No, I’m not talking about Christmas again. I’m taking an online class this month and part of the class homework is learning to set goals. Daily goals, weekly goals, yearly goals. You pair up with a classmate and go over your goal lists, and your “coach” keeps you on track when you get off course.

Personally, I love this concept–even as I hate it. My coach has already had to reel me in a day this week when I placed other things above my goal of writing daily. So after I’d finished all the things I “had to do” before I could write, even though I was exhausted, I wrote–because I knew I had to answer to my coach as for why I hadn’t otherwise. And because she scares me LOL I wasn’t about to do that!

I love daily goal lists because this class has taught us to keep them realistic. That load of laundry is going to take longer than five minutes. You know it is. But instead of beating myself up about spending more time on it, I’ve now learned to keep a log of how long a task takes me, so the next time it winds up on my goal list, I don’t over-schedule and feel bad about not getting everything done. The class has helped me make realistic time-management decisions, and change my attitude. (Note: It’s a daily struggle with the attitude change but I’ll get there!)

For instance on my daily goal list? It sounds silly but a daily goal is to eat a salad for one meal. That’s it. Just…eat a salad. Not something calorie-heavy and bad for me but something healthy.

A weekly goal is to make it to the store once a week to stock up on salads, fruits and healthy snacks rather than waiting until we run out of everything and hating the entire process of dragging a cart-load through the supercenter.

A yearly goal? Those are more writing related but one is to read at least one non-fiction book per month, on top of all the other books I read in a month’s time. (OT: Any suggestions???? I’m getting a late start this month!)

So what about you??? Are you a list/goal maker? Do you keep things realistic or do you plan and plot and then kick yourself when you fail because Super Woman couldn’t accomplish the list? Have you ever made a daily, weekly and yearly goal list?

If you have any secrets for success, I’d love to hear them!

Kay

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 8:06 am and is filed under Kay's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.