August Goals

I love my friend Rachel, who blogs over at Balance and Blueberries. Without question, my favorite posts of hers are her monthly goal setting posts.

Rachel, its not that I don’t love your delicious recipes or tales of hiking adventures. I just love your goal setting more!

As a musician and an administrator, I’ve learned goal-setting and to-do lists are vitally important to surviving and thriving. So, in honor of Rachel, and all of you goal setters out there, here is to starting off my month with achievable goals. By the end of the month, hopefully you’ll see me posting my goal-meeting successes, and be honest about my goal-meeting failures. My grad school training has taught me that goals are SMART:

Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

All of these are time-bound, because I’m doing them in the month of August, so between now and August 31. They’re also all relevant, because I’m not setting a goal of jogging a marathon or climbing Everest. They’re things that I’ve been talking about on my blog, and therefore, relevant to my life. Measurable, for the most part, we’re talking a check list, and the only measuring will be whether or not its done. Attainable? We’ll see come August 31! Specific – I’ll let you be the judge – is there anything I should clarify?

• Vacation, vacation, vacation – I’m not saying where and I’m not saying when. Just that I’m going, and it will be good. In my head, this is specific, but wisdom tells me I shouldn’t be broadcasting an absence from home for the entire world to read.
• Annual summer cleaning; since I missed my quarterly projects, I’ll be adding those to the list. I have a detailed list on my cork board at home, so I’m ready to dig in soon. Look for a future post on what is included in my summer annual cleaning. Hopefully this month, after I finish it!
• Read Ann Voskamp’s book “One Thousand Gifts.” I try to pick one book to help me grow spiritually during my time off.
• Create a seasonal meal plan for fall. I just keep thinking life would be so much easier if I didn’t have to meal plan every week. I think what I will do is compile a number of recipes to be used throughout the season and keep them in one spot. That way when I plan each week, I don’t have to dig through stacks of recipes. I’ll be focusing on dinners, with soup recipes for lunches, and basically summing up breakfast as eggs or properly prepared grains.
• Make a fall wreath. Like this one. Or this simple one. I’ll make a decision after checking out what I have available to me at local crafting stores.
• Can tomatoes. If mine will ever turn red.
• Make some serious headway on my big quilting project – meaning I’d like to get 8 blocks done this month. Sadly, that is a tall order.

 

What are your goals for the month of August?

~Amanda