Well, it’s 2025, and yet again, I’m asking where did another year go? Are you the person who sets new goals for the year and starts off strong in January, only to fade in February and give up altogether? I hear that. I’ve been infamous for flopping hard on failure, but I’ve also been known to blow some of my goals out of the water. Let’s make this year the latter! I’ll walk you through some simple goal planning strategies so you can make 2025 the best year yet!
We’ve heard the phrase New Year, New Me. I don’t think we necessarily need to remake who we are, but I do believe that we are better when our homes and family are in order. It’s really hard to feel good when there’s discourse in our house or clutter everywhere we look. The good news is, it’s never too late to get our homes in order. In this blog, I will share five simple steps to set a goal for your home and family and achieve it. I’ll skim the surface of my strategy, but if you’re interested in diving deeper, check out my book, Manage Your Busy Hive or one of my workshops, “Grow Your Goals”.
Define Your Problem
When we’re setting a goal, we need to narrow down what our main problem is. We may look at a situation and think it’s way too overwhelming to tackle, but when we look closer, we realize there are lots of smaller problems creating one large one. Think about the contributing factors to your large problem, and pick ONE of those to tackle first.
I know you probably want to get moving and tackle all of the problems in your life, but that’s unrealistic and a great way to fail at trying to achieve success. Once you tackle a small problem, you can move onto another small problem. Before you know it, your largest problem will no longer be an issue because you’ve slowly treated each contributing factor.
If you aren’t sure where to start, check out my free goal setting download or, as I mentioned before, my book and workshop will walk you through this task step-by-step.
Timelines Keep Us On Track
Now that you’ve chosen a smaller goal, we need to set a timeline to tackle it. We want to make the timeline feasible. Setting a goal to tackle six months from now will probably be too long because we tend to push it off until we don’t even realize half a year has passed us by and we didn’t make any progress. Making the timeline too short may set us up for failure because we need enough time to make a plan and implement it. I can’t necessarily give you a magic number, but depending on what your goal is, giving yourself a few weeks to achieve it is typically a good place to start.
Treat Our Goals Like an Important Appointment
After setting your goal and the timeline to achieve it, we’ll need to schedule how we’re going to tackle this. Suppose you want to declutter your basement. Your kids may have activities from 4:00 PM until 9:30 PM on Mondays and Wednesdays, but they only have one practice on Tuesday and nothing on Thursday. Knowing this, you should block off Tuesday and Thursday nights to dedicate time to decluttering. Wherever you put your family events (a digital calendar, dry erase board, or paper calendar), your goal needs to go there, too. If you have a shared family calendar, put your work time in the calendar and have a conversation with your family letting them know how important it is to respect that time and allow you (or all of you if it’s a family goal) to work on it.
It’s also important to block out a sufficient amount of time. If you only have 20 minutes a night, decluttering your basement will not happen because that’ll be just enough time to go through one pile and make no progress. You should think about blocking out enough time that you can get things done but not too much time that you’re going to give up out of frustration, impatience, and exhaustion and forget the project altogether.
Reward the Successes
In order to keep our eye on the prize, we need to celebrate the little wins. If you stuck to your set times and successfully worked toward your goal for multiple days, give yourself a tiny reward. I think it’s important to recognize the progress, but we want to be careful with what we’re using as a reward. If you’re decluttering, it’s probably not a good idea to reward yourself with a shopping spree because you’re just going to hinder the progress of getting rid of things. If you’re working toward getting healthier, treating yourself to a milkshake may knock you off track. We want to focus on healthy rewards like allowing yourself a 20-minute break from the work to scroll on social media, take a girls trip with friends, paint your nails to match your favorite outfit, draw a hot bubble bath, or take yourself out to the movies. Things we want to stay away from are habits that can tend to be unhealthy for us, such as going out drinking or rewarding ourselves with comfort food. These types of rewards can cause other bad habits.
Reflect On Your Progress
In order to reward ourselves, we need to be sure we’re reflecting on our progress. After working on your goal for a while, stop and reflect on the progress about midway through. Are you gaining progress? If not, why? Reflect on how it’s going and make changes as needed in order to get back on track. We want to reflect throughout the journey so we don’t get to the finish line when it’s too late to make changes and we haven’t achieved our desired outcome. This causes frustration and defeat, so be sure you’re checking in with yourself regularly to prevent the desire to give up.
If your plan is working, continue doing what you’ve been doing! If it isn’t working, don’t focus on the negative. Instead, take the failure and refine the plan in order to make it better. We can’t get defeated by things that aren’t working. Failures are just the first attempt at something amazing.
To recap, narrow your problem down to smaller parts so you can tackle your goals bit by bit. Once you decide what you want to achieve, set a realistic timeline of when you’re going to achieve this goal. Once you’ve set your timeline, add when you’re going to tackle the goal into your calendar and treat it like an important appointment you can’t miss. Discussing this with your family will help you be successful too with their encouragement and support. Throughout your work, remember to celebrate successes with things you enjoy that are healthy for your self care. Finally, be sure you’re checking your progress along the way. If things are going well, awesome! If you’re not getting the results you wished for, reflect on what you’re struggling with, tweak it, and continue to tackle your plan.
As always, I’m here to support you on your journey of creating beauty and order in a chaotic world. Feel free to check out my other resources on my website at thecraftybcompany.com, sign up for our mailing list (which you’ll get a free 4 week meal planner with recipes), or contact me if you’re interested in support with personalized consultation. Don’t forget to pollinate joy to others who may find this blog helpful, and be sure to find me on facebook, listen to my podcasts, or watch my YouTube videos so I can continue to make content for you and others. Take care.
