TIPS FOR SETTING AND ACHIEVING YOUR GOALS

SETTING GOALS

With the New Year upon us, we often set goals for the upcoming year. We might feel like it’s a fresh start and we feel the desire to make improvements to our lives. Of course, goals can be started at any time.  The New Year feels like a fun time to set some goals. Creating goals has many benefits regardless of the time of year you make them. Goals help you accomplish the things that are most important to you. They give you something to put your mind, time, and energy too. Goals also help keep you motivated by having something to work towards. Setting goals and dreaming about the things we would like to do can be really fun and inspiring. However, if we do not take steps to make sure we are clear on our goals and how we will achieve them, they often get forgotten.

SMART GOALS

There are many different frameworks that can be used to think about your goals and define them in a clear way that can help you achieve them.  One method of setting goals is a technique called setting SMART goals.  I’m sure many of you have heard of SMART goals before.  But, if you have not SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.

SPECIFIC

When setting a new goal it is important to be specific about exactly what the goal is.  Otherwise, it will be difficult to know when you have completed it. Having a goal that is specific will also help you in being able to plan out how to achieve it. It also feels better working towards a goal when you know exactly what the end result is that you are looking for. You don’t want to set a goal such as “I will save more money this year”.  That could mean saving $20 or $10,000.  You will never be able to say when you have achieved the goal. A better goal might be “I will save one thousand dollars this year”

MEASURABLE

You want to be able to measure how close you are to completing your goal. Seeing that you are making progress on your goal will help you stay motivated. Staying motivated will make you much more likely to achieve your goal. A goal such as saving a certain amount of money is easy to measure. Some goals are more difficult to measure.  So, you may need to assign an arbitrary value to each step of the goal. For example, I am working on sprucing up my kitchen.

To track the goal, I broke down all of the tasks into small parts. I then assigned each part a percentage of completion of the total job. So once the wallpaper border is down, that will be 10% completion. Once the ceiling is painted, that will be another 10%. With something that does not have a certain numeric value to measure, just create your own stats. Don’t get hung up on the exact percentage each task represents!

ACHIEVABLE / ATTAINABLE

It will be super unmotivating to set a goal that you will never be able reach. It’s much better to set goals that stretch a little than goals that stretch so much they will never happen. Consider what else is going on in your life and how much time and effort you can put into the goal on a regular basis. If you were setting a goal to read more, you would not want to set a reading goal that would take an hour a week to achieve when you know at best you could only squeeze in a 1/2 hour. It should be fun to work towards completing your goal. If you set expectations that will be unlikely to achieve you could turn a goal that could make you feel great by making constant progress into a source of stress.

REALISTIC / RELEVANT

Similar to why we want to make sure our goals can actually be achieved we also want to make sure our goals are realistic in terms of our current life situation. For example, I downloaded an app that will apparently get me to do a 4-minute plank within 5 weeks. Considering that I can barely hold a 30-second plank currently, I seriously doubt that by sometime in February I’ll be able to hold a plank for 4 minutes! If you are not familiar with a plank, it’s an exercise position used to strengthen your core strength. There are several different types of plank poses, but even with doing what I consider to be the easiest of them, I truly don’t think it’s realistic that I will be able to hold this position for 4 minutes at the end of the next 5 weeks.

If I can do it, that would be amazing, but I am not going to set that as my goal! So, while this goal may be completely realistic to someone else who is at a higher fitness level than I am, it’s not realistic for me. That is the difference between the achievable part and the realistic part. Whether or not a goal is realistic is more about your current situation and what would be possible for you. Again, we want to push ourselves, but not set ourselves up with goals we can never complete.

TIMELY

It is also important to set a timeframe for your goal. When will you start and complete your goal? You can assign timeframes to certain milestones. With my kitchen example, I have decided that I want to complete the project by the end of March. Based on that end date, I have set time frames for the other tasks that need to be done at some point between now and the end of March so that I can be sure to keep on track to be done with everything by the end of March.

If you wanted to save $1,000 by the end of the year, you might determine that you want to save $20 each week. If you feel like your goal will take an extraordinary time to complete, generally, over a year, you might want to consider breaking the goal down into something smaller to be focused on in a shorter time frame. And then create a new goal which you get closer to your ultimate goal once you have completed the first one.

TAKE THE SMALL STEPS

Setting goals is the easy part!  As much as you come up with a really well-laid-out achievable goal with small steps broken out to help you achieve it if you don’t start actually taking the steps, it’s not going to get you anywhere on your goal. Don’t wait to be motivated to get started, schedule an actual time to work on your goal if you need to hold yourself accountable.  If needed, put it on your calendar in a time slot just like you would any other appointment.

You do not need large amounts of time to work on a goal. Several times I have set a timer for 30 minutes to work on removing the wallpaper border in my kitchen. I don’t have the time right now to do it all at once, but I have been making progress by doing it in little half hours when I have been able to.

USE SOME TYPE OF TRACKING AND REMINDER MECHANISM

Goals often don’t get completed because life gets crazy and our goals get kind of forgotten about. It’s not that they are not important to us.  Sometimes we are just trying to get by and survive each day, letting our goals get put aside. Even though we might go through busy times, we want to make sure that we have some way of keeping on top of our goals. Sometimes, we might be able to make a little bit of progress to keep up moving forwards. But, even when we are not able to work on the goals, having something that will periodically remind you can help us get back on track with our goal as soon as we are able to. I like to use a reminder app on my phone.

Recently I downloaded an app that allows you to break your goal down into milestones that can be checked off individually.  So far, I am really liking this to keep track of a couple of goals I have set for 2023. Goals and reminders can be done on paper too.  Just make sure you have a system that you will definitely use. If you write yourself a note that you need to get back to work on a goal and you never see that note, it’s not going to help you any. So whether you prefer digital or handwritten reminders, just make sure you have a system you can rely on.

Thanks so much for checking in! If you would like to hear the podcast version of this topic check out Lola’s Frugal Life Podcast! Also, be sure to check out my other blog posts on this site!

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