I’m starting my goal setting early. I wrote this blog for goal setting for 2018. On reflection; I haven’t slipped back into obesity at least, which I was super concerned about as I spent the first six months of 2018 recovering from a broken ankle. Here’s my thinking behind my goal setting for 2019 and why I’m starting early.
Table of Contents
Brainstorm everything I want to do
As an exercise, I listed everything I want to do and then asked myself, What do I have time to do? What is more important? What aligns the most with my personal values? I’ve had to eliminate a lot of extra curricular ideas and I still feel like I have a lot on my plate 🙁 .
I then came up with the following list of things that are really important to me. They are themed around personal, career, family and financial goals:
- Beat the overweight label (personal)
- Maintain a daily meditation practice
- Write a book (career)
- Teach my Nan digital marketing (career and family)
- Launch an app
- Pay off half of my credit card debt (financial)
- Speak at one international conference and take my Mum
- Brew two whole grain beers
- Keep Sydney Testers going
- Create enough content to run a 3 day workshop
Why start the goal setting early?
I’m going to focus on developing my morning habit for the rest of this year. I’m going to get up early, meditate and write before heading off to work. If I can do this for the rest of the year, I’ll be in a good place to expand it come 2019. The green in the following table is this minimum commitment:
I’ve put together an idea of what my ideal morning and ideal week looks like. If I do not put aside time to do things that are important to me, it’ll never get done. I reflected on what I could squeeze in. Unfortunately things like studying Japanese just don’t fit in financially and time wise. So here’s my ideal week to work towards in 2019:
There are some goals that I haven’t put aside any weekly or morning time for but they can’t easily be chipped away with a daily/weekly habit.
Keep goals measurable but hard to achieve
Everyone seems to be talking about Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for goal setting these days. One of the important things with OKRs is that they are hard to achieve. When you reflect back on your goals you should be able to say you hit up to 80% of your objective. If you hit 100% you actually set your goals to easy. For example, I’m going to work towards beating the overweight label but I’m not going to consider myself a failure if I only get halfway there. By listing up my ideal morning/week it gives me an ideal to work towards but by highlighting my minimum commitments I won’t beat myself up if I have a bad week or two.
External Accountability
There’s no point in setting vague goals that you don’t tell anyone about. To ensure external accountability with my goals I’m going to;
- Pay for a personal trainer for a twice a week weight lifting session
- Go climbing with my partner every Wednesday and Saturday
- Pay for a publisher’s time to help keep me focused on writing
How will you go about goal setting for next year? What measures will you take to ensure accountability? Please let me know.
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