The Goal Setting Process We Use to Create the Life We Want

For about 8 years now, Josiah and I have had an annual tradition where on New Year’s Day (or sometimes a different day around New Year’s) we take time to plan and set goals for the coming year and reflect on our goals and accomplisments from previous year. This tradition is one we’ve come to really value, and looking back it’s clear how it has helped us actually do many of the things we’ve wanted to do. This year, I thought I would share our process for goal setting and how it’s helped us actually achieve some of the things we used to only dream of.

How Our Annual Goal Setting Tradition Started

Every year, I recall the first time we sat down together at a coffee shop next to the Nelson Atkins Museum on a day in December of 2017 and talked seriously about what we most wanted in life and how we would get there.

We were living in an RV in Kansas City at the time. The previous year, I had quit my job as an English teacher, we had sold our house and bought an RV to live in, and we had moved to Kansas City to go all in on the idea of making money as commercial real estate investors.

Seven months later, we were burning through our savings and seemingly no closer to accomplishing our goal of syndicating the purchase an apartment complex, so in early 2017, Josiah got a full time job as a software engineer for a local marketing agency. In March of 2017, I launched a blog that I was trying to turn into a source of income, but 10 months later it was making just a few hundred dollars per month. Our long-term financial goals seemed completely out of reach.

When we sat down at the coffee shop a few weeks before the end of 2017, we started by opening up a Google Doc and titling it “Life Bucket List: Things We Would Like to Do at Some Point in Life.”

Under that heading we listed all our dreams and desires….some of which we still have, and some of which have since evolved. For example, one of the things I listed was, “Document traditional homesteading skills for posterity (video series in the format of MasterClass)” That’s no longer a desire I have because I’m no longer personally interested in homesteading, and because there are already so many other people doing this. On Josiah’s list was, “Make and release two multimedia projects (Written, Music, and Film)”. That desire has evolved in some ways but has also intensified for Josiah.

The next heading that Josiah wrote was possibly the most important: “Why aren’t we doing this now?”

This was my answer: “I feel guilty spending my time on something that doesn’t get us out of debt.”

Josiah’s answer was this: “The film and the music will take time and money. If I had no debt and a $5k/mo income, I would be doing this.”

From that line of reasoning, we were able to conclude that the best way to accomplish our long-term goals, which were not related to money, was to improve our financial situation. The exercise helped us see that focusing on our financial goals didn’t mean we were giving up on our long-term dreams, but could eventually help get us to our long-term goals–an extremely important motivating factor.

To make a long story short, by the end of the following year, I was making a full-time income with my blog, and Josiah had launched a software company.

At this point I want to note from the perspective of hindsight that I now realize money wasn’t the only thing standing in our way. When we finally achieved the goal of being debt-free with an income of $5k/month, we were confronted with other obstacles having to do with clarity of vision and mindset. But we wouldn’t have been able to identify the next obstacles until we had overcome the first major one.

Visualizing My Ideal Self

The most powerful part of what we did at that first meeting in late 2017 was not setting goals for the coming year, but giving active thought to what we wanted our life to look like in the long term.

In 2019, we revisited what we had written in 2017 and made notes about how our desires had evolved, and last year, at the end of 2023, I again wrote a list titled, “My Ideal Version of Myself,” with the headings, “Physical Health,” “Financial,” Spiritual,” and “Purpose/Impact.” I then set goals for 2024 in each of those categories

This long-term vision is what informs our goals for a given year, because without a vision of who we want to eventually become, we have no way to know where we’re headed and why or what we should be working on, and no measuring stick we can use to see how far we’ve come.

Our Approach to Goal Setting

During 2016, we were part of a commercial real estate coaching program that we paid an insane amount of money for. One of the only tangible things we took away from our coaching was a strategy for goal setting that we continue to use. (Maybe this alone was worth the money?)

The goal-setting process works like this:

1. Write down something you want to do or accomplish at some point in your life.
2. List all of the things you will need to do before you can accomplish that goal, starting with the end result and working backward. (For example, “In order to do X, I will need to have done Y, and before I can do Y, I will need to do Z.)
3. Decide which of the things on your list you would like to try to accomplish this year.
4. Decide which things on your list you will accomplish this month. Do the same thing at the beginning of next month, and so on throughout the year.
5. Make a to-do list for this week that will help you accomplish your goals for the month.
6. Think through your week day by day, and plan specific days and times that you’ll do the things on your to-do list, or make a daily to-do list.

Once a month, you assess the progress you’re making toward your goal for the year, and revise if needed based on new information you may have. Then, at the end of each year, just like we still do, you check your progress against your long-term goals, and use that information to set new goals for the new year.

We follow this goal-setting process to set specific yearly goals for every “category” of our life, including:

• Health (including diet and exercise)
• Finances
• Business
• Spiritual growth
• Personal goals

You could include other categories like career, education, and relationships–it all depends on identifying how you want your future to be different from your present.

