Each new year's beginning is a time for setting goals and New Year's resolutions, which usually also include financial goals. For the majority of people, though, they tend to be forgotten by the end of the first month. On my writer's blog, I've written an article in three parts that is summed up bellow, full of tips to help you not only to set your goals, but also consistently pursue them along the year.
Set:
Organize:
Monitor:
- Keeping track of goals and keeping goals on track
- Breaking goals into smaller tasks
- Be specific and Make it Financial
- Goals month by month
Achieve:
- Accountability and evaluation of goals
- Electing your Top Priority Goals
- Dealing with the unexpected
Starting with pen and paper
The first step is to write down all your goals for the year to sort them later. You can start by dividing a blank piece of paper in four or more sections.
Write down all the areas of your life you think that need some improvement, for instance; write down relationship goals, health goals, financial goals, etc, and begin writing things you would like to do in each of those fields.
When you do this exercize, you will find that you have more goals that you think you had.
Prioritizing and organizing your goals
Having in mind that only one person, that is, you, will need to acomplish all those goals, it's a good idea listing them one after another, and insert a classification tag containing its category before it. You can use a simple () or [] markup for each category. The tag is useful to monitor the acomplishment of your goals by area.
Once you've done that, your goals are ready to be rearranged in priority order.
Goal Purgatory List
Now you are ready to start working on your goals according to your daily schedule.
Most goals depend upon one's dedication to it to be achieved, but, eventually, they may be impacted by the action, or lack of it, of others. Those goals may be important, thus you won't want to keep them out of your list.
It's no usual to find financial examples for this situation that are not short term, but imagine you need to start a balance spreadsheet for planning your next month spending and you need to wait on someone else sending you the correct data, which is being postponed; that puts your goal in the Purgatory List because, although you may be forced to set it aside for a while, you don't want to keep it out of sight and therefore won't send it to the bottom of your Goal List.
Another thing to have in mind is that a goal can be or involve an ongoing activity. In such case, even when you have reached your milestone, it's better not to cross them out of your goal list because you'll need to maintain the habit, what comsumns some time of your day, week or month.
A case of doubt may also occur when you're not sure a goal is worth it or not when compared to your overall plan.
So, I divided the Purgatory of Goals in 'keep it' (monthly/weekly/daily), 'depend mainly upon me', 'depend on others' and 'maybe' goals.
Keeping track of goals and keeping goals on track
The title of this section must have reminded you of Martha Stewart's motto*; I'm huge fan of her organization tips. Now we are going to see how to monitor your goals and make sure you don't give them up along the year.
*"A place for everything and everything on its place."
With your Purgatory of Goals list divided in those four categories, start to look for your already stablished routine through the preliminary list and put them under the 'keep it' group only as a reminder and do the same for the other goals, ordering them by priority.
Breaking goals into smaller tasks
We can analyse each goal's feasability in more detail by breaking them into smaller tasks.
For goals that depend upon others, or any other goal that can't be broken into smaller tasks, you can ask yourself: what can I do about it? And come up with ideas to help achieve it. These ideas become tasks that you'll act upon.
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