To do lists are a great way to keep yourself on track with your goals and dreams. It is actual steps that you can take every single day to help you actually achieve your goals.
There are 5 important steps to determine what you want on your daily goals to-do list to consist of and how to make it.
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1) Determine your goals
You can’t try to make your daily goals list without knowing what your long term goals are. For some people those goals are pretty clear cut – like graduate college or pay off your car. For others, the goals can be more vague and less clear what those goals can be.
My biggest advice for determining your goals is to sit down and picture where you want to be in 5 years and what your life will overall look like at that point. Write down a description of what that will be. That can help you break down what your goals are and therefore determine what needs to be done to get there.
For example, if you picture yourself living a more healthy life, then you need to determine what it will take to get there. This probably entails more than just a goal of “be healthy”. It can include things like “eat more healthy food” or “get to X weight goal”.
Those more detailed goals are how you will start to determine your daily goal list. Taking the example from above, you would want to include on your list:
-eat 1 serving of fruits
-eat 1 serving of vegetables
-walk 10,000 steps today
Once you figure out what those long term goals are you really just need to figure out what you CAN do every single day to help you achieve that goal. Those steps become your daily goals that then become your every day goals list when added together.
2) Figure out your time commitment
It is so easy to think of all these incredible things you want to do with your life and really it is not hard to figure out what daily goals will help you get there. However, it is not realistic that you can do everything that you want to right away. You need to sit down and analyze what your days look like currently and what can fit into your life.
Do you work 10 hours a day plus an hour of commuting? Then a goal of working out for 60 minutes a day, cooking dinner at home, writing 2 blog posts, and walking the dog for 45 minutes are probably all together not attainable.
There are ways to incorporate your goals into your time restraints though! For example, if your health goal is to walk 10,000 steps and also to not eat out then during your lunch break instead of driving to a fast food restaurant, instead you can take a walk around the area. That can quickly add up to 5,000 steps before you even get home and you avoided grabbing unhealthy food.
3) Prioritize your list
After you have an idea of your goals and your time restrictions you need to prioritize. What will break your heart if you don’t achieve that goal in 5 years? What goals are deal breakers for your happiness and overall well-being? Those are the goals that you should prioritize. Plenty of people get “goal happy” when brainstorming and that is AWESOME but you have to realize they are not all going to be able to be a priority.
I tend to personally focus on three major categories of goals:
Family
Health
Career
So when I am re-evaluating my daily goals I prioritize what goals fall into those three categories. If I think it is manageable I will add in more goals but prioritizing what is the most important to you will help make sure that you can actually achieve your daily goals and therefore your long term goals.
4) Ensure it’s attainable
Learning to play the guitar with the end result of being a rock star?
Probably not the most attainable goal. Prioritizing is great but make sure that what you decide is the priority has attainable end goals as well as attainable daily goals.
Setting a daily goal to workout 2 hours and eat only 1,000 calories is crazy (and unhealthy / unsafe) and it REALLY is not attainable. You will go insane after a week or two and then quit your daily goals all together because it doesn’t feel like something you can do every day. Slow and steady is the key for so many goals especially ones related to health, fitness, and hobbies.
5) Figure out what makes you stick to it
There is no point to writing this list and figuring out your goals if you are not going to stick to them. It can be overwhelming to feel like you are making so many life changes at once (it will be worth it though!). So part of making this list is making sure that you stick to it.
For me, daily reminders of what I am trying to achieve help me stay on track. Remembering why I am doing these steps re-motivates me every day to actually complete my goals because it reminds me that every day I complete my little goals is one day closer to achieving my major goals.
What type of goals are on your daily goals list?
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