When I think back to some of the people in my life that have passed away that I greatly miss, one of the things that really bothers me is that I don’t have some memento of their life that lets me have at least a sense of the person that they were. All I have are memories, a few old home movies, and lots of photographs.

The one exception to this is my great grandmother, who spent a significant amount of time during the last few years of her life writing something of an autobiography. I had the opportunity to read most of it once and, in the near future, I’m hoping to be able to have a copy of it of my own and read it again. It’s just a way to touch the thoughts of a person that I loved very much that I’ll not be able to see again in this life.

This, of course, brings me to thoughts of the people I love the most: my wife and my children. What will they have to know me by if something were to happen to me?

I’m not foolish enough to think that I’m infallible. I’ve protected their financial future with a sensible life insurance policy and an estate plan.

What I’d like to do is, in some way, protect their emotional future as well. What would I want to leave for them as people if something were to happen to me?

For my children, there’s simply a lot of life advice that I want to impart on them as they grow older, become adults, and face their careers and lives. I’d like them to know about their ancestry and I’d also like for them to be able to know something of the person that I was, what I held dear, and what I felt about them.

For my wife, the mission is a bit different. She already knows most of the things that I would leave for my children. What I would want to leave for her is a different gift: the knowledge that I loved her very much and that I want her to move on and have new experiences and a new life after I leave, whatever those may be. I think a lot about the scrapbook that Ellie created for Walt in the movie Up that recollects their lives shared together and ends with an admonition that Walt creates his own adventures.

This is challenging work, but it’s also valuable work. It’s something I can give to my children when they become adults even if I’m completely fine. It’s something I can continue to update throughout our marital life and leave for Sarah.

My goal in 2012 is simple: I want to create a journal/scrapbook for each of my children and for my wife that collects together the things mentioned above. I want them to have these items if something were to happen to me in the near future, and I want to give them to my children as they reach adulthood. As for my wife’s book, I’ll leave it for her to find it when the time is right.

For the most part, these will take the form of handwritten journals. I communicate so much through the written word that this seems natural to me. Although the material covered in the journals for my children will be similar, I’m going to write them each individually and I hope that they do vary some.

As for my wife’s memento, I hope to just recollect everything that’s happened in our lives together to this point and add to it regularly, with a note on the last page reminding her that I love her and that I want her to have a beautiful life, whatever that may be.

If a time comes in their life where they yearn to reach out and touch me in some way after I’m gone, perhaps I will have left behind something that can fulfill them at that moment when they need it.

Every single time I engage in some form of community service, I feel extremely happy about what I’ve done. I feel like I’ve caused some sort of positive change in my community and made someone else’s life better.

The problem is that it’s incredibly easy for me to put aside some of the things I could do related to community service and instead do other things. I could head over to the food pantry… or I could make chop all of the vegetables for a great ratatouille. I could pack up the children and help remove snow for elderly people… or I could go inside, make some hot chocolate, and watch The Incredibles with my kids.

Although the “right” choice here is very fulfilling, it’s often hard to do in the face of temptation.

This year, I’m simply striving to make the “right” choice more of a routine.

What areas am I focusing on?

I hope to spend some time helping a couple local food pantries with odds and ends that need done, such as restocking shelves and preparing bags.

In the winter, I’m going to pack up a shovel and do some volunteer snow removal where it’s needed.

In the spring and summer and fall, I’m going to do some volunteer work for the local parks and recreation department.

There are also a couple local charity groups that have some computer needs that I can help fulfill, so that their normal workflow can go much more smoothly.

What I’m essentially committing to is about four hours per week – on average – of such volunteer work, with a couple weeks for travel and the like.

I’ll be keeping track of this time in a spreadsheet, just so that I know I’m keeping pace with this goal. If our winter turns snowy, it’s likely that I’ll get significantly ahead earlier in the year. This does provide some breathing room for periods in the summer when there are reduced opportunities and different time constraints.

Why do this? Volunteer work makes a better community, and a better community makes a better life for those who live in it. It also leaves me feeling better about myself every time I do it. That’s reason enough for me.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I had made some changes to how The Simple Dollar is managed in an effort to free up time for other writing projects that I’ve wanted to take on. For me, first and foremost among these projects is the fantasy novel I’ve long talked about writing here on The Simple Dollar.

Why haven’t I written it yet? Time, mostly. The ideas behind the novel float around in my head all the time, but turning those ideas into actual written prose is a time-consuming process.

Right now, the novel exists as a fairly detailed plot outline that I keep tinkering with, several character sketches, and one chapter that I’m not even sure will be in the final novel. It might actually be a prelude. Although the novel is self-contained, it could easily develop into a series.

I also have several ideas for a second novel that I’d love to write, one with a more modern setting.

2012 is the year that I’m going to write them both.

Obviously, the first step is to simply get first drafts finished of both of the novels. That in itself will take some time, particularly for the second one.

I intend to first draft the first one, then move on to making character sketches and a plot outline for the second, then moving back to the first for later drafts. This way, I give them both some time to breathe.

I have several test readers and a freelance editor lined up. This will help me polish these things up a bit beyond what I could do myself.

After that, I’m going to publish them. I’ve decided already to go the self-publishing route regarding these novels, and I’m going to be discussing them and promoting them at TrentHamm.com and on my personal Twitter, though neither is really up and going quite yet.

The exact plans for publishing are still up in the air at this point, but I will likely publish a Kindle version first and eventually do a print version. I am considering a Kickstarter campaign for it as well.

Such issues are secondary, however, to the primary goal. I intend to write two novels this year. That’s pretty clear cut. I’ll worry about selling them when that bridge comes.

A few months ago, when I was feeling particularly frustrated about the failings of my fitness goals, I scheduled an appointment with a personal trainer.

I really do not like the idea of a “coach” to motivate my workouts or anything like that. I’ve had such coaches in the past, and I usually find myself getting angry at the coach in the middle of a workout and quitting. I do far better on my own, as I can always push myself to go a little bit farther or do one more rep. With a coach demanding it, I get irritated because I feel like they have no idea how I’m feeling and they’re just making things up, so I quit on them. I’m motivated internally, not externally, in other words.

My challenge really is coming up with a plan that works for me. Once I have that, I feel confident I can follow it.

When I met with this personal trainer, I was pretty clear that I wanted to set up a plan for myself to follow, which he understood. He then asked me point blank what my goal with all of this was.

I thought about it and I realized that the biggest thing I wanted was to be a good parent and eventually be a good grandparent. I wanted to be able to be fit enough to engage in lots of activities with both my children and with my eventual grandchildren, and I wanted to live as long as possible.

From there, he offered up a lot of recommendations.

First, he said my primary goal should be losing some of my excess weight.

As for my diet, he said that my current diet (vegetarian with occasional fish) was pretty solid but that I should work on portion control. He mostly suggested that I never take seconds during meals and a few other similar tactics.

Where he got down to business was with the exercise. He suggested that simply doing cardio – which was my main method of exercise – wouldn’t lead to long term weight loss and my avoidance of other forms of exercise was responsible for my back injury due to weak back muscles. Larger muscles lead to a higher metabolism and would then lead to weight loss if I didn’t give into eating large portions.

He gave me several books to read and offered up a simple suggestion. He said that I should spend fifteen minutes to half an hour each day exercising, but that each day of the week should focus on a different type of exercise. I should spend only a couple days a week doing cardiovascular exercise and the rest of the days should focus on different muscle groups. If I get injured, then I just avoid using those muscle groups.

The best part is that virtually all of the exercises are ones that I can do at home, with only a few weights required.

Since I have a plan, the key step is to codify a goal.

I want to lose 52 pounds in 2012. That’s a pound a week, or a calorie deficit of 500 per day. My trainer says that’s a very reasonable goal if I stick to a schedule of fifteen minutes of fairly intense exercise a day and portion control with my diet. If I get injured, I just avoid that muscle group for a while.

Will it work? Stay tuned to find out!

Get Fit
My biggest opponent in this regard was two unexpected injuries that were unrelated to my fitness.

For the first month of the year, everything was quite successful.

In February, I slipped and fell on a patch of ice and caused some severe internal bruising and tearing. I was in pain doing much of anything for about three weeks, during which my fitness schedule completely fell apart.

I started from scratch again at this point and by early summer I felt good about the state of things. Then, in July, I went on a trip to Seattle with my family. On the last few days of the trip, we stayed in a cabin with a really low ceiling where the only way I could get around inside the cabin was to severely stoop. On the last morning of our cabin stay, my back popped, leaving me in almost constant pain for about a month. The worst part was that while I was recovering, walking for more than a minute or so left my right leg numb.

