Let’s say I plan to setup an emergency fund for me and my wife.

If our monthly expenses are INR 75,000 then technically our emergency fund should have INR 2,25,000 – INR 4,50,000.

Now if I take our usual savings and investing rate of 15% each with an approximate salary of INR 1,20,000 then I must at any costs save at least INR 36,000 per month, taking us about 6-12 months to reach the emergency fund target.

Usually what I would look at is the amount of money in my emergency fund on a weekly or monthly basis.

However what if once I know that I need to save at least INR 36,000 towards my emergency fund every single month I stop looking at how big the fund is getting.

What if all my focus is to get that 36,000 saved. Maybe some months I try and save more than that by lowering other useless expenses.

This is me focusing on the process. As an example let’s say something happens and we need to withdraw 75k from the emergency fund.

What now? The amount of money there has gone down, so do I look at the money in the fund or do I simply tell myself that this is a minor setback and we should get back to our regular process of saving 36k.

2.2 Lakh emergency fund is an outcome based goal while saving 36k is a process based goal.

What I have 100% complete control over is actually the process, what I can do to the best of my abilities is the process. The outcome then is the side effect of the process I have been following for the past many months.

It isn’t the goal that matters. Instead it is the process that has the magic engrained in itself.

If we focus on the process, sincerely do everything that the process demands, for however long it demands then getting to the goals is nothing but the side effect of following that process.

We tend to get distracted by the fact that if we hit or miss our target.

It is not about the target.

Now this philosophy can be applied to literally everything in our lives.

Do let me know one such process goal that you have set for yourself.

Here are 2 of mine: Publish at least 2 articles every week on this blog and send a daily finance, money and career newsletter.