January Status Check: Progress Towards Goals
Progress Towards Goals Jan Update
This update is a bit late because I wasn’t planning on sharing these with you. However, research tells us that people who share their goals publicly are 65% more likely to achieve them! I also get many questions about how I track projects and get work done; I’ll use these monthly updates to give you a peek behind the scenes.
I don’t tend to set resolutions each year, but I reflect on the past year and think about what I hope to achieve or do in the following year. From there, I break big projects into small, doable tasks that I track in Trello. I also establish a theme for the year, and any projects should connect to the year’s theme. Setting a theme and having your projects point back to your theme increases the likelihood that you’ll see progress. Often, we give up on our goals too soon or have too many goals that are disconnected, making it challenging to see progress, especially in a short amount of time. Create cascading goals, and you’ll see an impact much faster.
Project Management Tools
I use Trello to track personal goals and projects. At work, I use Clickup, a fine project management tool, but I’ve found that it’s much more than I need for personal use.
If you aren’t familiar with Trello, it’s a simple project management tracker and FREE. I create a board to track each project, and then I often have additional boards that track how individual projects progress toward even more significant goals. I create a status titled celebrate, where each task goes after it’s finished. Whenever I make a purchase, I pull a task out of the celebrate column into complete. This keeps me motivated and accountable. For example, if I want to get a massage and realize that I don’t have any tasks in the celebratory status, I will focus and complete a task to schedule my massage. For some of you, that might seem overly strict, and that’s okay. When establishing and tracking your goals, you need to understand and implement what motivates you. What will keep you going when things are hard, or you don’t see immediate results?
We often don’t reach the significant goals we set for ourselves because we don’t realize how many small and consistent actions we need to take to achieve that goal. We also waste time thinking about what we should do next instead of just looking at the list of actions we already laid out and doing the next one.
Key Goals for 2024:
The theme for 2024 is Joyful.
Pizza Project 52:
My husband loves to make pizza and thinks he might want to do something in the food industry as a job in the future. We decided to create this project as a testing ground. He’s experimenting with many different types of pizza and toppings and has to develop systems and processes to ensure everything runs smoothly. If nothing else, we thought this would be fun, connecting to the theme of being joyful this year. We’d done a handful of pop-ups in the previous year, and while they were fun, we wanted something that didn’t require us to pack half our house into our outback, which meant bringing the people to us.
Progress:
In January, we hosted 16 new people. Our January numbers indicate that we’ll easily reach the goal of 52 new people by the end of the year.
A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words Project
I run a publishing company, Reading Tree Publishing, with my brother, and I want to publish more books this year. I also wanted to create and release The Breakdown Creative Planning School to address a need that I see every day in people of all ages. Knowing that two specific goals were to publish and sell more books and create and launch a course, I determined that the common product was to create words and pictures. So I decided to play off the phrase, “a picture worth 1,000 words,” and determined I would “write” 240,000 words this year. I track this every 1,000, meaning I can write 1,000 words or create a picture—both actions leading towards reaching larger goals.
Progress:
I completed 23,000 words/pictures in January, indicating that I’m on track. I’ll reach the annual goal if I meet 20,000 words each month.
100 Things Project:
While I’m great at organizing projects, I could improve at organizing things. Add to that that we moved three years ago and have been renovating our home ever since. Renovation always means extra stuff like tools, supplies, and disrupted spaces. After not unpacking some of our things for three years, it made me wonder, do we need them/want them?
My way of dealing with clutter has always been to get rid of things. The 100 Things project means that we need to evaluate what we have throughout the year.
For each item in the house, we must decide if we still want/need it; if the answer is no, it must go. And for each thing that goes, that counts as one towards the 100 things project.
We also have 50 lbs of rice, a gallon of protein powder, and an endless supply of noodles. Before you get concerned, we haven’t had all these things for three years, but they have been sitting around for a while because we forgot that we had them. I’m adding protein powder to my morning oatmeal until I make my way through the gallon jug, and then that will count as one thing towards the 100 things project; you get the point.
Overall, the goal is to reduce clutter and to be more intentional about what we have and why.
Progress:
In January we went after this hard and removed or used 22 things. This goal will likely get more challenging as we move through the year, as we went after all of the easy wins in January.
What are is your theme for the year, and how are you tracking and making progress?