What will you do in 2024 to ‘Make Life Special’?

I bet there is something about which you have said, ‘I’d love to do that!’, it’s often followed by ‘I’m just too busy!’ or ‘I wouldn’t know where to start’ or even ‘but there’s no way I could do that!’

Life is also full of people who did do that, who found a way to start and who organised time to do it; they became busy with achieving their goal in amongst everything else. The question is, how important is it to you?

What do you dream of doing? What would you love to achieve in 2024? In twelve months time, what will you love looking back on saying ‘I/we did that!’ ?

Grab pen and paper and write down something you’d love to do next year. Organise a family gathering, visit a special place, take the kids to do something wonderful, climb a mountain, run a 5k race, lose weight, get healthier, get a puppy, grow sweet potatoes, get a dream car, paint, write a book! Whatever it is and there may be more than one thing: Write it down!

Some goals will be simple to envisage and put into motion, others may be more complex, larger and if they are:

How to set goals and keep them!

Incremental steps and process:

  1. Define your goal and write it down together with how it will feel to achieve it. (That sometimes feels odd but putting words on paper adds weight to them, they become more real, tangible and purposeful.)
  2. When is your deadline? (Easy if working to a defined date i.e. an organised event like a charity day or 5k run etc. Harder if writing a book perhaps)
  3. Determine what needs to happen to achieve your goal. (If it’s organising a family gathering, who is coming? Where are they travelling from? Where will they stay? How much space will you need for everyone? etc)
  4. What order do things need to happen in?
  5. How long will each task/element take?
  6. Who will be tasked to do things (it may all be on you). Can you/they do it?
  7. How long will you/they take to do it?
  8. What do you/they need in order to do it? (Who will provide those things and how? Also When?)
  9. When can you/they start?
  10. Look at your deadline and work backwards, is this all achievable and have you got room for dealing with a let down, a slip up etc?
  11. Get confirmation that people will do what they have agreed to and confirm back to them that you want them to start. (It can be a good idea to share your project schedule so people understand what is going on elsewhere and where they sit in the picture, who is dependent upon them and for them to understand who they are depending upon.)
  12. Get started!
  13. Set sensible review periods. Communicate. Get feedback.
  14. Stay focussed and positive.
  15. Enjoy achieving your goal and celebrate!

Make Life Special

Always remember why you set your goal, what you wanted to feel and achieve at the end of it. Some projects can start to overwhelm if things go awry but having a vision of what the outcome will mean for you and for others keeps you going. Just make sure that big goals are ones you really want to achieve.

Do let us know how you get on, share with us on social media (you’ll find links on the right hand side of this page or at the bottom on mobile). We’d love to hear from you, to see some pictures and by all means share ideas for next year. We already have a growing list we couldn’t fit into this challenge.

Please continue to follow our Advent Challenge here

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