Our “Sunday Meetings”

In 2018, to help us accomplish our goals, Josiah and I began having a planning session each Sunday morning where we look at our schedule for the week and plan to-do list items corresponding to our annual goals. We continue this weekly tradition to this day, even though sometimes it happens in the car or on a plane when we’re traveling.

In addition to making our to-do list for the week, we also use this opportunity to plan meals (so we can stick to our diet goals), plan times we’ll exercise throughout the week, and discuss challenges we’re facing at work or in our personal lives. After our Sunday meeting, we usually go grocery shopping to buy all the food we need for the week.

Our “Sunday Meetings” are where we do some of our best thinking and problem-solving in addition to planning and scheduling, and missing a meeting makes us less productive throughout the following week. For that reason, we are very religious (irony noted) about making our Sunday meetings a priority, and as a rule we try not to schedule any activities or social events for Sundays so we have time to do things like grocery shopping and cleaning the house that allow us to wake up on Monday feeling ready to get things done.

How to Write Better Goals

Over the years, we’ve both set many goals that we didn’t end up achieving. When that happens, reflect on what prevented us from achieving that goal and use that information to revise and improve our goals. By doing this again and again, we’ve learned to set better goals.

Here are our tips for writing a goal that you’ll actually accomplish:

1. Make sure your goals are SMART goals.

A SMART goal is a goal which is:

• S – Specific. “Make more money” is not a specific goal “Increase my monthly income to exceed my monthly expenses” is a specific goal.
• M – Measurable. In order to know you’re making progress, you have to measure your results. “Eat out less” is not a measurable goal. “Eat out no more than twice per week” is something you can track to know if you’re eating out less.
• A – Achievable. An overly ambitious goal is unlikely to be accomplished. If you want to start exercising more and you currently aren’t exercising at all, an achievable goal might be going for a walk or run 3 times per week rather than committing right way to exercising every day.
• R – Relevant. It’s easy to fill up your schedule with activities that make you feel busy but aren’t actually getting you any closer to your long-term goals. That’s why it’s important to “begin with the end in mind” (one of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) and make sure every short-term goal you set is moving you toward your long-term goals.
• T – Time-bound. Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands to fill the time allotted to it.” If you give yourself a year to do something that could be done in one month, you’ll end up taking the full year. That’s why it’s important to set a deadline for achieving your goals.

2. Visualize potential obstacles and plan how you’ll overcome them.

One of our goals has been to eat healthy, home-cooked meals for dinner each weeknight, but another goal is to attend Jiu Jitsu classes 3-4 evenings per week. Doing both requires careful planning, including meal planning and grocery shopping on Sundays and scheduling time for cooking into our day. Anticipating potential roadblocks that might keep you from achieving your goal allows you to come up with a solution ahead of time instead of being caught off guard.

Just like we do with our meal planning, we put careful thought into how we will accomplish each one of our goals. That is the work of planning we spend several days on at the beginning of each year.

Here’s another example:

One of my goals for this year was to do some type of personal writing, whether for this blog or even just journaling, at least once a week. But I knew just writing a goal of “Write once per week” wasn’t enough. It would be easy to let almost an entire week go by, realize on Saturday afternoon I hadn’t written anything yet that week, and feel too tired to get into the proper headspace.

In order to accomplish my goal of weekly writing, I had to think in advance about when would be a good time each week to do some personal writing. I decided that Sunday would be the best day, because I don’t usually schedule events on Sunday and already use the day for planning and goal reflection. Ideally, I would make time in the morning to write, but if that was not possible, I would make sure to finish up other projects in time to write in the evening.
By thinking in advance about the obstacles that could keep me from writing, I was able to creatively solve them ahead of time, and here I am on a Sunday evening, finishing this blog post. 🙂

The Value of Failed Goals

I don’t want mislead anyone to think we crush every single goal we set, because that is not the case. However, the mere exercise of regularly setting and evaluating our goals has helped us identify obstacles (like I mentioned above), notice unhealthy patterns, and develop new habits over time.

As an example, here is a goal I set for multiple years and failed to accomplish:

2020: Establish a regular at-home yoga practice.
2021: Establish a habit of exercising each weekday morning.
2022: Build a habit of daily home exercise.
2024: Restart GMB (an at-home fitness program).

For a long time I’ve had an ideal of myself as the kind of person who does yoga or some type of flexibility/mobility practice at home every morning, but after failing year after year to establish that as a regular routine, I had to ask myself honestly whether that goal was truly as important to me as I thought it was.

After reflecting on it, I concluded that it really wasn’t so important to me to exercise in the morning specifically. If I’m being honest, I’d rather spend my time between waking up and starting work cozy on the couch, slowly waking up with a cup of coffee. If the weather’s nice, I enjoy a morning walk, but I actually prefer to exercise in the afternoon or early evening–it helps me turn off my work brain so I can relax in the evening and get a good night’s sleep.

