While I've always had big ideas and a strategic mind, I got very frustrated several years ago when I realized I had never achieved a goal. Not a single one! I'd write down the same goals every year and not make progress. Even worse, I'd watch others succeed around me and wonder why I couldn't just "get it together".
It turns out, my approach to goal setting was all wrong. (S.M.A.R.T. goals weren't the best fit for my creative mind.)
If you’re new here, I’m Ashton. I'm an artist + surface pattern designer with a lifelong love of journaling in pretty notebooks. When my elementary school taught goal-setting, I was hooked. So you’d think goal setting would come naturally to me, and it did. But actually achieving those goals? Not natural at all.
The Goal-Setting to Discouragement Pipeline
Maybe you can relate to setting goals in January and feeling really excited about it. You break them down into an actionable plan. Maybe you start working on it, and you see some wins. But that’s where progress ends. Life gets in the way, and by December, you haven’t achieved your goals. And you want to give up on goals entirely.
I call this the goal-setting to discouragement pipeline. Maybe you’ve written the same goals every year, but still haven’t made progress. You feel like a failure watching others succeed around you.
A New Approach to Goal Setting
You aren’t a failure. You just need a new approach to goal setting.
I went on the hunt for a goal-setting system, a book, a workbook, anything that could help me see progress on my goals. But they all followed the same framework. Annual goals. 90-day goals. S.M.A.R.T. goals.
As a right-brained creative person, I found it hard to align my goal execution with a calendar year. S.M.A.R.T. goals were just too boring or too restrictive for the way I like to work on creative projects - in passionate, energetic bursts.
Gradually, I found my own methods. In a frustrated slump, I wrote each goal on a sticky note. I assigned projects to each goal and wrote those on sticky notes, too. And I stuck them all on a dry-erase board by my desk, next to a label for each month.
When I finished a project, I’d draw a big X on it. If I didn’t finish within the month, I’d move the sticky note to the next month.
And it worked. I started finishing projects and achieving my goals for the first time.
But why?
The Four Seasons of Goal-Setting and Achieving
Instead of a linear journey with a set timeline, let’s look at engaging with our goals as a cyclical process. We’ll start an ongoing journey through four phases - think of them like seasons.
- Reflect and Assess: Pause and reflect on your journey.
- Define Success: Envision success on your own terms and determine which areas of your life need goal focus.
- Create Goals: Break meaningful, motivating goals down into actionable steps.
- Take Action: Visually map out action steps and goal check-ins into the upcoming months.
You can start your goal journey with ANY of these four seasons, at any time. So, if it isn’t January 1st as you’re reading this, no problem. You can begin right now. The key is to move through to the next phase of the process.
Looking at goal-setting as a cyclical process explains why my simple sticky note system worked so well. Using sticky notes allowed me to reassess my goals every month, so I could flexible with my projects and tasks, and ultimately stay focused despite setbacks to reach my goals.
Most goal-setting systems only address the Create Goals phase. But we have to follow up our actions with regular check-ins and reassess whether what we are doing actually works. And most importantly, define success on our own terms so that we can create goals that are truly meaningful and motivating.
Always Focused: A Workbook for Consistent Goal Progress
This year, I wanted to create a guide to keep me on track through these four phases. As we approach a new year, my head is always swimming with ideas, and I’m ready to get them all on paper.
Always Focused is a workbook to capture these ideas, turn them into meaningful goals, break them down into actionable projects and tasks that you can put in your calendar. The workbook walks you through each step of the goal-achieving process, so you’ll have built-in reflection pages to help assess your current life and responsibilities when you get stuck.
Whether you're struggling to juggle many ideas or need better methods to stay on track, this workbook will help you break through overwhelm around goal setting and stay focused all year long!
So grab your copy of the workbook, a pen, and a pad of sticky notes, and join me in mapping out your best year yet!
