One of my biggest pet peeves is people who go through their existence acting as though life just happens to them. Your life is something you create. Your actions have consequences as does your inaction. That is why I’m taking the initiative to create my future and I want to help you with creating your future too. The key to creating your future is as easy as monthly goal planning. I’m going to show you how to create specific, actionable goals that will start building the life you desire.

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Divide Into Categories

When listing out your goals divide them into categories. Don’t just create a long list and hope you get through it. Organizing your goals makes them easy to stick to and easy to reference throughout the month. You also want to limit the categories you choose. If you choose too many then you will be too unfocused to accomplish any of them. Here are some category ideas to help you out, but remember not to try to do all of these in one month:

• Family
• Business
• Finance
• Fitness
• Professional
• Travel
• Self-Improvement
• Educational
• Homemaking
• Religious
• Creative
• Journaling
• Holiday
• Savings
• Weight Loss
• Organizational
• Home Improvement
• Cleaning
• Long-Term* (See section below about long-term goals)

Long-Term Goals

This is the one exception to choosing extra goal categories. Everyone should choose 3 long-term goals. This step should also be done first. Identifying your long-term goals first allows you to ensure that supporting goal categories work towards achieving your ultimate goals. For example, if you want the freedom to travel when and where you want in 3-5 years then your professional, business, and/or finance goals are needed to achieve this.

How to Choose Your Goals

Step 1

As I said above, choose your long-term goals first. Here are my current long-term goals:

1. Pay off student loans.
2. Earn 10k a month from my site and side hustles.
3. Spend summers travelling with my family.

Step 2

Next, number a post-it note (or scrap piece of paper) 1 through 3.

Step 3

Use the list at the beginning of this post as a reference and write down the categories that you feel correspond with each long-term goal. Overlap is perfectly fine as you can see in my example:

1. Finances, Business
2. Business, Organizational
3. Finances, Business, Family

Step 4

Choose 4-5 categories to set monthly goals for. Be sure to include the ones you listed in step 3 then fill in the empty spots left. Here are my categories:

1. Business
2. Finances
3. Organizational
4. Family
5. Self-Improvement

Step 5

Create specific monthly goals under each category. Again, be sure not to overload yourself with more items than you can reasonably accomplish in one month. You can see my November goals below.

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My November Goals

Business Goals

• Create an Instagram Plan – I want to get on top of my IG game by planning out my posts a month in advance. I want to create a spreadsheet that includes the captions that go along with each photo that I can copy and paste. I believe this will ensure that I am posting every day.
• Add Daily New Listing to Etsy – I just launched a shop with my mom on November 1^st and I want to see it grow steadily.
• Plan New Revenue Stream – You can’t get to earning $10k a month without trying out new things. Overall, I plan to spend the next year trying out a different technique for earning income each month. I want to see what works for me and what doesn’t. This month is the Etsy shop but I need an idea for December.
• Get Ahead on Posts – The autumn season is hitting my schedule hard and I have fallen behind (which I hate!). I want to get back in front of my blogging schedule.

Finance Goals

• Save $200 (or more) in an Emergency Fund
• Meal Plan – This month I want to get back to meal planning. It saves money and, frankly, saves my sanity. I don’t have to think about dinner, I just make it. It’s even better when I can have meal prep sessions to create crockpot and freezer meals.
• Extra Cash – I want to try one thing to make some extra cash fast. Some ideas I’ve brainstormed are selling something, try my hand at investing, or perform an odd job. While we are blessed enough to not truly need the money, I want to start socking extra payments towards my student loans.

Organizational Goals

• Get rid of one item each day.
• Empty Living Room – We finally have all of the materials for the living room remodel. That means it’s time to empty it out so I can get to work. Because of how large of a goal this is, I’m not adding anything else to organizational goals this month.

Family

• Family Dinners – For the first time in years everyone’s schedule allows for family dinners together. I want this to become the new norm for our family again.
• Weekly Family Night – The demands of my work keep me busy constantly. I want to be more intentional about taking undistracted family time each week. Having a weekly family night is a great incentive to make sure that this happens.

Self-Improvement

• Complete Monthly Fitness Challenge – I’m going to go with this push-up/plank challenge if you’d like to complete it with me.
• Increase Gratitude – I plan to accomplish this by journaling about 3 things I am grateful for each day. They can be little or big, the point is to focus on the good things in my life.
• Read 20 Minutes a Day – This is not my leisure reading (which I love!). These will be educational reads pertaining to business or personal finance. I want these to help motivate me to rock my monthly goals while also expanding my knowledge on the topics.

There you have it. These are my goals for the month of November. I look forward to sharing this adventure with you. Are you ready to start creating your future along with me? Don’t wait to see what happens, be the catalyst behind it.

See where I’m linking up!