After that, I never really got my fitness plan back on track.

What went wrong? I don’t think my fitness plan accounted for the possibility of such things going wrong. When I was unable to do certain types of exercise, I would simply give up on the idea entirely.

What can I improve on? Flexibility. When I set a goal, it needs to have a path leading to that goal that’s as flexible as possible.

Play Music
For the first few months of this year, this goal went really well. I took weekly piano lessons and practiced when I could.

My biggest challenge was that I couldn’t practice at home. We did not have a conducive keyboard setup for practicing. My wife largely felt that this was a frivolous endeavor and we constantly struggled with discussions about whether we should invest the money into a piano or a good keyboard setup.

Later in the year, this problem was made worse by a string of childhood illnesses that required me to miss a series of lessons, leaving me feeling lost and not making much progress on my playing.

Eventually, these two issues came to a head and I chose to end my piano lessons.

What went wrong? Lack of a proper environment. I didn’t have a place to practice that didn’t involve going somewhere else. On top of that, I began to realize that my children took priority over my piano playing.

What can I improve on? I shouldn’t choose a goal that’s significantly incompatible with my home environment or requires a significant purchase to make possible.

Read 100 Unread Books
This is the goal I hit out of the park. I read 100 new books this year – 103 at last count, to be exact. My list didn’t quite match the list from this post, but I read a little more than half of the books listed in that post.

What went right? I simply attacked this goal with relish. One of the big advantages was getting a Kindle as a gift, to which I was able to add electronic versions of about twenty books on the list for free that were very convenient to take with me anywhere.

Final Thoughts
Life is unpredictable. The goals that you think have a clear path to success sometimes have obstacles that you don’t see at first glance, and sometimes those obstacles prove insurmountable.

The best thing you can do with any goal is to give it some careful thought in advance. Think about your plan carefully and look for potential problems – and solutions to those problems. The more care you put in up front, the more likely you are to see success as things unfold.

I hope that principle is reflected as I discuss my 2012 goals throughout this week.

My husband’s father just gave him a huge speech about how he doesn’t dress appropriately for work and how he will never get promoted or “become a manager” dressing the way he does. My husband is a computer programmer who works with a bunch of engineers. He wears dress slacks and polos or button-up shirts everyday to work, while most of his co-workers wear jeans and t-shirts. This confused me, but my husband exaplined to me that what his father is saying that since he doesn’t wear designer clothes and because he doesn’t wear a tie everyday that he will never be promoted. We buy his clothes at JC Penney, but the cheaper brands. I can’t tell the difference between them and the nicer dept. store brands, other than the price. Do you agree with my father-in-laws assessment? What about if my husband wants to advance his career, but has no interest in managing people? I realize he would make more money if he eventually became a manager, but he enjoys his computer programming work, and probably wouldn’t enjoy managing people, and I would never want him to work a job he didn’t enjoy if he didn’t have to.

I think what’s happening here is that your father-in-law is substituting his own goals for his son’s goals and he’s trying to guide his son towards those goals.

Your husband seems to have his own set of career goals. He’d like to advance his career as a programmer, but he has no interest in being in management. Your husband also has familiarity with the culture of the career path that he’s chosen.

I think it’s absolutely vital that people have a set of career goals. They need to have a sense of where they want to go and what they need to do to get there. For those reading this, ask yourself those questions. Where do you want to be with your career in five years? In ten years? In twenty? What do you need to be doing to get there?

Yes, attire can be a part of those goals. The usual advice is to dress in the attire of the position you want to eventually attain. If you want to be in management, dress like management. If you want to be just part of the senior staff, dress like part of the senior staff. I consider that to be pretty good advice.

It sounds like your husband is dressing for the position he wants to attain eventually, which is a senior programmer. He should note what people in his desired position wear and emulate it.

Your father-in-law has his own goals and he probably envisions certain outcomes for his son, for various reasons. For those goals and outcomes, the advice your father-in-law is giving his son is probably good advice. He likely envisions his son eventually moving into management and wants to prepare him to do so.

The challenge here, as it often is, is communication. For this type of disagreement to occur, both people aren’t articulating what their goals are and the paths they see toward those goals.

Your husband can fulfill his part by simply making it clear that his goals do not involve moving into management. He needs to make it clear that he’s dressing for the role he aspires to, and that something he values deeply is a job that he enjoys doing and he’s willing to accept non-executive pay for that position.

If your husband can’t clearly articulate his career goals and his plans for achieving them, he should spend some time thinking about his plan for the future. Can he clearly state where he wants to be in five or ten years? What exactly is he going to do to make sure that happens? The more thought he’s given to this and the more detail he can give, the better.

Your father-in-law should be able to accept that. If he’s not, then your next move is to simply disregard his advice with regards to a career path. If he’s still giving advice that seems to be guiding your husband toward a management role, your husband needs to just nod his head and then follow his own path.

I actually sympathize with your husband. I have little interest or desire to be involved with personnel management, and knowing that about myself has driven many of my choices, both in the past and even today. I don’t want to manage people and it sounds like your husband doesn’t either.

However, it’s important to remember that (likely) your father-in-law cares deeply and desires a successful life without want for his son. Keep that in mind as you address this situation and handle everything with care and without anger or aggression.

Someday, I’d like to move forward on a long-planned series of video reviews of board games and card games that my friend and I have long discussed making and posting to YouTube.

Someday, I’d like to spend some time doing volunteer work for the two charities I care about, Jump for Joel and L’Arche Tahoma Hope, using what skills I have to increase their community presence and maximize the donations they receive.

Someday, I’d like to travel internationally with my family and show my children that the world is a beautiful and varied place.

Someday.

Pretty much every one of us has a “someday” or two on our list of things we’d love to do. They’re big things that would require a lot of time and planning. They’re things that seem incredibly exciting and compelling to us, but present some tremendous obstacles along the way.

Because those obstacles seem so daunting in our day-to-day lives right now, we simply think about these things as “someday” things. They enter into our daydreams, but we don’t take any real forward action toward them.

My Experience Reaching a “Someday”
Several years ago, my “someday” thing was being able to write full time for a living which would allow me to be at home for my children without travel and with extreme schedule flexibility.

At that time, I had a full time job in a field that was largely completely separate from writing. I had a very technical desk job that required some travel and also required my attention outside of office hours on a very regular basis. I also had a wife and a young child at home.

How did I make that “someday” dream a reality? Simply put, I started sacrificing my evenings and (quite often) my weekends to making that “someday” a reality. Instead of coming home and vegetating in front of a television show or a video game or just curling up with a book, I would spend several hours setting up, writing articles for, and promoting The Simple Dollar.

Simply put, I made that “someday” dream a priority of my free and leisure time and of my free and leisure money.

The amazing part was that once I got the project moving forward and got used to the routine of working on it, the project itself became really rewarding. Because it was something I had wanted to do for so long and it was so intrinsically tied to something I deeply enjoyed as a person (writing), the day-to-day work was incredibly fun even when I had very few readers and was making very little money with it.

The finanical rewards weren’t the real rewards. The process itself and the enjoyment I got from it was the real reward.

Reaching Your “Someday”
This brings us back to your “somedays” and mine. If you want to make these things come true, you have to start looking at your day-to-day time decisions with a discerning eye.

What’s more important to you? That “someday” dream or a new episode of The Big Bang Theory? Getting started on that big project you dream of or napping on the couch? Your big project or yet another shopping trip to the same old stores?

At the start of this month, I made a commitment to start on one of my “someday” projects and carry it forward to a conclusion. This means, for me, giving up some of the things I’d been filling my spare time with lately. It’s been challenging, but it’s been deeply rewarding at the same time.

What “someday” could you get started on starting today? Choose one that’s tied deeply to something you already enjoy doing, something that just channels it into a new direction. Let that “someday” fill your spare time.

Eventually, you may just find yourself on a new path, living your dreams.

I started off writing him an email about it, but I realized that much of what I was going to write to him would make a powerful article for The Simple Dollar.

My goal was to simply list nine things that he could do today that would improve his situation and leave him, at the end of the day, as though the day that has passed has been a valuable one and has put his life on the right track.

The Reflection
Spend half an hour and reflect on your life. Do it with nothing to distract you except a pencil and a piece of paper in front of you. Just spend that time walking mentally through every part of your life, thinking about where it’s at, what you’d like to be different about it, and what you actually like about it. Hit on what brings you joy and also what you can do to improve. Think about your dreams. Think about your biggest challenges. Look it in the face. Go through all of it.

