hey it's Abby and today I wanted to talk about one of my most favorite things,
goal setting. I love goals because I think that they work and they are so important for
organization because they help you be more productive and get more things done
so today I'm going to talk about the system I use to set big goals and
accomplish them now I use a specific planner to help me keep track of all my
goals and if you want to get the same planner that I'm showing in this video you
can do that at abbyorganizes.com/planner alright so I like to think of my
goal-setting strategy as kind of an inverted triangle I like to start really
big and broad and then get narrower and narrower and narrower until I am down to
kind of little baby steps so let me talk about what I mean the first thing I do
when I kind of sit down to set some goals is I think about the big picture I
think about you know like where do I want to be five years from now and I
have a little page in my planner that I use it's kind of it's just a blank page
and it allows me to kind of dream big I make lists I make little doodles and I
really try to come up with in an ideal world realistically where do I want to
be in five years and I kind of paint a picture of that on this page so that is
the really broad kind of top of that inverted triangle then I narrow it a
little bit after I've kind of done my dreaming and thinking about where I want
to be in five years I think about just this year so I look
at that list that five-year plan and I say okay what can I do this year to help
those dreams come true you know five years down the road so I use these goal
setting pages in my planner to write down kind of the top only like three or
four things cause I think it's really hard to focus on any more than that but
three or four things that I want to work on this year that will get me moving
toward that long term plan so let's say you know one of my goals is financial
if i say this year i want to save 1200 extra dollars now that's
manageable that goes down on my list and I also can set some action steps for how
I'm going to do that because I can set a goal but if I don't have a plan of how
I'm going to get there it's never going to come to fruition so I could say this
is how I'm going to spend less money or make more money or cut back so that I
can reach that goal this year so that was kind of the beginning of each year I
start broad and I get a little bit narrower and then at the beginning of
each month I narrow it down again so again I have a page in my planner that
helps me list out my focus areas for the month and they're always based on those
yearly goals so if I want to save $1,200 this year for example I know that this
month I need to save $100 and I'm going to write specifically on this goal page
what I'm going to do this month to get to that smaller goal of saving $100 this
month so maybe I'll say we're not going to eat out this month and I'm going to
find some items in my house to sell on Craigslist or Facebook yardsale groups
or something like that so between those two things I'm going to save that extra
$100 so I plan that all out here so I've started big and I've got narrower for
the year and I've got narrower for the month and then I get even narrower for
each week so I also have these weekly spreads in my planner where I can
whittle it down even more so in my monthly goals I said that I was
going to give up eating out so in order to do that I need to make a meal plan
and I need to go grocery shopping so we have enough food at our house so we're
not tempted to eat out so on my weekly plan I will write in you know on Monday
I'm going to do my meal planning and grocery shopping and then maybe on
Thursday I just schedule in that I'm going to gather up some things from
around my house and start getting ready to sell them because those were both
things that I wanted to make progress on on my
monthly plan so it's breaking it down by week wasn't small enough I go one step further and
each day I use a process called time blocking and in my planner that I use
it's all mapped out for me I have my days broken down by hour so I take my
to-do list each day and I put each of the items from the to-do list I
assign it to an hour on my planner and this might seem like it would be
stressful to have your entire day planned hour by hour but for me it's
actually a little bit freeing because if I'm in the middle of a project in the
morning and I remember oh I have to respond to that email instead of running
off and responding to the email and leaving my project and not getting
anything done I know that later in the day I have time scheduled to work on
email so I can leave that for then focus on my project get that done and then
move on so for me time blocking has been really freeing and it's helped me to
accomplish more so then going back to our example I will put maybe from on
Monday from 9 to 9:30 I'm going to make my meal plan and my grocery list and
then from that 9:30 maybe to 11:30 time period I'll do my grocery shopping so
that I'm all prepared for the week I have all my meals planned so we aren't
tempted to eat out and we're saving money so that's how I break it all down
down to even by the hour now what I love about this system is that you know
sometimes our big goals can seem intimidating it can feel intimidating to
put an amount of money that you want to save or an amount of weight that you
want to lose or you know the number of books that you want to read or whatever
that can feel intimidating to make that big goal when you use the system and
break it down into smaller and smaller and smaller parts until all you have to
do during the day is one tiny baby step like making a grocery list suddenly it
becomes more manageable and when you start adding those baby steps on top of
each other day after day after day you'll get to the end of the year and
you'll have accomplished some of those big goals that you
set out to accomplish and they won't be nearly as intimidating so that's the
system I use to set and accomplish my big goals again you want to get the
planner that I use kind of write everything down and keep track of things
from my big goals down to my baby steps you can head to abbyorganizes.com/planner
I can't wait to see you crush all of your goals in the coming year!