To me, New Year’s is a time to reflect back on the past year & determine what changes need to be made in the future. My first project for 2014 is to set some realistic & achievable goals for myself & my home. I always seem to stick with my resolutions for a week or so, then life gets in the way & by the end of the year I’m left feeling bad about myself for not ‘accomplishing’ anything.
This year, I’ve been doing a little research on how to best achieve my goals & stick to my resolutions. I also found this great article, courtesy of a friend, that outlines how to set meaningful goals for the New Year. I think that the biggest trick is making the goal or resolution as specific as possible. Then you have to set out the steps necessary to achieving the goal & set up a form of accountability.
I decided to use the LifeHack steps (from the above article), combined with basic goal setting techniques, to help clarify what areas of my life I want to focus on this year. I can’t expect to achieve everything all at once, making changes takes time. Too many resolutions is just setting myself up for failure. Here’s what I came up with. Note: Anything in quotes is from the LifeHack article, link above.
“Step 1: Create a list of areas in your life that you care about.” Mine are friends/family, job, writing, & health. I know the article says to list 8-12. I didn’t want to list that many areas because I don’t want to end up feeling overwhelmed by trying to change too much too fast. You can find my goal/s for the home here, so I didn’t include it here.
“Step 2: Rate 2013 in each area on a scale of 1 to 10.” This was the hardest part for me – actually sitting down & reviewing what the past year has given me. Obviously the areas aren’t all 10’s, otherwise I wouldn’t feel the need to work on them during 2014. Friends/family – 8, Job – 5 Writing – 3, Health – 5.
Step 3 is to determine what you want to change in each area during 2014 & what each area will look like at the end of 2014. For each goal, I determined why it is important, what the reward will be if I achieve it.
Laying out the necessary steps that must be taken to achieve each goal comes next. I’m going factor in some form of accountability to ensure that I’m working on each step & moving closer to the end goal. If I don’t have accountability, I’ll talk myself out of anything.
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