It's the most wonderful time of the year

Goal setting time

As we approach the new year, people are starting to think about their New Year's resolutions but, unfortunately, most people can't seem to make it beyond Ditch New Year's Resolutions Day, the day when most people have given up on their resolutions.

What can we do to keep this from happening? A lot of this post is from Stephen Covey's "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" and "First Things First", a book that expands on Habit 3.

I've covered some of these things previously but I'll go over them again here with links to previous posts.

First, know your roles in life. You may have more, but ideally you'll want to have 5-7 roles in your life. What do I mean by roles? These are the various parts of your life. You could have roles as a parent, spouse, child to your parents, sibling, friend, employee, business owner, church or civic organization member, volunteer, etc. If you have more than 7, pick out the 7 that are most important to you. I'm not saying you can't have more, but we're going to concentrate on your 7 most important roles to you.

Begin with the end in mind, Habit 2, means to know what outcome you desire. Suppose you want to be remembered as a loving spouse and parent, a successful small business owner, or a productive employee when you die. These things will be part of your long term vision statement. A vision statement is a statement of who you want to be in the future. The post linked above contains some tools to help you create a vision statement. A mission statement is a statement of who you are now. Some people use the terms vision statement and mission statement somewhat interchangeably, but I like the above definitions.

Now that you know who you are and who you want to be, how do you get from here to there? You set goals. You want to include goals for all of your current roles and any future roles. We could talk about the differences between goals and objectives here, but you can check out this summary post about vision, mission and goats...yes, I said GOATS, check out the post linked above.

I've written about these subjects several times before, so feel free to look back at previous posts.

And here's an article about why it's important to write out your goals by hand.

Interesting days

Today - Card Playing Day Anybody up for a game of Go Fish?

Tomorrow - Tick Tock Day There's still some time to accomplish some of the things you wanted to do in 2015

Next Monday - Pop Music Chart Day, World Braille Day, Spaghetti Day, Hypnotism Day and Trivia Day And for some pop music chart trivia, check out this webpage, it will tell you the number one song for any date since 1940 and will tell you the songs that were number one on that day every year after that, all the way up until this year. You can then play a medley of all those songs or save an image of a 45 of the song on that date and you can even have it printed on a mug or stein...makes a great gift idea!

 January 28 - Data Privacy Day and Blueberry Pancake Day I'll definitely have to observe this day!