How and why to set goals for the year?

Goals for the year are the most useful tool for organizing your life. How to collect your thoughts and feelings in the right direction so that you can write goals for the year?

Goals for the year work when they are connected to your real life values. To connect your goals with your values, do the Wheel of Life exercise — you will understand well what is important to you, and it will be easier to formulate the main decisions that you need to change in your life.

And after that, sit down and write down goals for the year in three areas:

1. Work (business projects, career growth, money),
   
2. Close people (relations in the family, raising children, questions with parents),
   
3. Everything that concerns you personally (health, personal development…).
   

Having written down the goals, think over and write down a plan for each goal — what you need to do in order to move towards these goals step by step.

When you do just that, your daily activities will immediately become more organized and efficient. What else can be done?

One of the simplest and most powerful ways is to hand-write your yearly goals every morning, before you write down your goals for the day. If you write briefly, for yourself, then it will take only 3-4 minutes to write the goals of the year. That is, a minimum of time is spent, and the effect is strongest: you are charged for the whole day, your day is built under the flag of “Goals of the Year”. You’ll be making your to-do list while already looking at your goals for the year, and be sure to include something you might have missed without it. This will organize you to think about your future.

There are other options: do not rewrite the goals of the year by hand, but draw up a table with these goals and sum up the results every day: put, for example, a plus if something has been done in this direction, and a minus if nothing has been done in this direction. Someone instead of plus and minus uses ratings on a ten-point system — find what suits you personally.

Another method to help organize your daily activities and make them more focused on the things that matter most to you is to compare and analyze how the goals of the year relate to the tasks of the day and the tasks of the week. Analyzing this, you will ask yourself such “strange” questions as — for what purpose of the year do I do exercises? breakfast? Going to work?