If you come up with something – anything – that you feel like you should follow up on later, write it down. That’s why you have a pencil and paper in front of you.

Why do this? When you finish this, you’ll feel invigorated. You’ll feel far more in control of your life. You’ll have a much better sense of where things rank in your life in terms of what’s important and what really isn’t.

The List
This can follow the first one quite effectively. Make a list of ten things you want to accomplish, big or small. The best way to do this is to simply go through your mind and write down the first ten things you can think of that you want to do but just haven’t gotten around to doing.

Once you have that list, make another one. For each item on the first list, write down one single action that you can take – fifteen minutes or less – to move that item forward in some way. Then, use that second list as your to-do list for the rest of the day. Get through as many of them as you possibly can before the end of the day.

Why do this? You’ll feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment as you go to bed that night. You’ve taken forward action on a lot of things going on in your life – and forward progress on the things bothering you feels good, like that moment you’re scratching an itch that’s been bothering you for a while.

The Raise
Stop in and have a chat with your boss. Tell him or her that you’re not asking for a raise now, but that you’d like to ask for a raise in six months. Ask your boss what you can do to earn that raise over the next six months.

Take notes. Make a checklist out of what your boss tells you, then strive to go beyond each item on that checklist. Create a situation where you’re so valuable and useful to the company that they need you around.

Why do this? This is a very straightforward thing you can do to improve your own income and secure a stronger place at work. It tells you, in no uncertain terms, what you need to do to excel in the workplace.

The Book
Go to the library or to the bookstore and pick up a well-respected nonfiction book on a topic you’ve always been curious about. Start reading it today and get a significant amount of the way through the book.

The topic can be truly anything you’ve consistently wondered about over the years. All of us with even a bit of curiosity have something that we’ve regularly thought about. Now’s the time for you to sate that curiosity.

Why do this? The act of reading itself improves your language skills. Reading a challenging book improves your thinking skills. Following up on an area that you’re curious about is a great way to improve your knowledge on a topic that matters to you.

The Walk
Go for a one hour walk in your neighborhood. As you’re walking, be observant. Don’t just withdraw into your own shell or your iPod. Notice what’s going on around you with your eyes and your ears. Look for things that are interesting to you.

Along the way, say hello to everyone you see (if that’s reasonable, meaning you’re not walking in a particularly crowded area). Genuinely compliment anyone that you have a real reason to compliment. Also, make an effort to remember anything interesting that you come across, like a flyer for an interesting community activity.

Why do this? The walk itself provides exercise. The constant observation improves your observation skills and your understanding of what’s going on around you. The positive social interaction with others is a great way to practice social skills and perhaps start building connections to the people who live near you.

The Giving
Go to a charitable organization in your neighborhood that you believe in, knock on the door, and ask how you can help. It could be a church, a food pantry, a soup kitchen – anything. The key is that you believe in what they’re doing.

Most charities are happy to find something for an interested set of idle hands to do. It might be anything, from cleaning to serving food to organizing things to setting up or fixing a computer. It depends entirely on what that organization needs, and if you’re meeting that need with whatever skills and energy and time you can offer, you’re helping that charity achieve its goal of helping others who need it.

Why do this? Few things improve your outlook on life quite like investing some of your time, energy, and talent toward helping others. It gives you a strong sense of social accomplishment and pride in how you’ve spent your time, particularly when you can directly see the connection and improvement in your community.

The Cleansing
Go through your house. Gather up everything that you rarely use. Load it in your car. Drive it down to your local Goodwill. Donate it.

Yes, of course, you could have a yard sale or something like that, but the relative earnings for a lot of the things you’d donate wouldn’t earn you a lot at a yard sale and a lot of it would go unsold. Not only that, the stuff would have to sit around your house until the next time you can have a yard sale. If you want a fresh start, you’re better off just getting it out of there.

Why do this? You’re reducing the number of items you own, which means more space in your home and less time invested in upkeep and maintenance of your stuff. You’re giving those items to a charity, and you’re also ensuring that they wind up in the home of someone who wants them.

The Thanks
Call the person that has meant the most to you over the course of your entire life and tell that person that you love them and appreciate what they’ve done for you.

That person might be a parent, but it might also be a mentor or an old friend or an older sibling, depending on how the course of your life has gone.

Why do this? You’re able to let that one important person in your life really know how much they meant to you, which is an emotional gain both for you and for that person. Sometimes, this type of call can cut through a period of poor contact between the two of you, which can be a great improvement to a valuable relationship for both of you.

The Goal
Set yourself a single overarching goal – financial or otherwise – that you want to achieve in the next five years. Come up with a detailed plan for doing it. Do everything you can do for that plan on the first day, such as setting up accounts, setting up an automatic installment plan, doing some research, and so on.

For many people, the singular goal is an obvious one. It’s one that’s been dominating our thoughts for a while but has seemed so big that we’ve been afraid to take action on it. Today’s the day to start taking action.

Why do this? A big goal like this is something that can completely change your life. Taking the first steps toward that transformation can feel incredibly empowering – and they also do start you on your way to the change you dream about.

I’m trying to figure out how exactly I should save for several goals that I have. Here are the things I want to save for:

1. A BlendTec blender – $300
2. A complete refinishing of the downstairs bathroom – $3,000
3. A vacation to Germany next summer – $5,000
4. A car replacement – $12,000
5. A house down payment – $25,000

How do I prioritize these things? How do I go about saving for different goals? Where do I put these different batches of money?

This is a great question, one that you spelled out incredibly clearly and one that most of us struggle with to some extent.

Let’s break down your question into multiple pieces.

How exactly do I save for multiple goals at once? The easiest way to do this is to choose a bank that facilitates this process quite easily. I can recommend two banks for this – ING Direct and SmartyPig. I’ve used both of these banks. They both have great customer service and they each have a set of tools to make saving for a lot of goals quite easy.

With ING Direct, you simply open an account there, which will give you a single savings account. Once you’ve done that, it’s quite easy to simply open additional savings accounts and give them each nicknames. Just create an account for each goal.

With SmartyPig, you actually create savings goals within your account. You can create as many as you’d like.

With both of these, you simply link your new account to your regular checking account and set up automatic transfers to fund each of the goals or specific savings accounts. Easy as pie!

But how much do I save for each goal? The key thing to remember with any and all savings goals is that you’re trying to come up with a certain dollar amount at a certain time. Shannon certainly knows what her dollar amounts are, but she’s mostly unclear as to the timeframe.

Let’s come up with some examples of deadlines that Shannon might decide on.

Shannon wants the blender before Christmas, so she has three months to save for the $300 blender.
She wants to refinish the downstairs bathroom next spring, so she has six months to save for the $3,000 renovation.
She wants to travel next summer, so she has nine months to save for the $5,000 trip.
She wants to replace her car in two years, so she has twenty four months to save for the $12,000 car replacement.
She wants to buy a house in four years, so she has forty eight months to save for the $25,000 house down payment.

So, how much does she have to save per month for each goal?

For the blender, she needs to save $100 per month ($300 divided by 3 months).
For the downstairs bathroom, she needs to save $500 per month.
For the trip next summer, she needs to save $555 per month.
For the car replacement, she needs to save $500 per month.
For the house down payment, she needs to save $521 per month.

Now, that seems pretty stiff, doesn’t it? That’s a total of about $2,200 per month to save. What if Shannon can only save $1,000 per month for her goals?

There are two ways to do this. One is to simply prioritize. Is there one goal (or more than one) that can be postponed for a while?

The other is to simply focus on the goals chronologically. In other words, she goes through that list and applies the full $1,000 toward each goal on the list, with the nearer-term goals at the top and the longer term goals at the bottom.

So, during the first month, she’d put $300 toward the first goal, completely fulfilling it. She’d then drop $700 toward the second goal. Over the next two months, the full $1,000 would go toward the second goal. In December, she’d put $300 toward the second goal, fulfilling it, then put $700 toward the trip goal. This will get her pretty close to fulfilling all five of the goals.

In other words, if all of the goals have a high priority, put all of your savings toward the one with the closest deadline. When it’s fulfilled, move on to the next goal.

Good luck, Shannon! You’re definitely on the right path.

On Facebook, Joan wondered “What do you do when your financial goal seems out of reach?”

Goals that feel too out of reach are certainly a challenge. They can leave the goal-setter demoralized and feeling as though the goal will never really be accomplished, so why try at all.

