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Setting, accountability and achievement of goals - Part 1

    One thing I love about the beginning of a New Year is setting goals and New Year's resolutions. But, for the majority of people, they tend to be forgotten before the end of the first month

    So, how do you set your goals and keep consistently pursuing them all through the year?

    While I was reading through my goals for this year to sort them in order of priority for their execution, I had the idea of writing this post sharing my system for organizing them and getting it done.

    You may have goals for different areas of your life, but it's a good idea grouping them all together in your schedule.

    I wrote my personal and professional goals together in another profile. On this blog, I posted my writing goals. I have worked with design, mainly design for web, development and animation. but been a songwriter since childhood and also wrote some screenplays that were hugely succesful, but I didn't receive my authorship credits and patrimonial rights yet, thus I must keep on working with other fields.

    Being from a English community in a country whose majority of population is latin, I grew up bilingual and acquired a sense of organization early in life, from the machine sheds and from talking to people in my neighbourhood about their habits. 

    When, a few years ago, my life changing move didn't go as planned, my organizing skills led me to writing and I became a ghostwriter.


Start with pen and paper

    The first step is to write down your goals. If a blank piece of paper scares you, you can start by dividing it in four or more sections.

    Write down the areas of your life you think need some improvement. For instance; relationship goals, health goals, financial goals, etc.

    Then, begin writing things you would like to do in each field.


Prioritizing and organizing your goals

    Having in mind that you're only one person to acomplish all those goals, I think it's better to list them one after another, keeping a classification tag with its category before it. A simple () or [] markup will do the job.

    This system works well for me. The tag is useful to monitor the acomplishment of goals by area.

    So now, they are ready to be rearranged in priority order. Once you've done that, you can start working on them according to your daily schedule.


Goal Purgatory List

    Once you've done that, you can start working on them according to your daily schedule.

    Most goals depend on oneself's dedication to it, but, eventually, they may be impacted by action (or not) of others. 

    That was the case with my goals for this year in more than one situation. Those goals were important, thus I didn't want to keep them out of my list.

    I also had some conditional goals, that I wasn't sure I was going to pursue, depending on the circumstances and goals that I was already doing with some periodicity, only needing to keep with the same consistency from the last year.

    

Read the second and third parts of this post:

Part II: Keeping track of goals and keeping goals on track


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