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So Christmas is over and we survived the holiday shopping craze. It’s time to start thinking about the New Year! What are some new habits or things you want to change? Do you have something that you would like to continue to do well or do even better this upcoming year? The possibilities are endless. How do you want your 2020 to look? Are you prepared to do what’s necessary to stick to your goals?
5 Tips to Help You Plan Your Goals EFFECTIVELY & Stick to Them
This is my favorite time to not only establish all of my goals for the New Year, but to start implementing them as well. There are a few tips I’ve picked up that have helped me stick to my goals. I want to share these tips with you as well as some of my personal goals for 2020!
1. Keep your goals where you can SEE them
Just writing goals down and putting them away somewhere rarely helps me. It’s actually very easy for me to forget what I even wrote this way! Life can get so busy and it really helps to have your goals somewhere you can see them without even trying. I highly recommend using a dry-erase board (I LOVE these things) to write your goals and hang it where you will see it often, if not daily, without even trying.
Affordable dry erase board + materials options!
I personally hang mine in my work area for motivation to remember my “why”. This helps a lot if you tend to be “all over the place” sometimes. Of course, if you have numerous goals for the year, you don’t want to fill up your dry-erase board and overwhelm yourself. This brings me to the next tip: planning for shorter time periods.
2. Plan for Shorter Time Periods
Fact: a year is a long time to plan specific goals. It just is! Anything can happen within a year’s time, anything can happen within a month’s time! We’re human, we know that sometimes life can happen, causing our personal goals to change. Setting goals for shorter time periods helps to stay reasonably flexible with your progress as well as be prepared for any surprises that may come along during the year. This means less pressure for you. Can’t say no to that.
I love to write my tentative major goals for the entire year in my planner and put my three month quarterly goals on my dry-erase board. Basically, you only want to put the goals on the dry-erase board that you are absolutely focusing on for that time period. This will cut your overwhelm in half (or even more) if that’s an issue for you.
3. Include a Realistic Action Plan with Your Goals
Instead of just listing your goals and leaving the rest up to chance, make them even more achievable with action plans for each goal. How will you achieve the goal? What exactly are the steps that need to be taken? This one is a game changer! For each of your goals, make a few bullet points with each step that needs to be taken to achieve it and check them off as you go. This helps you to feel more accomplished and provides self motivation as you get closer to achieving the final goal.
4. Hold Yourself Accountable
Motivation from outside sources doesn’t last forever. You know that, I know that. Checking in with yourself on the regular is a great way to maintain your self motivation when it comes to achieving your goals. And keep it real!
For example, one of my small goals for the New Year is to get back to drinking at least 90 oz of water daily. To hold myself accountable, I plan to keep a water journal for the entire month of January where I’ll just write how much water I drank each day. On January 31, I’ll look back over the month and see if there were any days I didn’t meet my daily goal. If I didn’t, I’ll be honest with myself about why I didn’t meet my goal and what changes need to be made to stay on track. Apply this to your action plan for a surefire motivational boost. Involving others always works too if you need an accountability partner or want the check-ins to be more fun!
5. Remember that you can’t plan everything
The whole reason for setting goals is not to put pressure on yourself. Have fun with it! Be intentional about how you want your new year to look and be realistic about what you can currently do to make sure that happens. Usually, I make plans and things have to go EXACTLY as I planned. As we said before, that doesn’t always happen. So please don’t set goals and obsess over them trying to be specific about every detail. You never know, something even more awesome could happen than you even planned! Then you’ll have to go back and make your goals even bigger.
This new year is yours. If you’ve set your goals or are in the process of setting them right now, I want to remind you of something. You can do absolutely anything that you set your mind to and take action to achieve. Take the tips above (especially the action plan tip because nothing happens without action!) and use them to your advantage. Please let me know if they helped you and, hey, you can even share these tips if you feel like someone else needs them!
How do you plan your New Year goals?
Great advice, particularly keeping them visible and shorter time periods. If they’re out of sight, they’re easily out of mind and a year feels like such a long time to achieve something… until you’re 9 months in and realise you haven’t made a start!
Author
You are so right! I’ve definitely done that before thinking that I “had all year”.
That’s a great ideas. I was looking forward to achieving my goals for 2020. This will helps me a lot. Thanks for sharing!!
Author
Thanks Jenisha! I’m glad that you found the tips helpful. You got this!
Excellent tips on goal-setting thanks for sharing this. I really feel holding your responsible for your goals is the key to actually achieving them. Enjoyed reading this one.
#2 very much applies to me due to my short attention span haha! I also like number 5. It reminds me that I’m not a genius and I’m only human. Great post!
Author
Yesss those are honestly the main two that I struggle with the most. It’s easy to want to plan down to a T, then when you see it all, you want to do it all (which is a call for disaster with us that are apart of the short attention span club).
Such good tips! I think keeping them in sight is definitely important – all too easy to forget something or push it aside otherwise!
Author
Thank you Katie! The dry erase board really helped me. After I started writing my quarterly goals and monthly goals on it, I’m not sure how I was surviving without it!
Really great article I am going to try some of these tips
Author
Thank you for reading! Let me know how the tips work for you!
Great tips for reaching goals. I especially like the planning for a shorter time frame. That can also mean creating and reaching numerous small goals throughout the entire year.
Author
Absolutely! I love that the smaller time frame approach aligns better with your actions throughout the year rather than having a broad list of goals for the entire year. Thank you for reading!
I love these tips! The most important thing to me is having goals where I can see them – I have to write things down or else I slack at completing them!
Author
Me too girl!! I’ll completely either forget or keep putting it off to another day. I’m glad you enjoyed!
Really enjoyed the post Truemenda. Love the jumper you are wearing in the photos too.
I think your fourth point regards holkding yourxself accountable is especially important to remember as it’s so easy to look for a scapegoat when we don’t achieve things.
Author
Thank you! I’m so glad you enjoyed it. I definitely agree with you; no matter what the circumstances may be, I always ask myself first what could I have done differently to still reach my goal? Such a great point!
I love these suggestions! I feel like people fail their New Years resolutions because they pack so many ideas into a mental list, not realizing how unrealistic their expectations are! These are all great tips to avoid that problem – thanks for sharing!
Author
You’re so right! I used to be so guilty of that until I got tired of looking at my resolutions at the end of the year like…what have I done??? Thank you for reading Samantha!!
Great ideas! I love your pictures. 🙂