Making Your Life Plan - Phase 1 - Setting Goals

It's a new year, and it's time to sit down and put together a Life Plan.

What's that you ask?

Simple. It's a plan for life.
If you hop in your car and head off on a trip to Disneyland, how will get there?
Sure, you could just start heading south, and look for road signs.

But without a roadmap, and a plan, it's going to be difficult to get there.

In fact, it's going to be much less efficient and affordable, and you could have long sections of the trip where you are lost, and not quite sure where you are! You might know where you're going, but how to get there? Not a clue.

I recommend at least once a year to sit down and determine your goals for the new year.
I like to work with Flow Charts and Bubble Graphs. So I start with a great big piece of paper. (At work we have some old continuous computer paper for an old fashioned tractor printer. We use it for scratch paper, and I can have a great big workspace to brainstorm.)

I break up my life into a few areas:

Personal
Employment
Business

Then I break them down into subcategories:
Personal>
Family - Spiritual - Physical - Educational

Under each of these, I make a list of what I hope to accomplish this year. Don't set an easy goal. Set yourself several goals, some that are easy to accomplish, some that are lofty.
For example, under "Physical" I determined that this year I hope to:
1. Get myself trained to work out three-four times a week.
2. Lose 100 pounds

Under Educational, I hope to:
1. Learn Wordpress coding
2. Read "Foxe's Book of Martyrs"
3. Read at least one blog post a day on freelancing

Employment>
At the moment for me this is only at the local community Center, so I make a list of my work goals for the coming year.



For some, this spreadsheet/graph/flowchart will take up more paper than others. I filled about six pages of standard size paper just on my goals for the coming year. For others, it might be much more simple.

When I'm done, I type them up, and post them in a visible place.

But if you don't write them down, if they're just a dream in your head, you'll never reach it.
It's like getting in the car, and saying, Disneyland would be a nice place to go, and then never even trying to go that direction!