I’ve fallen into this trap myself, often with fiction writing. I’ll have some great ideas for a fictional story, but when I sit down to write it, the story feels too big and the writing task just too immense to really tackle it at all. The sheer scope of it scares me away from even starting.

For others, goals such as eliminating all of their debt, starting a business, or having and raising a child can take on that particular flavor of out-of-reach hopelessness. I’ve found that there are seven techniques that really help me in dealing with my out-of-reach goals (and have helped me make some amazing progress on my fiction writing).

I’ll talk about these goals with the perspective of a recent goal-oriented experience of mine: working on my fantasy novel.

Embed yourself deeply with people who have achieved what you wish to achieve
Make friends with them. Spend time with them. Read their books and their blogs. Listen to their audiobooks and radio shows. Know their experience of succeeding in this area as deeply as you can. This not only will help you to believe that it’s possible, but also give you an abundance of techniques for making it possible.

Over the years, I’ve read countless books on the art of novel writing and follow the blogs and Twitter feeds of many of my favorite fiction writers, including Neil Gaiman and George R. R. Martin. They provide a constant reminder that it is certainly possible to take the dreams and ideas and world you’ve conceived in your head and convert it to the printed page.

Shrink the goal down to a milestone that’s not quite so immense
Instead of focusing on paying off all of your debts, focus solely and exclusively on paying off whatever debt comes first in your debt snowball. If you’re focused on saving for a down payment, focus instead on the next thousand dollar milestone – $1,000, $2,000, etc. Using smaller milestones as your focus point makes it all seem that much more reachable.

For my writing, by focusing on a plot outline or a single chapter at a time, the entire project started to become more manageable. It moved me from simply thinking that the project was too big to really embark on to actually creating something, and simply by doing that, I put myself and the project in a better place.

Take baby steps every day
A goal is made up of thousands of little actions. You don’t get in shape without making the choice to exercise every day. You don’t improve your finances without choosing to minimize your spending every day. You don’t build a better career without doing your best at work each day.

For me, it was mostly a matter of committing to writing a small number of words each day (1,000 – but that’s a small number in the grand scheme of things for me). It didn’t have to be on the novel itself; that many words in character outlines and other materials are perfectly acceptable.

Reaffirm why you’re doing this
A goal without motivation is a hard one to achieve. There needs to be some sort of motivation, whether internal or external, to keep you moving toward your big goal. Without it, it’s easy to get distracted by immediate and short-term temptations. For my financial goals, I use my family as a motivator and I still usually keep a picture of my children wrapped around my credit card.

For my writing, I really get a lot of joy out of just getting into that “zone” where time seems to stand still. I try to get into that state as often as possible because I produce great material when I’m in that state and I feel great when I snap back to “reality.”

Be obsessed
It’s a lot easier to achieve a giant goal if you become obsessed (or nearly so) with it. If you’re enjoying the progress, there’s no reason not to allow it to fill up your spare time. Use your spare hours to cut your spending through frugality projects like air sealing your home. Use those spare hours to exercise or to prepare healthy meals. Use those spare hours to learn.

Whenever I find a spare hour, I usually try to either write or to read something that will inspire me to write. An open book and/or my Kindle are constant companions, as is a notebook of some kind.

Use reasonable metrics
Measuring your idea of success or failure against an incredibly long measuring stick is a recipe for failure. If the only way you can feel successful about your financial goal is if you achieve something that adds up to more than your annual income, you’re asking to fail. Instead, measure yourself by simpler things. Instead of focusing on the mountain of debt, focus instead on measuring how much less you spend than you bring in each month. By measuring this (and using previous months for comparison), you push yourself into actions that naturally move you toward the giant goal you want to achieve while also keeping things real.

My reasonable metric is word count for a month versus earlier months. I try very hard to exceed the word count of the previous month by just a few, which keeps pushing me to put my pen to paper (or my hands to the keyboard). I don’t worry about completing a novel or anything, as I know that if I keep up with the word count, I’ll get there eventually.

Remember that the only success that really matters is internal success
In the end, what really matters is that you’re internally happy with what you’re achieving or have achieved. If you don’t feel good about the way things are going, it’s going to be impossible to keep going. You have to have a deep positive sense both about the goal and about the steps you’re taking toward that goal.

I really, really enjoy writing and I really, really enjoy looking back at and re-reading what I’ve already written. That positive feeling is strong enough that it often pulls me along to continued future progress.

I still don’t see any compelling reason to worry about my future more than about five years down the road. I can think about where I’d like to be in ten years, but life shifts so rapidly that no matter what I think of it won’t happen. Why should I even think for a second about anything beyond five years or so?

It’s a good question and Mark does make a good point. I think there are a few pieces, though, that he’s missing.

Unless you unexpectedly die at an unnaturally young age, you will grow old. It doesn’t matter where your path leads you. Eventually, you will grow old. Eventually, you won’t be able to keep up with the levels of productivity that you have right now. Eventually, you will be less employable.

Retirement is a long-term savings goal that makes a lot of sense to participate in for those reasons. It’s preparation for a situation that you know will happen down the road. Unlike many long-term goals, aging will happen and it’s worth your while to be prepared for it.

Most other worthwhile long term goals are centered around the accumulation of flexible skills and resources. Many people set goals in the five to ten year range in many areas: career advancement, business building, personal growth, a house down payment, and so on.

The vast majority of these goals have results that are incredibly flexible.

For example, if you’re saving for a down payment and your life path changes so that home ownership is no longer a goal you’re interested in, you still have a significant amount of financial resources saved up that you can apply toward whatever direction your life is now headed.

Another example: if you’ve set a long-term goal of heading the IT department at your company and you spend years building an appropriate resume and skill set, only to see your company fold up, you’ve still got a great resume and skill set to shop elsewhere and help your career.

I can go on and on with such examples. The core principle holds throughout all of them: a great long-term goal usually creates resources and skills that are still valuable even if the goal changes.

Many people are motivated by having goals of all terms. I find a big, ambitious long term goal to be really exciting and invigorating. The vision of doing something that leaves a major mark in my life and the lives of others keeps me wanting to move forward on that goal.

Short term goals motivate me as well, but in a different way. They often feel very reachable, as though it’s almost inevitable that I get there.

I can describe the difference as if you were a person standing on a hilltop in Seattle. There’s a street sign nearby and you could reach it quite quickly. It’s easy to see yourself walking half a block to get there.

On the other hand, you can see Mount Rainier off in the distance, about fifty miles away. Reaching it on foot is a long journey, but the idea of going there often seems exciting (particularly if you’re new to Seattle).

Long term goals are like Mount Rainier. They feel almost impossibly far away, but they look enormous and inviting in the distance. The idea of journeying there excites you and you can’t wait to get going.

I have no problem setting goals for myself. I follow the steps you suggest: make them realistic, make them numerical so I can keep track of them, write them down, and so on.

The problem is that when I come up with a plan to reach them, that plan completely falls apart within a week, every single time. I’ll have a four day run of working out at the gym, then a crisis will happen at work or my son will get sick and then I miss a day and once that chain is broken, I feel like such a failure that I don’t go back. I do the same thing with financial goals. I will do good for a while, then an emergency happens and I just give up.

What can I do? Help me achieve some goals here!

This happens to be a very common problem for motivated people who set strong goals for themselves. I usually find that when something like this happens to me, it’s a sign of one of three different basic problems, each of which has a different solution.

So let’s look at each one.

For examples throughout this post, I’m going to stick with the example Amy used of exercise goals, since it’s something many of us are familiar with. The same principles hold true for any sort of self-improvement goal, whether it’s financial or relationship-based or anything else.

Unrealistic or inflexible schedule
Your goal is to get into better shape. In order to do that, you decide that you’ll work out every day, perhaps using a system like P90X. For several days, you stick to it, but inevitably your life hands you some complexity that makes it impossible to work out for a day. Boom – you’ve fallen off your schedule and you feel like a failure.

The problem here isn’t your goal or your general idea for getting there. The problem is that your plan for getting there is so strict and tight that ordinary life will inevitably prevent you from getting there.

My suggestion is simple. Rather than saying “I will exercise every day” and feeling like a failure when you miss a day, say “I will exercise four times a week.” When you’ve set that goal, front load your week so that you have a good chance of knocking out those required four sessions right off the bat, then you can even shoot for exceeding that.

In short, give yourself a bit of room for flexibility. Assume that there are going to be times and days where things are going to keep you from executing your exact plan for that day. What kind of plan can you develop that takes that into account?

