You have four goals, which is a reasonable number, and two of them are stalled.
The obvious diagnosis is that four is too many. It usually isn't. Look at when each one would actually happen and you'll often find that two of the four want the same slot — the evenings after the children are in bed, or the Saturday morning, or whatever the one genuinely available block is.
They're not competing for your attention in general. They're competing for a specific three hours, and nothing about a list makes that visible.
Why the list hides it
Because a list is a set of intentions and intentions don't occupy time until they're scheduled.
Four goals look like four goals. Written out with their real requirements — two evenings a week each, at the same time of day, from the same person — they're clearly six or seven evenings from a week that has three.
The arithmetic is obvious once done and almost nobody does it. What people do instead is add goals one at a time, each addition reasonable in isolation, and discover the conflict only as a persistent sense of being behind on everything.
The tell
Two goals that alternate.
One moves for a fortnight while the other is silent, then they swap. Neither is ever properly dead, neither ever gets a run of momentum, and both have a slightly frustrating quality that's hard to name.
That's not two stalled goals. It's one slot with two occupants, and the alternation is the two of them taking turns without anyone deciding.
The second tell is that the diagnosis fails. You run the five questions on each — is the next step clear, is anyone blocking, would dropping it feel like relief — and the answers come back fine. Nothing is wrong with either goal. The problem isn't in either of them, it's in the space they share.
What to do about it
Three options, and the honest one is unpopular.
Sequence them. Pick one, give it the slot for a defined period, and park the other in writing with a condition. Second language — not before the beta ships. That's not abandoning it; it's admitting the order in which things will happen, which was already true and now says so.
Split the slot deliberately. Tuesday for one, Thursday for the other, and hold it. This works if both are genuinely fine at one session a week — some are, and some aren't, and work needing a warm-up usually isn't.
Find a different slot for one. Sometimes available and worth checking. A goal that would work at six in the morning, or in a lunch break, or on a Sunday afternoon, isn't in competition at all. But be honest about whether that time actually exists rather than theoretically exists.
What doesn't work is the default, which is leaving them to alternate and hoping. That produces two half-projects and a permanent low-grade guilt about both.
Write each live goal down with what it actually needs — how many sessions, how long, and at what time of day.
Then compare against the week you actually have. Not the week you'd have if everything went well; the ordinary one, with the work overruns and the evenings that disappear.
Most people find they've committed roughly twice their available time, and that the excess is concentrated in one or two slots. That's a specific finding with a specific fix, and it's much more useful than concluding that you have too many goals.
Where sequencing is the wrong answer
The counter.
Some goals genuinely lose too much from being paused. Anything with a warm-up cost degrades badly when set down for three months — a language, a codebase, a manuscript with a complicated structure in your head. For those, a session a week is much better than a clean pause, even if a session a week is slow.
There's also a version where the competition is the useful signal rather than a problem to be resolved. If two goals have been alternating for a year and you can't bring yourself to sequence them, it's worth asking whether one of them is being kept alive to avoid deciding about it. The relief test on both, separately, sometimes resolves the whole thing without any scheduling.
And some people genuinely run several things at once well, in short bursts, and would find sequencing stifling. If that's your history, believe it.
Four goals, three evenings
His list has four. The beta, the Spanish, the kitchen, and swimming.
Swimming is mornings, so it doesn't compete with anything. The kitchen is weekends. The other two are both evening goals, both wanting about two sessions a week, and there are three usable evenings after everyone's in bed.
For four months they alternate. The beta gets a good fortnight while the Spanish goes to nine days quiet, then the Spanish gets attention and the beta drifts to sixteen. Both diagnose as fine. Neither is going anywhere.
The fix takes about a minute and is unsatisfying. The beta gets Tuesday and Thursday until it ships. The Spanish is parked, in writing: not before the beta ships, probably March. Was on unit 14, past subjunctive.
The Spanish counter climbs to ninety days over the following quarter and costs him nothing to look at, because the reason is written underneath it. The beta ships six weeks earlier than it would have.
That's the whole intervention: not fewer goals, but an order.
Which is worth trying before culling anything. The instinct when two goals stall together is to conclude the list is too long and delete one, and deletion is permanent where sequencing isn't. If the conflict is about a slot rather than about wanting, an order fixes it and you keep both.
What the list shows and doesn't
The gap number will tell you both goals are stalled. It won't tell you they're stalled at each other, because it can't see when either of them would happen.
That's a real limit and it's worth knowing where the instrument stops. The counter measures silence. Working out that two silences share a cause requires you to look at the week rather than the list, which is a five-minute exercise done once a quarter rather than something an app can do for you.
Related: Three goals, not thirty · Parking a goal without killing it · Ninety minutes is the unit
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