Activity-based goals don’t work anymore. AI just exposed them.

Welcome to Prompt, Tinker, Innovate—my AI playground. Each edition gives you a hands-on experiment that shows how AI can sharpen your thinking, streamline your process, and help you do more meaningful creative work.

This week’s playground: Write goals that actually drive results

It’s goal-setting season. If you are like most professionals, you are staring at a blank page (or a scary spreadsheet) trying to build OKRs, plan Q1, or draft personal performance targets for 2026.

But if your goals still look like a checklist of things to do, you’re already behind.

Let’s use AI to audit your goals and rebuild them around outcomes—not activity. Why? Because in the age of AI, your old goals don’t just feel weak—they make you look replaceable.

The problem with activity-based goals

You’ve seen them a hundred times:

• Post on LinkedIn 3x a week

• Launch the new website

• Send 500 outreach emails

These activities sound productive. But they don’t answer the most important question: What changed because you did the work? In this case, you can do all of them perfectly and still fail to grow your business or career. Why? Because "sending emails" isn't the goal—getting clients is.

Worse, they often describe tasks AI can already do. If your goal is “create LinkedIn posts,” and GPT can generate them in 30 seconds… what does that say about your value?

AI is raising the bar. The new standard isn’t about volume or effort—it’s about impact. Your goals need to show how you move the business forward, not how busy you are.

AI helps you shift to the “impact economy”

Most teams operate in the "output economy." They reward volume: more code, more posts, more calls. But when AI can generate infinite volume at near-zero cost, output loses its value.

We are entering the "impact economy." In this world, nobody cares how much you produced; they care about what changed because you did it.

Here is how that shift looks in practice:

• The output economy goal: Publish 3 blog posts per week.

  • Why it’s obsolete: AI can draft, edit, and optimize content in minutes. If your goal is just "production," you are competing with a machine that never sleeps.

• The impact economy goal: Generate 20 qualified inbound leads per month through content.

  • Why it works: This reframes the point of the work. It forces you to focus on strategy, resonance, and conversion—areas where human insight is still the differentiator.

Your AI experiment: Try this prompt

👉 Time to tinker: Take your current draft goals for Q1 or 2026—even if they’re still messy and paste them into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini using this prompt.

📝 Prompt: “Act as a ruthless but supportive Executive Coach. I’m going to share a list of my current goals. Many are probably activity-based. Please:

1. Identify if each goal is Activity-based or Outcome-based.

2. If it’s Activity-based, explain why that activity matters (“So what?”).

3. Rewrite it as an Outcome—specific, measurable, and focused on business impact.

4. Suggest one Leading Indicator to track progress.

Return this in a table. Then ask: “Do these outcomes align with the true intent of your original goals?” If I say no, help me refine them.

Here’s my draft list: [INSERT GOALS]”

💡Pro tips: Outcome goals will feel riskier and that’s a good sign

Activity-based goals feel safe because they’re under your control. But safety isn’t strategy. Especially not now. Outcome goals push you to own what matters. Want to push these further, try these follow-up prompts:

• “Give me 3 distinct strategies to hit this goal.”

• “Based on this list, what important outcomes might I be overlooking?”

• “What are 3 likely reasons I’ll fail to hit this outcome?”

Don’t just look busy. Be irreplaceable.

After running this experiment, you might realize your goals were just well-worded task lists. That’s fine. Now you know.

Since AI can do the work, you need to define the impact. Post one upgraded goal in the comments and let me know how you think this will improve how you work.

Until next time—keep tinkering, keep prompting, keep innovating.

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