I found a lot of common themes in my list of lifetime goals. For example, because I love to travel and meet new people, I also love to learn languages. My goal list included speaking fluent German, good Japanese, and enough French and Spanish to be useful when I travel to destinations like South America and northern Africa. To expand on my “Language Goals” page, I thought about different ways I could achieve these goals, like passing international language exams, meeting up with language exchange partners and attending classes at the local college. Of course, learning four languages at the same time is virtually impossible (for me, definitely impossible), so I made a timeline showing how I could achieve these goals over the next ten years.
Daily and Monthly Goals
Another area I found in my goals related to being healthy and fit. To achieve this, I listed targets like eating more fruits and vegetables, pigging out less on chocolate and other treats, going swimming more often and exercising in other ways I enjoy like walking and cycling. These were starting to sound like concrete goals that I could measure, so I made a list of daily and monthly goals for my health and fitness. For example, to measure whether I’d achieved my swimming goal, I set a target of swimming once per week, or four times per month. Until then, I’d been getting to the pool perhaps two or three times a month, but I knew I had enough time in my schedule to be more consistent. When it came to eating healthily, I decided that my minimum standard should be eating two servings of vegetables and one serving of fruit every day. I made a table that looked something like a calendar, with a row for fruit and a row for vegetables (along with rows for other daily goals, like exercising, not eating junk food, and goals from other areas, for example, studying new German vocabulary each day). In the evening, I think over my day and tick the right boxes – one tick in the fruit row if I had an apple, two ticks if I also had a banana. Focusing on small sub-goals like this quickly got me in the habit of doing the things I’d wanted to do.