I love a checklist

I do have them and actually love them: goals. And I love crossing things off.

Both personal and work related. Yesterday I was able to share some goals that I am working toward in my business for the 2017 year, but I am also sharing today what I goals I am working toward in my personal life. Kevin and I always take a day to really focus and hone in on the goals and ideas that we want to accomplish throughout the year both for our family as well as personal. These goals and ideas range from what we want to do for vacation, financial goals, the activities we envision for our kids, to putting work events on the calendar. We then go into deeper goals like how we want to invest into our marriage, how we want to invest into our kids and into our church, and what our mission statement for the year will be. As you can imagine, this takes lots of time and it is something that we plan for. Typically we cover the first half of the year, and then re-acess mid summer when we have a vacation and other late summer and fall events on the calendar.

We typically go somewhere and do this, but this year we spent the day in our PJ’s with calendars spread across the kitchen table while an ice storm hit and let our kids basically run the house (which now days actually looks pretty calm as they are all old enough to be by themselves! When they were little we would have a baby-sitter watch them during the day while we went away to a coffee shop or just plan an night after they went to bed to really hash through these ideas.) Some years we go deeper than other years, but either way, we try really hard to look at the entire calendar and get an idea of how we really want to use our time wisely!

I won’t share all our family goals, but for me personally these are things I want to invest my time into:

Taking our kids out one-on-one weekly
Reading one book per month (see my list above, and as you can guess, I am not a reader!)
Taking a day off , like really off. (Typically this is Monday. Because Kevin is a pastor and I work all weekend, our weekends are crazy, Sunday just isn’t possible for us, so we continue to aim for Monday!)
Connecting with family and friends, either by going out, or through texting/ e-mailing/ phone calls throughout the week
Running another 1/2 marathon (probably spring time!)
Doing a Bible Study/ quarter with other women
Investing into self-care ( Why does this have to be a goal for so many women and moms?!) Through a massage, getting my nails done, leaving the house by myself for a few hours, getting my hair done, working out, once a week
Date night with Kevin once every other week
Create and print photo books of my family for the year
Work on a personal photo project for myself (more of this to come in future weeks!)

So there you have it. And I am sure I will come back to this list as the weeks turn into months. What will you do to invest personally into yourself this year?