Planning Your Life By Way of Goals

Rebuilding

May 7

Written By

Let’s recap.

First, we decided we wanted to create a new life for ourselves.
Next, we expressed gratitude for the life we’ve lived up to this point.
Then, we envisioned what we want our new life to look like.
After that, we researched what it would take to achieve that life.

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Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Now, we plan.

Setting The Goal

Planning the life we want is really about detailed goal setting. Big, lofty, and general goals sound great but are so overwhelming they often don’t get accomplished. Instead, providing details to make SMART goals is the most effective way. Have you heard of SMART goals? I’m sure you have. They were originally created by businessmen as a synchronized way for project managers to set and accomplish project objectives. They’ve since become very popular and been adopted by businesses and individuals alike to accomplish a myriad of goals. Since I’m not the creator of this strategy, I’ll describe it and then link to more resources (at the bottom of this post) for further research if you need it.

SMART goals are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Specific means the goals are detailed, including components like the objective, who’s responsible, and the steps needed to achieve them. Measurable means the goals are quantified, which asks by how much and with which benchmarks. Achievable means just that - it’s a goal you can actually, realistically accomplish. Relevant means achieving the goal will add a tangible benefit to your life. Time-Bound means the goals have deadlines or time parameters built-in.

Let’s use an example to see SMART goals in action. Let’s say Lisa wants to become a lawyer. We don’t want Lisa just saying her goal is to become a lawyer. No. We want her to set herself up for success! So instead, she’s going to use the SMART acronym to set her goal.

Specific: Lisa wants to be a family lawyer. This means she’ll need to take the LSAT, apply to law school, be admitted to law school, start and complete 3 years of law school with family law as a focus, then study for and pass the bar exam.

Measurable: Each step above will have very obvious benchmarks - getting the required LSAT score needed to get into the desired law school; submitting law school applications; receiving acceptance letters and responding to the law school of choice; graduating from law school; receiving a score of pass on the bar exam.

Achievable: are each of these steps things Lisa can achieve? Yep! She has the will, intellect, time, and energy to achieve them.

Relevant: completing each of these steps gets Lisa that much closer to being a lawyer. And being a lawyer is Lisa’s calling, so it will benefit her mentally and spiritually to be doing something she loves and is destined to do. Additionally, becoming a lawyer will financially support her and any family she may have.

Time-Bound: The good thing about the goal of becoming a lawyer is that it inherently has time parameters. The LSAT has a suggested completion of a few weeks. Law school is set to take 3 years. And the bar exam has a suggested study time frame of a few months, with results a few months after that.

With the SMART goal strategy, goals that seem lofty and overwhelming (like becoming a lawyer) become much more digestible as smaller steps. Where you can, try to implement SMART goals for each and every category of life you want to see improvement in.

Focusing On Just A Few

This is something I’ve struggled with myself. I’ve set out to transform my life, in many areas. That’s a LOT of work. From career and finances to health and recreation, I have a lot of goals. And I want to achieve them all as soon as possible so that I can realize my dream life. Right? Right. But that’s just unrealistic - not that each individual goal is unrealistic, but trying to work on each individual goal at the same time is unrealistic.

By breaking our dreams down into goals and those goals into smaller, more specific steps, we set ourselves up for more realistic achievement. Yet, we have only so much time, energy, and attention left after our usual obligations like work and family to achieve those goals. To resolve this there are a few different suggestions - from accomplishing something tiny towards each goal every day, to just focusing on 3-4 goals at a time, to only focusing on one at a time.

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I personally like focusing on 3-4 goals at a time. I decided to change my life at the end of last year. So I made a 12-month plan spanning all of 2021 to accomplish those goals. Some may take the entire year (or even multiple years), like romance or home goals. Some may take just one month or quarter, like health or finance goals. I put each tiny step of each goal on a quarterly planner (you can find the one I used here). Then I just focused on the ones in the quarter I was in. I was able to not worry about the others because I knew they were planned for and that I’d get to them in due time.

Also important, allow goals that are related or benefit from one another to work together. For example, if I have goals to get a new job and to save more money, these may directly impact one another. If my new job comes with a salary increase, I’ll likely readjust my budget to account for that new increase. While setting my new budget, I can also implement my savings goal - increase it, diversify it, etc. Just like that, I will have worked on two goals at once.

Being Flexible

My best friend and I always have this discussion - about how fiercely loyal to be to our goals and life plan. We both have (varying degrees) of Type-A personality traits. I mean, we met at Stanford, after all. We like to have goals and plans. And we like to stick to them. But it’s important to constantly re-evaluate our goals and our progress towards those goals. We don’t want to hold ourselves to goals that no longer seem achievable or relevant.

In using the example of law school, let’s say Lisa doesn’t earn an LSAT score that will get her into law school or doesn’t earn grades to graduate from law school or doesn’t pass the bar exam, well then she has two options. She can keep trying to achieve that step, perhaps using valuable time and resources that could be applied elsewhere but eventually accomplishing the goal. Or she can decide that this goal is no longer beneficial and instead pursue a master’s degree or enroll in a certification program. We don’t want to be slaves to our goals nor end up trapped in the status quo because we can’t be flexible and adaptable.

Setting goals is the step in the process that prepares us for taking action. We want to make our dreams actionable. We want to take action steps toward achieving the life we want. Take a few days and make an action plan. If you need some help, I actually made some planner printables and wrote an article about the best way to use them.

How are you feeling about making this plan?

References

Boogaard, Kat. “An Explanation of SMART Goals and How to Write Them.” Work Life by Atlassian, Atlassian, 9 Apr. 2021, LINK
Free, Tet | Productive and. “How to Successfully Juggle Multiple Goals.” Productive and Free, Productive and Free, 21 Mar. 2021, LINK
Giolando, Elaina. “3 Best Things to Do When You Have Too Many Goals.” The Muse, The Muse, 19 June 2020, LINK
By the Mind Tools Content Team, et al. “Eight Common Goal-Setting Mistakes: – Achieving Your Dreams the Right Way.” From MindTools.com, LINK
Reynolds, Adam. “How Many Goals Should You Have?” MACKEY, 27 Sept. 2017, LINK