Poor measurements of success
As I’ve mentioned before, a good goal is one that offers a very clear way to describe success, often a numerical description, and completion of that goal often leads to the effect you want. “I want to lose weight” isn’t a good goal, for example, because it doesn’t describe what success is. Is it one pound? Is it a lot of pounds?

Of course, at the same time, “I want to lose 50 pounds” isn’t a good goal either, because pure weight loss is a rather poor metric for what you’re likely wanting to achieve.

What is it that you do want to achieve? Do you want to feel healthier? Do you want to look better? Do you want to live longer? Each of these has different things associated with it that you’d want to make happen, from diet to exercise.

Talk to people who understand these issues who can help you figure out what you should be aiming for with regards to success in those areas. These discussions should help you to have a much deeper understanding of what kinds of things you should actually be shooting for and provide you with some reasonable guidance for setting meaningful goals that will get you what you want.

Lack of external motivation
Another problem with many such goals is that they’re entirely internal. If you’re the only person involved with the goal, you’re the only person you let down if you fail to achieve the goal.

One way to break through this is to find a “buddy” who is working on the same (or a similar) goal as you are. This gives you someone to exchange tips and advice and motivation with as well as someone to actually participate in activities with. The key benefit, though, is that you’re no longer the only person involved with your goal. You’ve got another person who’s on the line with regards to your success. If you fail, you’re letting your buddy down, and that can be a huge motivator for people.

If you don’t have any sort of “buddy,” another method is to simply tell people about your goal and your plan to get there and ask them to keep you on your toes about it. When you know your close circle is going to be watching for your success, suddenly the motivation for your goal changes. Others are involved and the stakes are raised.

In the end, nothing can make you achieve a goal if you simply refuse to make progress towards it. However, just a few tweaks can turn something that feels insurmountable and pointless and not important to anyone else to something that feels reachable, vital, and valuable to people around you. That’s a drastic change in the nature of your goal and it can certainly make the difference between failure and success, whether you’re talking about financial goals, fitness goals, or any other type of personal goal.

That’s an unrealistic goal for me, and I knew it to be an unrealistic goal when I was ten years old on the playground. I wasn’t fast enough and didn’t have the natural reflexes of the other ten year olds on the court.

It was a painful thing for me to realize. I loved playing basketball. I still do. For me, basketball is a beautiful game.

The realization that I wasn’t NBA material didn’t mean I couldn’t be an effective basketball player. I had other skills that I could certainly utilize at the playground level. I was very solid and could plant my feet well, which meant that I could be a good defender, especially under the basket. I was willing to scrap for the ball. I was often more proud of a rebound or an assist than I was of a basket. I wasn’t fast and I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn more than ten feet away from the basket, but I did have at least some skills I could utilize and work on.

It also didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy playing basketball. I wasn’t going to be the next Michael Jordan. So what? That doesn’t mean playing basketball wasn’t – or isn’t – enjoyable. As I grew older, particularly during my later high school years and especially my first two years in college, I really enjoyed playing basketball. I knew what my areas of expertise were and I focused on maximizing those and being part of a team. It was a lot of fun and I had a set of experiences from those days that I’ll always remember.

It also didn’t mean that, if I committed to it, I couldn’t have spent my life around the game. Sure, I couldn’t actually play the game at a high level. However, I could coach. I could be an announcer. I could be a scout. I could be a basketball blogger. I could be involved in sports marketing. I could be involved in physical therapy. All of these were options that could have kept me close to basketball throughout my life. Each would have required me to add some additional skills to my repertoire beyond just the ability to play ball, of course, but that’s to be expected.

What’s the point of all of this?

First, some goals are too audacious. It is not realistic – nor has it ever been – for me to set playing in the NBA as a goal. It simply is not going to happen. It would simply be a path to failure for me to set being in the NBA as a goal.

Having said that, there is often some large element of even the most audacious of goals that you can achieve. It might not be realistic for someone to be President of the United States, for example, but it is certainly realistic for that person to aim to be mayor of the town in which they live or to be part of the White House press corps. It might not be realistic for someone to be an astronaut, but it is realistic for someone to become a NASA engineer.

If you find those initial but still fairly audacious goals easy, then aim higher. For example, if you decided that being President wasn’t going to happen, but you found yourself going from nothing to assistant Parks and Rec director to full Parks and Rec director to city council to mayor in a six year span, you might just have a gift for politics and might want to look higher. If you’re young and you decided to not shoot for the NBA but just be the best rebounder on your high school team and you set state records for rebounding during your sophomore year of high school, you might just want to aim higher.

One way to achieve this is to set goals not based on achievement, but based on performance. Let’s say you dream of a political career but are just getting started with a chance to be an assistant parks and recreation director, look at that position and ask yourself what kinds of things you can do in that position to hit a home run in that position while also setting yourself up for higher steps. Make a plan to succeed in just that regard. Set specific short term goals that will define your success and build the relationships you need to climb from there.

Similarly, let’s say you decided you wanted to be a basketball announcer. As I mentioned before, I have a friend who goes home in the evenings, turns the television on mute, and practices announcing the games he sees on television. It turns out that he records these sessions and then listens to them, noting what he’s doing wrong along the way. He’ll watch games while listening to his recorded coverage of them, and he’ll also listen to the straight audio in the truck.

His big goal might be to be announcing games on TNT and hanging out with Charles Barkley, but his short term goal is the priority. His goal, every single day, is to record a play-by-play of a basketball game, listen to another play-by-play, and critique it. Beyond that, he’s making connections in sports broadcasting at every level, using Twitter and personal interactions to meet people who are actually in the business, particularly production folks.

Those are goals that are based entirely on the process of achieving his big goal. Even if his big goal doesn’t come true exactly as he envisioned it, I don’t think anyone would argue that he’s not creating a very compelling path for himself in sports broadcasting.

It gets better. His medium-term goal is any paid job broadcasting basketball games. Anything. It can be for a local radio station broadcasting high school games. It can be voiceovers for a website. Whatever it takes. Again, he has a plan for that goal that’s loaded down with the things he can do today.

If you’re reading this, you probably don’t have the skill set needed to be president or the skill set needed to be a Major League Baseball all-star or the skill set needed to be CEO of a Fortune 100 company. That’s okay. There’s still nothing keeping you from having a life filled with doing the things you love. Focus instead on who you are, what skills you can build, and what you can do.

You might just find a better path than you expect.

Goal #1: Get fit, which basically meant meeting a few fitness metrics

Goal #2: Play music, which meant being able to successfully play four pieces on the piano

Goal #3: Read 100 unread books, which meant largely clearing out my to-be-read list

I’ve had the most success so far with the third goal, far and away. It is the reason for that success – and the failure on the other goals – that left me thinking. Why that goal?

This morning, it hit me, out of the blue. When I put the revelation in context with the other goals I’ve previously accomplished and failed with in my life, it makes complete sense.

I succeed at goals where the goal itself is a process toward some further end. I fail when the goal is merely that further end.

Let me break it down and explain what I mean.

With the third goal, reading 100 unread books, the real thing I hope to accomplish is to become more well-read. The reading list I put up there is diverse, and by reading all of that stuff and absorbing it to the best of my ability, I’ll likely become a more well-rounded person.

However, becoming well-read is not the goal I set for myself. The goal I set for myself directly sets down the process for becoming well-read. Simply by accomplishing the goal of reading 100 books, I will have naturally become more well-read in the process.

Thus, I’m left with a goal that explains what I need to do right on the surface. Read. Read what? These 100 books I have listed here. I can go right down that list, knocking off book after book. There’s no question or deliberation about what to do. I just simply follow that goal.

The other two goals have failed because they don’t make it clear what I need to do. They both sound noble on the surface – get into shape and learn to play the piano – but they don’t immediately translate into some sort of action.

A successful goal, at least from my perspective, is one where it’s immediately clear from the goal itself what needs to be done and by doing what’s suggested, you’re pushing forward strongly on some value in your life.

So, let’s recast those two goals a bit, shall we?

The first goal is to get into shape. Being in shape is the outgrowth of following a routine exercise regimen. After talking to a trainer, we set up something of a plan for exercising every other day (with a day in between for rest) that hits cardio each time and a certain muscle group every four sessions.

If I were to actually do those sessions, being in shape would be a natural outgrowth. So, my goal should actually be go to the gym every other day. If I actually just accomplish that very simple thing, then the personal change I want – being in better shape – is a natural result.

