Many Christian homemakers have never learned to formulate clear goals.  Well-written goals can make the difference between a good idea and actual accomplishment, so I’m hoping to remedy that with this post!  Here is (I hope) everything you need to know about goals in life: choosing them, articulating them, and pursuing them — including anticipating and dealing with obstacles.  (That sounds like it should be an acronym: “CAP your goals.”)

Learning About Goals in Life: the Basics

Our natural inclination when setting goals is to write something that sounds kind of like this: “be better about quiet times.”  This is definitely something worthy of effort!  But there’s a problem with the way this is worded.

How will you know whether you’ve succeeded? This kind of statement of intent is a good start, but it’s far too vague. Goals need to be much more concrete in order to give us an end toward which to strive, and to allow us to determine whether we’ve succeeded or fallen short.  (This is the primary difference between goals and resolutions, by the way.  Resolutions typically lack the specificity to help you put them into practice.)

Goals should be specific, measurable, time-limited (this goes hand-in-hand with measurable), and realistic. Look back over each of your written goals and examine it for these factors.

• Specific goals provide concrete boundaries for the thing you want to accomplish.

Going back to our quiet time example, what is a “quiet time”? Does it involve prayer? Bible reading? Both? Is your daily planning part of this? See how “quiet time” is rather vague until we define it clearly?

Now, I personally think that it’s okay to just write “quiet time” as a shortcut if you have a clear idea, mentally, of what “quiet time” involves, but make sure you’ve thought through it completely first so that you really are clear on what you’re trying to do.

• Measurable goals (along with time limitations) give you a means of determining success or failure.

Basically, if your goal does not include a number of some kind, you’re still missing a piece. Ask yourself questions like, “how many?” “how often?” “how much?” “how far?” etc. to determine a good measurement for your particular goal.

Some types of goals (usually the most important ones!) are, admittedly, much harder to quantify than others, but it’s important to do this, anyway, or you really don’t know what you’re aiming for. With things like spiritual goals, I have found that the two easiest ways to add measurements are to either:

a) set a goal for the disciplines that will ultimately produce the growth, or
b) set a goal for a certain amount of time to do something or go without doing it.

For example, “go a whole day without complaining” works much better as a goal than “complain less.” We could make our quiet time example measurable in a variety of ways: “Have quiet time 6 or more times per week every week.” “Spend 30 minutes a day on quiet time.” “Have quiet time 90% of the days this year.”

• Time-limited goals are really another aspect to making them measurable. A time-limited goal is simply a deadline.

“I want to do thus-and-such by thus-and-such a date.” With one-time tasks, pure deadlines like this work well. (“by August 12th,” “sometime this year,” etc.)

With routines and habits, time frames tend to work better. (“for 1 week,” “for 1 month,” “all year,” etc.) If you’re attempting to develop a new habit, choose the longest amount of time you think it’s likely to take for the thing to become a habit, and set that as your goal. Then, hopefully, if you meet that goal, the thing will have become a habit and you won’t have to think about it again.

For example, if you think it will take 2 months to develop the habit of a daily quiet time, you might say, “I want to have quiet time 6+ days a week [to allow yourself a little wiggle room while you’re learning] for 2 months.” At the end of 2 months, it will hopefully be an established habit.

Another option is to set multiple goals that are progressive steps. For example, you might set the following three goals, to be worked on consecutively: “I want to have quiet time 5+ days a week for 1 month. I want to have quiet time 6+ days a week for 1 month. I want to have quiet time every day for 1 month.”

Sometimes the deadline is built in, by virtue of either the nature of the goal itself or the nature of the list. If your goal is, “Make Emma’s birthday present,” then the deadline is obviously Emma’s birthday (or birthday party, if that’s sooner), unless you specify an earlier date. If you have a list of “Goals for 2008,” then the deadline for every goal on the list is December 31, 2008 unless you specify an earlier deadline.

