It should come as no big surprise that I’m a big fan of bullet journaling. But did you know that bullet journaling can also help you keep your New Year’s Resolutions? Bullet journals aren’t just useful for keeping track of your schedule and tracking what books you read. They’re great for planning out your goals!
Let’s first talk about the reasons that most New Year’s Resolutions fail.
Goals and Habits
A lot of goals involve habits. It seems like the number one resolution on everyone’s list is to “get in shape”. How many times has this one been on your list? But getting in shape isn’t something you can just check off your to-do list. Getting in shape not only involves working out consistently but also eating better.
Those are habits you have to build slowly and they take time. In order for a habit to stick, you have to do it daily for anywhere between 21 and 66 days. And if you’re working out every other day, randomly, whenever you can fit it in, it’s going to be extremely hard to make this habit stick.
If there’s no consistency, it’s much harder to build a habit. The first thing that often happens is that you’re too busy to work out one day and then you don’t feel like it the next. And then after a few days you decide to get back to it, and it goes well for a few more days or maybe a week.
And then the same thing happens again. By then, you either try one more time or you give up, but either way, by February, that resolution is already down for the count. Sound familiar?
Failure to Plan
Another reason that resolutions fail is because there’s no plan behind them. Sticking with fitness, let’s say the resolution is to “lose weight”. It’s a common New Year’s Resolution, but there’s no plan behind it. Losing weight involves both working out and eating healthier. But without a goal of how often to exercise or what dietary changes you want to make, there’s no clear path to keeping your resolution.
Out of Reach
The third reason that resolutions fail is because they’re not attainable. It’s not to say that they won’t ever be attainable, but it may take longer than just one year to accomplish. For instance, if your resolution is to “buy your own home”, but you currently don’t have any money saved up for it, it may take more than just one year to make this resolution come true. But that doesn’t mean that this resolution should be given up on, it just needs to be approached differently.
So how do we keep our resolutions?
Make Time For Habits
First, make time for them. If you have a resolution that involves a habit, you have to make time for it. And not just “whenever.” You need to schedule it. This may mean that you get up half an hour earlier so that you have time to focus on your goal. Or set a timer on your phone for the same time each day so that you stop whatever you‘re doing to focus on what you want to accomplish. Some days, time just gets away from us, and we get wrapped up in what we’re doing and “forget” to make time.
Start a Habit Tracker
Second, track them. Sometimes we need a reminder that is in our face in order for us to make a habit stick. There’s nothing like seeing how many exercise days you’ve missed in a row to get you to focus on doing better. And tracking it on a daily basis with a little check mark or coloring in a box, acts as another form of reinforcement daily. You can either make separate trackers for each habit you want to work on, or you can add all the habits in a table to track. Add these trackers to each month of your bullet journal and you’ll definitely notice a difference.
Be SMART About Your Goals
For other resolutions, you need to plan! And in order to plan, you need to be SMART! I’m talking SMART goals. (Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time based.) The more specific your goals are, the easier it is to create a plan to get there. If your goal is to save money, you need to be specific and say how much money you want to save.
This goal will be measurable as you’ll be able to see how much money you’ve saved in your bank account. The last three letters of SMART goals go together. If your goal is to save $1000, you need to make sure that it’s attainable and realistic. You need to write down all your bills and give yourself a realistic amount that you can set aside each pay period.
And now that you know how much money you can set aside each week or month and how much money you want to save in total, you’ll know how long it will take you to reach your goal. And that’s the time-based piece of your goal: how long it will realistically take you to reach that goal.
Turn Your Resolutions into a Goals List
One of the ways you can use your bullet journal to keep your resolutions, is by making an annual goal list. Put this list near the front of your bullet journal so that you can look at it often.
Break Down Your Goals
Now that you have your Annual Goal List, you need to add a quarterly goal page. Break down each of your annual into four reasonable pieces and place each one into a quarter. Try to work backwards from your end goal by asking yourself “what has to happen before I can achieve this goal?”
And Then Break Them Down Twice More
Once your goals have been broken down into quarters, you need to break each one of those down into three pieces, one for each month of the quarter. You’ll need to make a page in your bullet journal with all of the months listed out, and add each goal to the appropriate month.
And once you have all of those in place, you need to break them down into weekly goals. Break each monthly goal down into four pieces. Add one mini goal to each of your weekly spreads. By adding this first into your weekly spread, you are giving it the importance that it needs. You can fill in all your normal tasks around this goal, but make sure that you keep the focus on making each weekly goal.
Yes I know that all if this is a lot of work! But that’s what it takes in order to keep your New Year’s resolutions.
Scheduling and Estimating Your Time
In order to add your goals to your schedule, you need to know how much time it’s going to take. (I am the queen of underestimating!) One way that you can get a better estimate of the time that is needed is to take your tasks for a test drive. Let’s say your goal is to build a business, and you break it down into smaller monthly goals and then weekly goals. Take each one of those goals and time yourself doing it. Because inevitably, something will come up. You’ll get interrupted, you’ll have a mental block, you have trouble locating your notes for something. So be honest, how long did that one task take you? Did other tasks come up as you completed it?
I call these tasks branches. Because additional things come up that you didn’t think about that branch off of the original task. Depending on how long your branch task takes, and whether or not it will be recurring, you may need to make a goal for that too. Once you know how long something will actually take, you can better plan your week. Just because you want to accomplish a certain number of things each week, doesn’t mean that it’s possible. This is part of the “realistic” section of your smart goals.
Baby Steps
Once you have your annual, quarterly, and monthly goals set up and your monthly trackers, you are on your way to keeping those New Year’s Resolutions! Just remember to take one month at a time because things may come up each month that you’ll need to add to the next month. Or you may need to reorganize some of your tasks. Keeping resolutions is hard and so is building a new habit. But when you’re talking about life changing results, it’s definitely worth it!
Need help setting up your bullet journal, join the free 7 Day Challenge here and get started on reaching those goals!