The second goal is to play four pieces on the piano. Again, being able to play these pieces is the outgrowth of practicing them. Simply put, all I really need to do to be able to play these pieces is to simply practice each day.

If I set my goal to be the straightforward practice the piano for thirty minutes each day instead of the less clear and more lofty one I have in place, then actually playing the pieces I want to play will be the natural result of the steps.

I can even improve the third one. If the change I want to affect in myself is to be more well-read, reading that list of books will accomplish that. However, it still doesn’t point toward a simple action. How about spend an hour each day reading something challenging? I exceed that most days, but this gives the right idea. It pushes me constantly toward the change I want to bring about in my own life.

All of us have big changes we want to make in our lives. Success in making that happen comes often from the little steps along the way. Focus on those little steps for a while without worrying about the big goal. Spend your time just dribbling the ball instead of wanting to be the next Allen Iverson. Spend two hours on your side business each day instead of talking big about building a major enterprise.

Do the little steps right and your destination will sneak up on you.

Is this moving me towards my goals?

The outcome of that question casts a strong light on the activity at hand. Sometimes, it’s a positive light and it encourages me to move forward. At other times, it’s a negative light, and it makes me back off a bit.

It’s a very simple and very effective litmus test for everything that I do. Let’s break it down a little bit.

First, you’ve got to have goals
For this question to work, you need to have goals for the future. Almost always, I have a bunch of goals going on at once. Some of them are very short term, to be accomplished within a week. Others approach a lifelong journey.

Here’s a snapshot of a few of my goals, just to show you what I mean.

By March 16, I want to have the house prepared for a nearly weeklong visit from my sister-in-law and her soon-to-be spouse.

By the end of June, I want to have about three weeks of articles banked for The Simple Dollar so that I don’t have to worry about content production when I visit Seattle for the aforementioned wedding (and give myself a little bit of breathing room on either side).

By the end of 2011, I want to have “Project X” completed. What is Project X? I’ll tell you about it in the future, but it’s intended to be a fully passive revenue stream.

By the end of 2013, I want to have our home’s mortgage completely paid off.

Four goals. Four different timeframes. Four different sets of influences on me.

So, when I’m looking at what I’m going to do right now, I keep those goals in mind.

An example: I was out running errands earlier. I was near the local gaming shop, so I stopped in. There was a game there that I knew that Sarah and I would enjoy playing. Should I buy it?

Well, Sarah and I play a lot of games together – it’s one way we spend time together in the evenings (a positive towards the goal of being a good husband). On the flip side, we have several games on our shelves already that we’re itching to play (negative toward being more diligent about using stuff we already have), plus the game would cost $40 (negative toward every spending goal). I could also definitely afford to go home and research the game a bit more and perhaps buy it online at a later time, saving some cash.

So I move on, knowing that such a choice is not really taking away anything I might enjoy, but also knowing that it is yet another step towards goals that I have.

Does a bad answer always mean no?
Now, it would be easy to perceive this as being a reason to never indulge in anything that doesn’t take me toward a goal. Abandon fun, all ye who enter here? Not so much.

Yes, if something is a negative towards every goal that I have, I won’t choose to do it. Drug use? It’s not going to happen, because it’s a negative towards many of my goals (savings goals, being a good parent, etc.) and a positive towards none of them.

On the other hand, when a friend calls me up and invites Sarah and I over to do something fun, I’m almost always going to say yes. Sure, that time spent might be a negative towards some of my goals – I certainly could spend my time getting prepped for my sister-in-law’s visit or working on “Project X” – but it’s also a positive towards other goals, such as building key friendships and enjoying non-idle leisure (my friends don’t just sit there watching whatever’s on television).

Sometimes, I’ll even go ahead with things that are contradictory to more goals than are benefited by the choice. For example, I might decide to buy a new boardgame out of my personal spending allowance for the month. Yes, I could save that money for another goal and yes, there probably are games on my shelf that could be played instead.

But I recognize that such a choice really is a rare splurge. It is not something I do every day – or every week. Occasionally doing such a thing not only maximizes the fun of doing something so frivolous, it also reminds me that doing this every day would not be nearly as fun.

Doing something like that is a fun occasional splurge, but it’s not nearly as fulfilling over the long term as making consistent choices that take me towards my goals.

The big win
Of course, the best options are ones that simultaneously bring me deep enjoyment and move me towards a number of goals.

A period of writing where the pressure is off is a great example of this. I thoroughly enjoy writing when I’m not under some sort of time crunch, plus such writing almost always carries me towards lots of personal goals.

Planting the garden is another great example. It’s often a goal in and of itself, but beyond that, it’s a very frugal activity that gets me outside and gets some exercise (using the hoe, etc.). I enjoy every second of it, too.

Going to thrift stores with my wife often hits several things at once, as I’ll sometimes find things we’re looking for at a huge discount, plus I’m bonding with my wife without spending much money at all.

Playing with my kids, reading a challenging book, preparing dinner at home – these all fall under that umbrella.

When those things happen, when I hit a bunch of goals and do something deeply enjoyable, then I truly feel like my life is headed in the right direction.

I want to publish a series of fantasy novels that appear in every bookstore in the country.

I want to pay off the $300,000 in debt that I owe.

I want to start a restaurant chain.

I want to visit 100 countries by the time I’m 40.

I’m a fan of overly audacious goals. Setting a huge goal for yourself can shock you into action and sometimes make you go beyond what you believe you’re capable of.

In 2002 and 2003, I worked on a software development project that was far, far over my head. During the course of that project, the technical advisor (the one helping me figure out the actual specs of the software) essentially quit, leaving me to not only write all the code, but also design the interface of it based on what the customers would want.

Waiting around for additional hires was not an option. I either had to move forward or the project went under and I would be looking for another job.

Add on top of that the fact that I was writing all of this in a language that I was largely unfamiliar with (as I was under the impression I would have plenty of room to learn on the job).

When I realized the scope of what I had to do, it was almost overwhelming.

Not only did a two man team manage to pull it off (myself and a database expert), the project is still in existence (albeit in very modified form) to this day, using largely the same code I wrote in 2002 and 2003.

How did this happen? There were three real factors involved here, in my opinion.

First, a big part of this project was the personal challenge. I wanted to show myself that I could do this and, in the end, I was really the person that I was accountable to. If I failed without really trying, that sense of failure would hang over me for a long time. If I failed with a sincere effort – or better yet, succeeded – that would stick with me as well.

Second, a spectacular failure was worth far more than no action at all. I realized pretty quickly that if I gave this project my all, I would still get something out of it even if it failed. I would learn a great deal of domain knowledge. I would learn some significant skills. I would have an entry on my resume and a good story to tell. I would also learn some lessons from failure.

Finally, I had supportive people in my corner. The people up the food chain from my project were pretty supportive of what we were working on. They wanted us to succeed. They cheered us on when we needed it. They took care of peripheral things that would have just distracted us. They gave us carte blanche to use our own judgment, but were willing to provide input when we asked.

To be sure, not every big, audacious goal works. Any enormous goal you set for yourself needs to have a few key elements.

It must not seriously damage your life if you fail. No goal is worth risking the key things you need to have in your life. No goal is worth sacrificing your childrens’ needs or the well being of your marriage or your closest friendships or your career. If the worst case scenario of a goal is apocalyptic, it is never worth it. If you’re setting a big goal, spend some time teasing out the worst case scenario and make sure that you can roll through it. Often, this means that you need some advance planning before you leap into your big goal.

Ideally, you gain some degree of benefit if you only partially succeed – or even if you largely fail. For example, if you want to travel to 100 countries by the time you’re 40, but you only make it to 80 of them, you’ve still succeeded big time and you have a huge warehouse full of stories and memories for the rest of your life. If you want to pay off $300,000 in debt in seven years but only get rid of $240,000 of it – you got rid of $240,000 in debt. That’s not a bad thing.

It must be met with the support of key people. If you’re married, this always includes your spouse. It can also involve your coworkers, other family members, and close friends. The people you rely on most need to be in your corner when you approach something audacious.

The real fire has to come from within you. You’ve got to want it so bad you can taste it. If you don’t have the fire to make something happen, it won’t happen. Think of those moments in your life when you’ve most wanted something. That’s what this goal needs to feel like within you, because without that fire, you won’t go beyond what you think you’re capable of to reach that goal.

Set a big goal for yourself, something you’ve always wanted for your life. Throw yourself into it. You might be surprised at what you find along the way and on the other side.

