January is famous for being the month to kick off New Year’s Resolutions.

But that isn’t what this article is about. It’s about creating New Year goals.

We’re not a fan of the traditional resolution style formula. New Year’s resolutions are almost always destined to fail because they typically are made on a whim with no plan for success. Simply stating that you will lose weight, stop smoking or be smarter with your money on Jan 1st isn’t going to magically make it happen.

Journo is a great way to track and share your travels. It can also be a powerful place for personal growth and reflection when you use it to write every day regardless of your location.

We’ve developed a simple system using Journo for goal setting that will give you long-term vision and short-term motivation to really make them happen!

Step 1: Create Your New Year Goals Journo

Start by creating a brand new Journo specifically to track your goal progress.

This will be a dedicated space for your hopes, dreams, and aspirations! As with all Journos you may choose to keep it strictly private, invite a few select people to share it with OR publish it for the world to see.

Step 2: Draft Your Master List

The very first entry in your Goals Journo will be a running list of personal goals big and small.

There are two major types of goals: short-term and long-term. Short-term ones are tasks you can knock off anywhere between 6 months to one year from now, long-term ones will take anywhere from 5-10 years to complete fully.

Use bullets to list as many personal goals as you can think of that you want to accomplish in the next 12 months but also beyond that. Think big and small. Don’t hold back and don’t censor yourself! Think of all the areas of your life such as career, financial, education, family, spiritual, health, fun etc.

Remember this is a living document and you can always go back to edit, add and revised it as time goes on.

Step 3: Choose Your Goal

Once you are satisfied with your master list pick 1 goal, highlight it and copy it into a new goal-specific entry.

Make sure you pick a goal that you are fired up about. Don’t choose based on what you think you should tackle but the one that you feel most passionately about.

There are probably a bunch of short-term goals that connect to this larger one in your master list, highlight those too and add them to the new entry for this particular goal.

Now delve even deeper into the smaller tasks that will get you to your big picture goal. Be as specific as you can, add milestone dates, associated costs, people that can help you out, links to online resources etc. This is your home base for this specific goal that you can come back to revise and edit as you need to.

Step 4: Keep A Daily Log

Daily writing is the secret weapon of success. 

Your daily goal log is a place you will do a check in with yourself and your progress. It doesn’t have to be long and to make it even easier decide up front what information to track.

If your focus is saving money for a downpayment of a house, a daily check-in could be whether you stuck to your budget, jotting down different ways of saving money, making money and keeping motivated.

It may not look like much from entry to entry but trust us, committing to checking in every day and making some notes relevant to your goal really adds up when you do it regularly. It keeps your big picture dreams top of mind and can reveal insights and help you see how far you’ve come over time.

A few other tips for setting up your daily practice:

• Choose the same time to log every day.
• Format your entries to make them easy to scan.
• Add media! Use a combination of photos, videos, and drawings as part of your check-in

Once you have the hang of this flow you can repeat the process as many times as you want, reviewing your master list, selecting a goal and then laser focusing on it until you’ve accomplished it.

Oh, ya about that, one last step…

Step 5: Celebrate Your Success!

Make sure you pat yourself on the back for making a goal and taking each step along the way. Even if you fall during the ride what’s most important is to get back up and keep going. Because let’s face it a journey isn’t a journey without some bumps in the road.

On that subject, we are strong believers that allowing yourself to feel gratitude is really beneficial to for daily motivation on good and not so good days. You may want to even incorporate a gratitude list into your daily log. Journo founder Dane Homenick swears by this ritual:

“…One thing I do, whether on a trip or not, is to simply write down three things I’m grateful for. I do this in the morning as part of my routine. It has a remarkable way of putting life into perspective, which is a great place to tackle the day from. Don’t worry about being profound with this… ANYTHING can count. Some days it will be impactful things, and others it might be a hot cup of coffee and a swim. Whatever you are grateful for in that moment is enough… it’s about the act of being grateful that’s the aim, not specifically what each thing is you’re grateful for.”

Happy New Year Everyone! We wish you all the best in chasing your best life and living it to the fullest. And as always we’d love to hear your insights in the comment box below! Don’t be shy!!