Small Chats: Goal Setting a brief history

Hello Friends~

Time for a brief history of my relationship with goals. I’ve been goal oriented since I was little and was given little planners from my mother’s Scholastic sample box – I Googled them but I couldn’t find them to share. My mother was a Kindergarten teacher and every year they sent her samples of the elementary, middle and high school so I was always super excited to see them. Thanks, Scholastic.

Anyway, these were my first planners and I’ve been obsessed ever since. They, of course, were age appropriate but all had goals and how to set them/achieve them with happy little quotes.

I have tried yearly goals, weekly goals, monthly goals, and most recently, quarterly. I think I like the yearly goals the best – since they can be much vaguer – but you have to set them with the knowledge you might change your mind in the future. A year is a long time, and you might not want to do X in 5 months anymore. Things change.

In addition to the yearly goals, this last year I focused in on monthly goals. Essentially I set vague yearly goals and narrowed them down each month. So if my goal was to make more side money, each month I would work on listings/sticker sets to do that. It was OK and it kept them in front of me, and don’t get me wrong, I accomplished 80% of my goals, the ones I didn’t either became ‘meh’ or something made it so I couldn’t or I just sucked at it – like weight loss. It happens. I feel good though on what I got done, I mean I made SO MANY THINGS this year and it was great!

I have already started setting goals for next year, and most of them are education and learning with the hopes of year-end projects. I mean I could just learn the crap out of stuff and be done by March but I doubt it.  I am excited to do it too, so I think that is important.

If you haven’t already, be writing down ideas for goals for next year. You can also carry over goals that didn’t get complete that you still want to do.

For me, next year I am trying a more week based goal system. Yes, here are my year goals, but I want to narrow them down by week and set expectations and deadlines on my calendar. My hope is, by putting more serious deadlines on things, I can plot out what needs to get done each week better. For example, I really want to get back into stickers, so I am setting a hard release date in my calendar with the week before being the get-shit-done-week. I am not good with deadlines, in fact just writing that makes me cringe. I don’t like my hobbies to be work, I do things when I want, ugh. Whine. etc. But I want to get back into it and I think putting down this is what I want to do and be consistent with it again, I’ll see that growth.

I have some ideas in the back of my head for maybe goals too – for example, I would love to do a subscription service of some kind. I have no clue what that looks like. But I would love to have a specific area that is devoted to connecting to peeps and each of us helping each other, then I can put all my stuff in there, and maybe other people want to join in. Yes, I realize I am describing a FB group but I do not like FB and want to find a better solution. But it’s just a twinkle in my head right now, so it’s not on my list yet.

You can add to your goals throughout the year too – nothing is set in stone. Like I said your thoughts, wants and circumstances change over a year, its okay to readjust. I think the middle of the year is a great time to be like, hm is this working?

TDLR: Goal setting is personal, do whatever you want and set them whenever doesn’t have to be at the start of the year. I set yearly goals then adjust as needed. This year I am focusing on lining up my goals with the weeks of the year. 52 weeks of awesome.

I will share my goals once we get a bit closer. I was going to touch on SMART goals, but I like vague yearly goals better, I should think of an acronym for that and own it. If you know the direction, you can figure out the path~