• Realistic is the final trait necessary to a well-formulated goal.

A goal may be made unrealistic by the time frame given, the resources available, or by the need for intermediary steps (a variation on time frame issues), so check to be sure you don’t have any of these issues, and adjust as necessary.

For the average person (who is not a full-time student), “Read all 100 books on the recommended classics list, this year” is probably not a realistic goal (assuming you’d be beginning at the beginning of the list). But “Read all 100 books on the recommended classics list in the next 10 years” may well be attainable.

“Learn to downhill ski this year” is not a realistic goal for someone with no access to a ski slope! (That doesn’t mean you have to abandon this altogether. It means that you need to either set this aside for a while, or your goal this year needs to be finding a way to obtain access to a ski slope.)

If you can’t walk up a flight of stairs without becoming out of breath, “Swim the English Channel” is not a realistic goal for any time in the very near future. 🙂 You’ll need to start with something else designed to help you get into shape, such as, “Visit Curves 3 x’s a week for the next 6 months.”

 

Need more?  I’ve provided more thorough explanations of these goal-setting principles under slightly different designations.  The “3 Ds” of effective goal setting are that they should be Definable (specific & measurable), Doable (realistic), and have Deadlines.

Getting Started: Setting the Right Goals

Now that you have an overview of how goals should work, let’s back up.  You don’t want to be all about goals in life that don’t matter to you.  You want to be setting the right goals!

This is more of a preparatory stage, and there’s no one right way to do it.  You want to think about your own life, your own values, where you are and what you want to be.  What is it that you want to accomplish?  Those vague statements of intent we talked about farther up the page might come into play at this stage.

You can also look back in order to look forward.  Especially if you’re doing this at the start of a year, it can be a good first step to look back over the past year and assess.  What happened?  What were the blessings in it?  The struggles?  What did you get accomplished, and what do you wish you had?

You can also consider what are your non-negotiables.  These are the disciplines or habits which (assuming you did them regularly) would make the biggest impact in your life.

All About Goals: Breaking it Down

Once you have a general idea of where you want to head, you need to break it down to make sure it’s specific and realistic.  Goals can be a lot like sports championships.

Where you ultimately want to be is like the SuperBowl or the NCAA championship.  But you don’t start by trying to win the SuperBowl.  Before that you have to make it through the playoff brackets.  And before that, you have to finish the season well.

In like manner, you want to be sure the goals you’re setting are more akin to “winning this week’s” game than to “win the championship that’s 20+ steps away.”

As I’m working on my goals for a month or a year, I like to think through the various areas of my life and ensure that my goals don’t all fall into one category.  For example, I don’t want all of my goals to be about personal growth and none of them to be about building my family.  Or all of them to be about building my family and none of them to be about spiritual growth.  It’s good to make sure they’re spread around.  They may not necessarily be even, though, because you’ll have different needs in different areas during different seasons of life.

Some people also like to have a “word of the year” that provides an overall focus for their life and goals for the year.  This isn’t necessary, by any means, but it’s an option you can consider.  (I’ve done this for a few years and like it, but I could drop it and be okay.  I need the rest of my goals process to keep making progress.)

All About Goals in Life…Real Life

Let’s face it, life doesn’t always go as planned.  The Bible even tells us that we should hold our plans loosely!  Wisdom dictates, then, that part of our planning be to plan for the unplanned.

• Anticipate obstacles.

We all have them.  These hurdles make it difficult to accomplish the things we’ve set out to do.  They might be environmental circumstances, human nature, budget limitations, or something else entirely; it doesn’t matter what the source is; the key is to anticipate them ahead of time (as much as possible) and plan for how to address them.

For example, if your goal is to get up at 7:00 every morning, but you know that you struggle to come awake when the alarm goes off, you may determine that your willpower is not strong enough to consistently overcome the grogginess if you don’t have somewhere specific to be.  You could  choose to account for that in any number of ways.