January 2011: Rearrange my office with shelving
February 2011: Reorganize the laundry room, getting a better laundry system in place
March 2011: Reorganize the garage and closets, identifying stuff for a spring yard sale
April 2011: Plant a great garden and harvest springtime foods (like morel mushrooms)
May 2011: Set up a family computer workstation (and the required rearragements)

I have some vague ideas for the second half of the year, but I haven’t put them all together as of yet.

Let’s take a look at the features each of these have in common.

Each of these projects will take about twenty hours of work (by my estimation) to fully complete. Some of them sound easier than others, but often the easier ones have some additional constraints that will add significant time to the equation. For example, the office rearrangement requires me to dismantle my current (overly large) desk first, which will take time. I also have to move a significant amount of computer equipment, and when the office is rearranged, I have to move some items from the basement to the new shelves.

Each one can be done in small batches, so I’m not required to set aside entire days to work on these projects. My life doesn’t afford me large blocks of time that I can devote to projects like this – it just doesn’t happen. On the other hand, projects that can be subdivided into smaller pieces tend to work very well because I can simply work on the project for an hour here and an hour there until it’s complete.

I want to work on these projects steadily, so setting a clear deadline for myself encourages that. Although I am quite busy, I do want to actually move forward with and complete such projects. Setting a deadline puts me in a position where I consistently put time aside to achieve these goals – an hour here, an hour there, and then they’re completed.

Setting Your Own
Of course, you can do the same thing in your own life. Using monthly goals to accomplish such activities is a great way to keep yourself moving forward on the smaller yet still significant things you want to accomplish in your life. Here are some tactics to use for doing just that.

Make (and keep) a big project list. Spend some time making a list of all of the projects you want to take on in your life. Include everything, from enormous life-changers that could take years to any small thing that you can’t quite accomplish in an afternoon. Once you’ve made that list (I recommend using a word processing program), save the document and return to it regularly, adding new items and looking for things to accomplish.

Create time estimates for these projects. They don’t have to be perfect time estimates, just enough to help you get an idea of how many hours of work it will take as well as any other length requirements.

Seek out projects in the twenty hour range. Generally, such projects are perfect month-long goals for you to set for yourself. They require some significant time, but can be accomplished with an hour or two a day or a few full weekend days.

Come up with a month-long plan of attack. How will you accomplish this goal? What needs to be done each day? Sit down and define exactly what you intend to do and how you intend to accomplish it.

Flip the calendar… and get started. It’s as simple as that. A calendar month is a perfect period and timeline for accomplishing such small goals.

Twenty Ideas
Here are twenty ideas for such projects to get your creative juices going. Good luck!

1. Walk/run 100 miles.
2. Cook 25 meals in advance and freeze them for future use.
3. Thoroughly clean and rearrange a room.
4. Create a complete grocery “price book.”
5. Have a yard sale.
6. Make a “recipe box” containing 150-200 recipes you can just pull out and rely on.
7. Prepare and plant a garden.
8. Air seal your home and improve your attic insulation.
9. Open up an account at PaperBackSwap, then list and ship fifty unwanted books.
10. Learn some basic home repair and fix a few minor problems in your home.
11. Repaint the trim of your home.
12. Organize and host a block party to get to know your neighbors.
13. Attend meetings of several civic groups to see if any click with you.
14. Calculate your net worth and set up a spreadsheet to make it easy to calculate it in the future.
15. Contribute to a large-scale volunteer project, like a “speed build” of a Habitat for Humanity house.
16. Read four books – one per week.
17. Deeply investigate a topic you’ve long been curious about.
18. Prepare a batch of homemade wine or beer (for gifts, if for nothing else).
19. Repaint a room in your home.
20. Find new checking and savings accounts and migrate your banking to them.

For my first book review of 2011, which will pop up on the site on Sunday and appear in subscriber’s mailboxes early in the morning of the first working Monday of the year, I thought I’d take a look at one of the best books out there about defining and setting goals, since so many people start out the year with goals and resolutions of all kinds (and I’m no exception to that).

Goals! is one of a pile of self-motivation and self-improvement books written by Brian Tracy. I’ve read several of them, but the only one that really clicked with me was this one because it offered so many good pieces of advice about setting personal goals and working towards them. It worked for me because so much of the advice was actionable – I could actually do the things in the book and apply them immediately to my own goal-setting habits.

As with most of my book reviews, the things I share with you below just scratch the surface of the content. Instead, I usually try to seek out a key highlight or two from each chapter that really had an impact on me.

1. Get Started: Unlock Your Potential
Everything you have accomplished in your life up to this point is mere preparation for what is to come. You now have a pile of skills, experiences, and motivations to draw upon that you’ve accumulated throughout your life, and you should use those as constant fuel for the fire to move towards whatever you want in life. Think of the biggest things you’ve accomplished in life. Are the things you want in the future really that out of reach compared to what you’ve already done, especially considering all of the things you have at your disposal now as compared to then?

2. Take Charge of Your Life
You are responsible for everything you do in your life. You make the choices of how to spend your time, how to spend your money, how to spend your energy, and what you spend your time thinking about. Those things are up to you. Don’t blame others or make excuses when you make choices related to how you spend your time, money, energy, and thoughts. Instead, focus on using your thoughts, money, energy, and time to achieve the goals you have in your life. When you spend an hour idling, you’re not just losing an hour of time. You’re losing an hour of energy. An hour of thought. An hour of forward progress on the things you really want.

3. Clarify Your Values
What do you really believe in? What do you truly care about? If you’re trying to work towards goals that aren’t fed by those beliefs and cares, you’re going to have a very hard road with regards to achieving them. Spend some time clarifying what you care about and believe in before you even begin to set goals for yourself.

4. Analyze Your Beliefs
What do you believe with regards to your own abilities? What do you believe about the world around you? Is it holding you back or is it a giant pile of opportunities? It is these beliefs that will drastically constrain – or leave wide open – the goals that are available to you. Most of what’s possible is defined within your own head.

5. Create Your Own Future
Imagine that you could progress towards the goals you have in life with no obstacles preventing you from doing so and you had all of the resources you needed. What would your life look like? I often call this a “five year sketch,” in which I draw a picture of what I would like my life to look like in five years or so.

6. Determine Your True Goals
What do you want to accomplish in every major part of your life? Your finances? Your professional life? Your relationships and family life? Your health and wellness? What about other areas of importance to you? Think about each one and figure out what you most want in that area. This builds upon a foundation of your beliefs.

7. Decide Upon Your Major Definite Purpose
Often, when you look at the main goals you have for your life, it will become clear that they actually all point to a singular goal that rules them all. For example, in my case, my singular goal is to be a great father – it really does overlay every other goal and mission I have in my life. All of my significant goals are at least in part connected directly to my desire to be the best possible parent.

8. Start at the Beginning
What is your starting point for each of these goals? Where are you at right now? The more honest you are about your current situation, the easier it will be to create goals that actually work for you instead of goals that are completely out of touch with your current state. The more in touch your goals are, the easier they’ll be to accomplish.

9. Set and Achieve All Your Financial Goals
Tracy spends this and the next few chapters focusing on goals people typically have in certain areas of their life. His financial suggestions are straightforward: in essence, he suggests making a net worth calculator in order to get a full view of your assets and debts, then look for specific ways to improve both areas (as foundations for goals).

10. Become an Expert in Your Field
You’re better off being the best around at a very specific area than being just one of the bunch in a larger pool. Focus on getting to the very top in a specific area so that you can gan reknown for that expertise rather than being just one of a hundred people that throw their resume towards yet another essentially identical job.

11. Improve Your Family Life and Relationships
A big part of your life consists of the people around you, and the better your relationships are with those people, the better your life will be. Put effort into patching up rough relationships, eliminating unfixable ones, and putting continued focus on the relationships most important to your life.

12. Optimize Your Health and Wellness
Having a high level of energy and fitness makes it possible to enjoy many avenues of life that are difficult to enjoy without these attributes. You can cultivate these attributes in your life if you so choose, and the best way to do that is to take a realistic assessment of your current fitness and health and chart some goals leading you to where you want to be so you can tackle anything in life.

13. Measure Your Progress
For any goal, define a goal that has a clear way to determine if you’ve achieved it or not as well as a clear way to mark your progress. Then set milestones along the way so that you can constantly check and make sure that you’re moving in a reasonable way towards your goal. “I want to lose weight” won’t cut it; try “I’m going to lose 25 pounds this year” and have milestones each month that include losing two pounds that month.