I then realized that my actual reason for wanting to add yoga or some type of online program to my daily routine was wanting to maintain my mobility and flexibility as I age. If I could figure out a different way to do that, I need not feel guilty about not exercising first thing in the morning.

My goal for 2025 is to spend time doing some stretching and mobility exercises before each Jiu Jitsu class. Whether I’ll accomplish that goal remains to be seen, but hopefully from this example you can see how failing to accomplish a short-term goal can be an important step toward eventually achieving your long-term goals.

Why People Fail to Achieve Their Goals

From personal experience, here are some of the most common reasons for not achieving a goal:

• The goal was too ambitious.
• The goal was too vague.
• You didn’t plan for obstacles ahead of time.
• The goal isn’t something you actually want. (Perhaps there’s just one aspect of the goal that represents what you TRULY want.)
• The goal isn’t aligned with your priorities. (The goal is in conflict with something you want more.)

Remember, each time you fail to achieve a goal, you have the opportunity be more successful in the future. The key is to not beat yourself up for failing, but to instead figure out WHY you failed and use what you learn to set better, more achievable goals.

How Habits Create Virtuous Cycles

Making a big change in one’s life requires time, effort, and, in our experience, focus. Even though we set goals each year for multiple areas of our life, we’ve learned over time that it’s really only possible to work on developing new habits in one area at a time.

Something we’ve also learned, though, is that maintaining a habit is far easier than creating it, and each time you succeed at making a new healthy habit part of your normal routine, it becomes easier to work on creating the next one. This is called a “virtuous cycle.”

We’re experiencing this now, having developed habits that make it easy for us to exercise and eat a healthy diet.

We didn’t always have those habits, and early in our entrepreneurial journey, we both gained quite a bit of weight because, after working on our businesses all day, we would often resort to eating something convenient or using food to unwind.

Building healthy eating and exercise habits didn’t happen overnight, and it started with a decision to move to a different city. Where we were living in an RV park north of Dallas, it took 30 minutes to drive to a gym or yoga studio, and we didn’t have enough space to work out inside our RV. I occasionally did yoga on our campsite’s patio, but stopped when I discovered our patio was surrounded by nests of fire ants. The only we were able to get regular exercise was to take walks around our RV park.

We decided we needed to move in order to reach our goals, and started making a list of cities we might move to that had both Gracie Brazilaian Jiu Jitsu gyms and good third-wave coffee shops. When on a visit to our hometown of Springfield, Missouri, we discovered a new gym had been opened just 10 minutes away from a nice RV park, we decided to move back home, and suddenly we were getting 4-5 hard workouts per week, seemingly on autopilot.

Recognizing we didn’t have the bandwidth to grow our businesses, attend Jiu Jitsu classes 4 nights a week, AND cook dinner every night, we decided to try a meal kit service. We subscribed to HelloFresh for over a year, and even though the meals were higher in fat and calories than I felt was ideal, doing that helped us get used to cooking at home more than we were eating out.

Last year, because one of our goals for the year was to start budgeting and lower our monthly expenses, we started shopping the ingredients for our meals instead of ordering them by mail, and finally, after many years of slow and gradual changes, we’ve developed a routine for exercise and healthy eating that doesn’t require a lot of willpower to sustain, leaving us free to focus on other goals–with the added energy and mental clarity we get from exercise and a healthy diet.

My takeaway from this experience is that even though it’s important to have goals for all areas of life so you can see where you need to make changes, it’s impossible to change everything in your life all at once. Neglecting some goals in the short term might be necessary in order to accomplish other goals, but as long as you’re regularly checking in with all your goals, you’ll get there eventually.

Another takeaway: The more convenient you can make your goals, the less willpower is required, and the more likely you are to achieve them. While not always possible, especially at first, it’s something to take into serious consideration when you have the opportunity.

Conclusion: My Goals for 2025

I think I’ve said everything I intended to say on this subject for now, so I will conclude by sharing some of my goals for 2025. (I’ll summarize them instead of sharing every minute bullet point.)

Spiritual Goals

• Develop a habit of daily morning reading.
• List of books I want to read this year

Personal Goals

• Finish Duolingo French Section 4
• List of 3 books I want to read this year
• Write every Sunday
• Finish unpacking and organizing the new house (including garage and basement)

Financial Goals

• Track all spending
• Create a system for saving
• End the year with $X in savings

Health Goals

• Maintain current weight
• Build a habit of doing mobility exercises as BJJ warmup
• Develop a maintainable meal routine (Note: Josiah did most of the cooking last year; this year I’ll be cooking dinner more often to give him more time to spend on his new business.)

Business Goals

• Get 7 new web design clients
• Publish 6 new articles for my Jiu Jitsu blog
• Launch business coaching business and coach 3 clients
• Help [current coaching client] achieve [specific goal]

This is my first time sharing my goals publicly, and it feels a little uncomfortable. Specifically, it makes me feel like there’s more pressure to accomplish them. (If I don’t tell anyone about my goals, then no one else will know if I fail to achieve them!) But, maybe the added pressure is a good thing!