You could set two alarms, 15 minutes apart, so that by the time the second one goes off you’re not so deeply asleep. You could put the alarm across the room so you have to be up before you can turn it off.  You could set your alarm to go off with music that makes you want to dance.  You could schedule an early-morning phone call with a friend who’s an early riser.  However you choose to tackle it is up to you; the idea is merely to recognize what’s likely to work against you and deal with it up front.

Anticipating that a particular goal is unrealistic can help you break it down to something more realistic.  Let’s say, for example, you set a goal to buy all organic meats.  You wisely take a few minutes, though, to think through each of your goals and how it might go in practice, and realize that’s going to be difficult or impossible to do on your budget.  Rather than bail on that goal, you might scale it back to something like, “make one package of meat per shopping trip organic.”

Sometimes you don’t realize something’s a hurdle until after you’ve been trying to implement your goals for a while, which brings us to another important element of execution:

• Reboot your goals periodically.

It’s totally fine to change your mind.  In fact, I encourage it.  Your goals are a tool.  Their purpose is to serve you in accomplishing what’s important to you.  That means that if your priorities change, your goals might, too.  That’s okay!

Even if you hadn’t “finished” a given list of goals, it’s still okay — good, even — to set them aside and start over if they’re no longer serving you.

Sometimes that’s because what you wanted changed.  Sometimes it’s because you realized what you thought you wanted wasn’t really.  Sometimes it’s because your life changed.  (Maybe you moved, or had a baby, or someone got sick or had an accident.)

And sometimes the goals themselves are just fine, but you need to take stock of where you are and identify and address new hurdles you hadn’t anticipated.

I call this revisiting of my goals “rebooting” them.  My goal (ha!) is to set annual goals each year, and look back over them monthly to set more broken-down goals for the month and reassess.  I usually miss a few months each year — but that’s okay, too.  Imperfect forward movement is still forward movement.

What if You Don’t Get it All Done?

For many people, this is the biggest obstacle.  They’re paralyzed by the fear that they’ll fall short.  Let me let you in on a little secret: I expect to fall short.

Remember what I said about goals being a tool to serve you?  Well, I’ve found that I get more done if I aim high and fall short than if I just set the bar really low for fear of failure.  I’m not sure there’s ever been one single month or year that I checked off the whole list.

Ever.

But every year I get more done because I have the list than I would without it — and that’s the whole purpose. How you think about goals in life will make a big difference in whether you direct them to your purposes or let them enslave you.

In particular, you won’t be able to do everything at once.  I’ve had people ask me that before: “how do you do it all?” The answer is, I don’t!  At least not all at once.  I let things rise to the top or fall by the wayside during various seasons of life.  In the long run, that might mean I get a lot of things done, but I’m not doing them all every week or even every year.

So sometimes what happens is that I set goals in multiple areas of my life and then I’m surprised by which areas rise to the top so the other areas don’t get as much attention, and those goals get deferred.

Tips and Hacks for Making Goals Work

Over the years, I’ve discovered some things that can help as you attempt to put your goals into practice.  Some will apply to everyone; others will apply only to certain goals or certain people.

• When your goals need built-in flexibility, try this.  Goals should be specific, but I found that certain big-project goals needed to be sort-of-specific-but-flexible.  This method’s been serving me well for the past couple of years.
• If you’re doing a word of the year, this can help keep it in front of you.
• These tips can help habit changes stick.
• This post contains a long list of resources that might be helpful for a variety of common goals.

A Final Word

My prayer is that this will help some mamas to hone their written goals into concrete objectives and thus equip you to make significant progress and have great success in your growth in the coming year! May the Lord bless everything you put your hand to as you strive to honor Him!

“Blessed is the man….[whose] delight is in the law of YHWH, and in His law He meditates day and night….whatever he does shall prosper.” (from Psalm 1)

 

Originally published 19 Dec 2007. Updated 17 Jan 2021.