person and survives a change of employer, and sponsors never see personal goals or reflections — which matters for relatedness, since a goal connected to a person's own sense of who they want to become tends to survive longer than one set purely for someone else's dashboard.

For the mechanics of setting a live goal well, see individual development plan that survives week six or the glossary entry on goal structures.