Goals 2013: March Update

I love goals. This is probably not news to anyone who's read my blog. I'm can't exactly pinpoint why or when they became so important to me, but I love having a sense of direction as I'm doing them, and a sense of accomplishment as I complete them. 

I had a lot of goals last year, and while I completed quite a few, I want to be able to complete more this year. So I'm tracking my progress using google.docs, and it's really helping as I'm seeing what I'm completing and what I'm not as I do a little accountability chart every Sunday. 

These are my goals for the year:

Spiritual: 1-Read the Book of Mormon as a Family--read together DAILY 2-Wake up by 7AM, 6 days a week 3-Make a scripture study plan each Sunday 4- Attend Temple 12 times 5-Sing every Sunday 6-Read New Testament 7-Go to one new Temple 8-Journal every day 9-Plan FHE on Sunday 44-Plan Joy School/kids plans on Sunday Wife 10- 11-Family Vacation 12-Planning Meeting Each Week 13-Monthly Service Project 14-Blog once a week 15-make homemaking binder Mom 16-Take Jeffrey on an outing once a month 17-Paint Amri’s nails each week 18-Spend 30 minutes one-on-one time with Jacob each week 19-Take pictures of Xandir each week 20-Joy School with Jeffrey and Amri 21-Finish teaching Jeffrey to read 22-Get halfway through reading book with Amri

Personal 23-Practice taking pictures of the kids each month, and edit pictures in photoshop 24-Read 25 books 25-Listen to an audiobook from the library 26- Make bread with natural yeast 27- Either run or do exercise videos an hour a week 28-Make one French Cuisine recipe 29-Budget every month 30-Crosstitch once a month 31-Finish Christmas shopping by December 1!!! 32-2 non sugar weeks a month Monthly Projects 33-Re-certify my nursing license 34-Send pictures to friends from mission 35-Finish mission scrapbook 36-Listen to all the Michel Thomas French CDs. 37-Speak in Spanish an hour a day 38-Finish “parenting” class 39-Take “Butterfly” class 40-Finish Jacob’s Baby Book 41-Make Xandir’s Baby Book 42-Finish Jacob and Xi’s Baby Calendars Siblings: 43-Email my brothers weekly with the funny things my kids said that week

I broke them down into daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. My daily goals are to read the Book of Mormon as a family daily (family=usually 5/6 of us, but occasionally just Tyson and I when things are crazy) and write in my journal. We haven't missed a day of "family" scriptures, probably thanks to a little Book of Mormon chart I printed off the first day of the year. Really, it's amazing how tracking progress can make goals just take off. I've missed only two days of my journal.

Next are my weekly goals. I did horrible at my weekly goals last year. Now I'm pleased to say I'm doing much, much better now, thanks to this chart. I tried taking screen shots from google.docs so you can see, but they turned out a little small:

Tyson and I have a little secret code for doing fun things, which is why I pixelated part of my chart.

As you can see from the parts I left clear, the things we do aren't private (usually like a game,
going somewhere, etc.) but it's fun to have a private code between the two of us.)

This was really good for me to realize where I was prioritizing and what I needed to change. For example, I haven't missed a week of the blog, but I had several weeks that I wasn't getting even 30 minutes of one-on-one time with Jacob. Hello Cambria! Where are your priorities?!? I've done much better after that realization--except this week ;)

Monthly goals, that I was so good at last year, I'm not doing so well on. My worst goal is to do something with photoshop each month. But I did something today for the first time this year! Yay!

Year goals! I've decided to possibly divide my goals into quarters.  A year is just too long to be worried about whether or not I'm going to complete it. Also, I've been kind of adding goals as well, and doing goals by quarter gives me more freedom to be more flexible and add and drop goals as the year goes on. Because, let's face it, you can never plan out a year perfectly!

This week I'm really going to try and finish my gaol to mail pictures to the people in my mission we visited last summer. Hooray!