This year I started the habit of setting weekly goals for myself. I have identified some categories which are priorities for me and I am setting small goals in each of these categories. This should enable me to make at least a small progress in all areas that are important for me.
Monthly goals seem not to work so well for me. But a week is a good period of time to overlook. It is not too long and not too short and since I am doing weekly reflections anyways, it is not a big deal to add the habit of goal setting to the time I anyways use at the end of my week.
I also do monthly reflections but in a more focused way – there is just too much happening in a month! I focus on two categories: my artsy life and learning. I try to keep track of my progress in arts and learning, so that I could see at the end of a longer period what I have accomplished.
What I do see in both categories is that I jump around a lot, switching between projects and topics and not really moving forward in one direction. It would be nice to have something that I can stick to and I hope that playing the guitar could be such a thing. After all I am doing it for more than 6 months now.
I also hope that setting weekly goals in 8 priority categories will also help me to stick something. For now my priorities look like this:
- Housework
- Friends
- Family
- Guitar
- Sports
- Philosophy
- Social Butterfly Radar (my meetup group)
- Die Multipotentialistin (my primary blog)
So for each categories I put up 1-3 to-dos or goals that I should do during that week. So far it works well although I did not reach the goals in all categories: Philosophy and Sports are doing pretty bad. Whereas housework and guitar seem to see a good time.
I will follow these habits for a few more weeks and provide an update on how it goes. In the meantime I am curious to learn: What time frame works best for you to set goals? Do you think of my strategy as goal setting or to-do-list? And what is the difference between the two?
Leila Yuliyah 