Writing Effective New Year’s Goals

Sample Goal CardWe are now a number of weeks in to the new year. How are you doing with your New Year’s Resolutions?

Every New Year’s Day, I write my goals for the year. True, David Allen recommends that rather than writing resolutions, you muck out. If you’re not yet proficient with GTD, or if you’ve had bad experiences with New Year’s resolutions, try mucking out. If you want to give goals a try, keep reading.

Before we get down to wordsmithing goals, how do you choose what to focus on? In our time and place, we each likely have 100s of projects pulling at us. Some are short-range, Quadrant I, activities. Some are long-range, Quadrant II, activities. One way I’ve found to reduce the buzzing and keep a life balance, is to start with my roles1.

For each role, I ask myself what goal I want to focus on this year. For example, I have eight roles: Business Owner/Instructional Designer, Saw, Mother/Wife, Creative Writer, Pack Leader (I have dogs), Extended Family Member, Giving Back, and Homemaker2. Remember that it may not be appropriate or feasible to write a goal for every one of your roles every year3.

With your list of roles before you, draft your goals. By now, you’ve probably heard from many sources to make your goals specific. A lot of work environments like SMART goals. This is a format that works for me:

• What: 
• When: 
• How: 
• Proof: 

For example, my 2014 goal in my role as Creative Writer is to honor my creative writing muse. That’s the “what”. For this particular goal, my deadline is 31 December 2014. For the “how”, I brainstorm some actions and write down what comes to me right then. I’ve found it’s not useful to attempt an exhaustive list here. For the “proof”, I wrote “blog posts.”

Now, pull out that box of old business cards, the cards with your old job title, and write each goal on the back of a separate card.

Fan out your newly minted deck of goals. Imagine yourself, around December, being able to tick off each of these goals. Does that picture excite you? Good! If not, go back and rework the goals that leave you tepid. This is not the time to be mousy.

The key for me in writing the year’s goals is what I put down for proof.

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1 First Things First, Stephen R. Covey, p. 118

2 Yes, I know this list isn’t grammatically parallel. Give yourself permission to use what works.

3 First Things First, p. 126