14. Remove the Roadblocks
What are the biggest obstacles you can see that will keep you from achieving the goal? What can you do to remove these roadblocks? Goals are much easier to achieve if you don’t have things working against you with regard to those goals. Seek out ways to remove the roadblocks, then actively remove as many as you can so that you’re open to achieving the things you wish to achieve.

15. Associate with the Right People
The people you most closely associate with often set the standard for what you want out of life. For example, three of my four closest friends in the world at this point are very frugal people, and their frugality often rubs off on me with regard to my personal choices. Surround yourself with people who embody what you want to achieve. Make an effort to build relationships with them.

16. Make a Plan of Action
What is your plan for achieving your goal? Write your goal down, then write a detailed plan for achieving it. The more detail, the better. Can you boil that plan down to daily steps or individual actions? The smaller the pieces, the easier it is to just grab ahold and pull yourself towards your goal, one bit at a time.

17. Manage Your Time Well
Time management is key – if you don’t have time for the things in your life right now, how will you have time to add the behavior changes that you’re suggesting? One route is to focus on your time management and implement a better system for you, like GTD. Another route is to simply identify time you spend inefficiently in your life and free up the time needed for your new goal, as I did for exercise in 2011.

18. Review Your Goals Daily
Take time every day to review the goals you’re working on, and do deeper reviews of it every week. I do this by writing in a journal and keeping tabs on a few key goals every single day in that journal. I literally have a daily section in my journal where I write “Goal #1:” followed by a sentence on my progress, then “Goal #2:” followed by a sentence and so on. It forces me to think about that goal every day, and I feel ashamed when I have to write “no progress.”

19. Visualize Your Goals Continually
When you find yourself daydreaming, daydream about what success in terms of your goal will look like. It’s actually great to fantasize about a world where you’ve found success with your chosen goal because it keeps that goal central in your mind throughout the day and the week.

20. Activate Your Superconscious Mind
Tracy uses the word “superconscious” to refer to flashes of inspiration or brilliance, when a great idea comes into your head seemingly out of nowhere and helps you solve a particular problem. I usually refer to this as being “in the zone,” and I find it very worthwhile to spend time cultivating periods where such flashes of brilliance happen on a regular basis, which is exactly what Tracy advocates here.

21. Persist Until You Succeed
You absolutely can’t give up on a goal because of one or two small failures. A step backwards isn’t a call to quit. It’s a call to keep marching forward, perhaps seeking out a slightly different path through the woods.

Is Goals! Worth Reading?
Goals! is perhaps the single best book I’ve yet read on goal setting and goal achievement. It offers an enormous collection of advice on how to figure out what you want, articulate it into a clear and achievable statement, then move toward that statement, improving your life along the way.

Yes, much of goal-setting is common sense, but it’s the type of common sense that many people have a great deal of difficulty with (hence the huge numbers of failed New Years resolutions). This book lays the entire process out as clearly as can be.

Over time, any voracious reader winds up with a list of books that they intend to read someday, but they find themselves reading more urgent things in the interim. They could read this challenging novel, but there’s this great page turner to read instead. This novel is pretty good, but it’s so long that I’ve lost my place in it. Boy, this nonfiction one is really challenging reading.

As a result, I’ve gradually built up a long list of “to-be-read” and “come-back-to” books that I keep telling myself I’ll read someday.

2011 is that “someday.”

I’ve been assembling an actual list of these books over the last few weeks. I’ve mentioned many times on here that I keep a running Word document of books I’d like to read (or, in a few cases, re-read) at some point. I essentially took that list and eliminated some of the chaff, boiling it down to 100 titles that really sum up some of the things I’ve strongly considered reading over the past couple of years, but put aside for whatever reason.

Here’s that list.

The Best American Short Stories 2010, edited by Richard Russo
The Best American Short Stories 2009, edited by Alice Sebold
PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010
PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009
Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
Makers, by Cory Doctorow
The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano
Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson
The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson
The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
Tinkers, by Paul Harding
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell
The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris
Austerlitz, by W. G. Sebald
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon
Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon
Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow
The Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem
Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski
Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami
American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis
Less than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer
The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
2666, by Roberto Bolano
The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb
The Northern Clemency, by Philip Hensher
I Know This Much Is True, by Wally Lamb
Selected Stories, by O. Henry
The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Rainbow’s End, by Vernor Vinge
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
Fragile Things, by Neil Gaiman
Under the Dome, by Stephen King
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett
Shogun, by James Clavell
Ilium, by Dan Simmons
Olympos, by Dan Simmons
Accelerando, by Charles Stross
The City and the City, by China Mieville
The Count of Monte Cristo (unabridged), by Alexandre Dumas
Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence
Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers
The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes
Reality Hunger, by David Shields
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010, edited by David Sedaris
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, edited by Dave Eggers
Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace
The Best American Sports Writing 2010, edited by Peter Gammons
The Best American Sports Writing 2009, edited by Leigh Montville
The Best American Essays 2010, edited by Christopher Hitchens
The Best American Essays 2009, edited by Mary Oliver
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010, edited by Freeman Dyson
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert
The Language of God, by Francis Collins
Belief, edited by Francis Collins
The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan
God Is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens
The First Tycoon, by T. J. Stiles
Lords of Finance, by Liaquat Ahamed
Just Kids, by Patti Smith
The Beautiful Struggle, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlsetin
Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein
The Book of Basketball, by Bill Simmons
The Best American Magazine Writing 2010
The Best American Magazine Writing 2009
A Soprano on Her Head, by Eloise Ristad
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
Play Their Hearts Out, by George Dohrmann
Look Me in the Eye, by John Elder Robison
Fordlandia, by Greg Grandin
The Progress Paradox, by Gregg Easterbrook
Hungry Monkey, by Matthew Amster-Burton
Nudge, by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami
The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
American Sphinx, by Joseph J. Ellis
What the Dog Saw, by Malcolm Gladwell
NurtureShock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky
The Religious Case Against Belief, by James Carse
Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain
Manufacturing Consent, by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman
Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins
Hurry Down Sunshine, by Michael Greenberg
Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, by Geoff Dyer
Bringing up Geeks, by MaryBeth Hicks
The Trouble with Physics, by Lee Smolin

It’s a wide mix. It’s roughly half fiction and half nonfiction. There’s a fairly strong religious theme running through there, with some strong apologetics and some strong atheist writing, too. I could go on and on with the observations about the list.

In the end, though, my goal is to read every title on that list in 2011.

Where will you find time? I currently read just shy of two books a week for personal enjoyment – and this is my “personal enjoyment” list for 2011. Some of the titles are a bit more challenging than my usual stuff, but I plan on coming up with that time by making sure I’m always carrying a book with me when I leave the house so that I don’t find myself idly reading a newspaper at the car repair shop and the like.

Another of my 2010 resolutions was to learn to play the piano, which is something I feel is coming along very well. For 2011, I’ve been thinking about tackling some intermediate-level pieces and working with them until I can play them very well.

For the moment, I’ve settled on four pieces that I want to be able to play without error by the end of 2011. Two of them are classical and two of them are pop.

1. Scheherazade (piano solo) by Nikolaj Rimsky-Korsakow (listen to excerpt)
2. Beautiful Day by U2 (listen)
3. In the Hall of the Mountain King (piano solo) by Edvard Grieg (listen)
4. Clocks by Coldplay (listen)

My plan is to continue my piano lessons as they are and work through these (at first) completely on my own. As I start making breakthroughs, I’ll then take the piece to a piano lesson and go through it with my teacher, as she’s good at spotting where my problems are. I’ve basically asked her not to pull punches as I’d rather get good than have my ego fluffed.

For this resolution, I don’t have to set aside (much) time that I’m not already setting aside for piano practice. Instead, what I’m doing is setting new goals and renewing my commitment to learning an instrument.

Are these pieces over my head? Maybe. It really depends on the arrangement I wind up working with. I have arrangements in hand for three of them that I can at least comprehend and work through slowly at the keyboard.

I view these pieces as my “challenge” pieces. In a normal one hour practice session, I usually spend fifteen minutes on finger exercises and scales, fifteen minutes on a piece or two I know well, and thirty minutes on pieces that challenge me. They’re complex enough that I can’t just sit down, flop the piece in front of me, and just play it.

Why is this a goal? One, music education is a piece of my own personal education that I feel I missed when I was younger. I’ve always wanted to play an instrument and now I’m learning how. Two, I want to show my children that music is part of a normal, healthy life. Three, I might someday end up playing at my local church as a backup pianist for services. Fourth, I want to show myself that I can do this.

That’s reason enough for me.