Goal setting and the planner

There’s a new thing I’ve started in my planner with goals. I don’t usually plan out goals on paper. I’m generally a pretty focused person and reach for my goals without needing to see them on a page. Lately I feel a need to have something more concrete in my planner about my goals. I think having a written page of goals each month can be just what my list making heart needs.

Now, I’m still not doing a big yearly goal thing. I made some general notes for the year but things being how they are, I don’t exactly know what my year holds. Sometimes a goal is something that you can knock out and do, other times there may be something you want that other responsibilities might get in the way. This doesn’t mean it’s not a worthy thing to do, it just becomes a dream and not a goal. A goal needs to be something you can knock out. Something that is achievable.

For example, a general goal for a fiberist might be to get more consistent in their spinning. The dream portion of that is winning an award at a fair. This can all be broken down in a handy worksheet to help make that goal achievable.
This is my example of such a worksheet.

And here it is filled in with my ficticious goal.

Well, maybe not all filled in. I left some blank spaces because there may be something in that class that I need to add. Maybe there is something that I need to change? These could be written in with pencil. In my experience the main steps might not change but the mini steps off to the side there (that I didn’t finish filling in) seem to be what change most often.

You’ll note that I have my little bullet squares there. I’m using the filofax now because I like to move my pages around but if you’re using a regular book – pages set up like these are super easy to keep in your bullet journal.

Finally at the very bottom is written “What’s Next” – As I tick off the little boxes, a new idea or goal inspiration might come to me. That’s my spot to write notes for ides of the next step or the next goal or an expansion on the current goal. I find these pages not only help knock out a task or a goal but they help inspire more.

Sometimes a habit tracker is what will help me reach a goal and can be a line item in one of the steps. The mini step that says “15 minute coffee break” and the “2hr Friday spin” can both be added to my version of a habit tracker. I have daily habits and weekly ones.

You can see that I haven’t written anything in yet but my daily goals have personal things like Vitamins, Yoga, Meditate, and Study. My work goals are things like Leave it neat?, Emails, and Dye. Sometimes my habit tracker isn’t about new habits. I like to have a few gimmees tossed in there. Then weekly goals are things like Herbals for sheep/goats and Update Quickbooks files.

So my fictitious goal up there could be added to the habit tracker in both the sections. “Spin 15min a day” in the daily section and “2hr weekly spin” in the weekly section. This is just how it works for me and in using it, I’ve upgraded and changed it a few times. Overall though, I like a tracker like this. This kind of thing is just what a list maker needs.

Now that I’ve gotten all into the specifics and daily goal work, let’s pull out our focus a bit and I’ll show off my monthly goal pages.

I wanted pretty pages and I don’t care if they’re all only on one side of the page. They’ll be fun to archive like this so I can see what I was thinking at the time. My original thought was to put each page as a header page right in the weekly planner as each month begins but for now I’ve chosen to keep them all together in one section at the front of my monthly calendar.

My though too, is that when I archive this year they’ll be a great monthly separator. I can have these as header sections and make notes about what I did each month toward goals or I can archive all my goal sheets. Something journal like or even just a list of happenings. I haven’t clearly thought it all out yet but they’re in my book now and I’m using them.

Final thing in my goal section of the book is the accomplishment section.

I thought it might be fun to have a couple of pages where I jot down the goals I finished in any given month. Short form as opposed to writing out a big flowery journal which I might do (as noted up there). This will be a completely visual way to not feel like I screwed off all month long. Some of my goals are light weight but some are lofty. I think it will be cool at the end of the year to see at a glance, a note of what I managed to accomplish each month all in one space.