Goals, Schedules, and the Like

Now that I'm done with summer classes, I can finally start to relax a bit. The welcomed break is really less a break and more a chance to refocus. As I review my ever-expanding list of goals, I find that it takes a good amount of time to even go through them, thinking on each one. As I go through and evaluate my progress, I keep coming to the conclusion that I need to find a good way to think about these goals and how I can accomplish them.

One of the ways I've been forming these lists into more concise and digestible nuggets, is by organizing them by categories. I've been finding that many of these categories overlap with each other. So far these are the groups I have come up with: Exercise, Nutrition, Financial, Career, Piano, Education, Reading/Writing. It's easy to see how many of these overlap. Exercise and Nutrition obviously overlap; Nutrition and Financial goals overlap when you start planning around food costs; Financial and Career overlap; Career and Piano overlap for me; Piano and Education overlap in that applied piano lessons are a large part of my degree; and Education and Reading/Writing obviously overlap.

The other way in which I have been able to change my thinking concerning these goals in order to make sure I accomplish them is by scheduling. This kind of goes along with the post I wrote about thinking ahead. By scheduling, I can think ahead through my day, through my week, planning ahead to make sure things happen. To make sure I'm taking the small steps everyday in order to complete the larger journey that are most of these goals. This surprisingly takes many, many hours to complete - about 45 minutes per category.

For the Exercise category, I schedule my workouts for the week - not only when they will take place, but what I will be doing in each workout to accomplish my overall set of goals. For Nutrition, I research food options that are healthy and affordable that I can prepare fairly easily, or in advance, for the week. This typically includes thinking ahead and setting a mindset in certain situations. For example, when I get to my serving job, it's hard for me not to grab a bit of the loaf of bread that somehow always mysteriously appears in the server station. So I have to think ahead and make my decision now to not graze on bread for the whole shift, instead of waiting until I'm hungry to make that decision.

I'll cover the other categories in my next post. But in case you haven't discovered the power of scheduling your goals, try it. Setting goals and achieving them is great for your overall well-being.

-Taylor