In last week’s post, Skip Resolutions and make a Quit List, I explored how I love making a Quit List for the New Year instead of making resolutions. I also love setting goals. This is a great time of year to evaluate current goals and set new ones. I set goals for our homeschool when I plan out our new school year and revisit them in January to make sure we’re still on track.
Have you heard about SMART goals? SMART is an acronym that can be used to help you map out your goals. I’ve known about SMART for a long time, but I don’t think I’ve ever mapped out a goal with these intentions. It’s time to start making SMART goals.
- S – Specific
- M – Measurable
- A – Achievable
- R – Reasonable
- T – Time bound
A SMART Nature Goal for the Kids
Back in October, I found the 1000 Hours Outside challenge, and we jumped right in. I thought my girls got plenty of outdoor time with their neighborhood friends, so I wanted to focus on getting more time out in nature. We live in a suburban area with tiny backyards. Outdoor time with neighborhood friends is important, but it’s not time in nature – at least not in our neighborhood. I set a goal of having half of those hours be nature hours.
After 3 months, how did we do? Not well at all. It turns out that the neighborhood kids haven’t been allowed to play much. They’re inside doing homework after school, and it gets dark too early for them to finish and come out to play. Seeing this has only shown me that a challenge like this is desperately needed for kids today! Perhaps, I can get the neighborhood families to join us for this challenge.
This obstacle has really affected our kids because they usually don’t want to play outside if their friends can’t play. We’ve expanded the blocks that they can explore, and they haven’t found any new kids out playing. Now that we know that this is the routine for their friends, I need to be more proactive about getting my kids outside. We’ll be heading to a park or trail after our school work is done. Otherwise, we won’t hit our goal of 1000 hours outside.
Related post – Exploring Nature with Kids with Leave No Trace
A goal for me – more Moms only hikes
A SMART Goal Just for Me
Not only is it important for kids to spend time outside, it’s important for adults too. With this in mind, I’ve set a new goal for myself for this year. Now that my kids are a bit older, we’ve started going on longer and more difficult hikes. It’s been challenging for them AND for me. Plus, the views are often breath-taking – even in a desert!
This year, I joined the 52 Hike Challenge. I will be doing 52 hikes in 52 weeks! It’s free to sign up and do the challenge, but they also have some pretty cool swag. I ordered the patch and stickers to start, and I’ll definitely be ordering the finisher’s medal when I hit this goal.
Anything over a 1 mile will count as a hike, and I’ll try not to duplicate too many. Some of our homeschool nature group’s events will count towards this goal, but this is a goal for ME with or without kids. As a way to hit this goal, I’ll be hosting moms only hikes and big kid hikes with our homeschool group. I’ve also joined a very active local Facebook group that hosts several group hikes every weekend and even some during the week. I also found my state’s groups for Women Who Hike and Girls Who Hike, but they are not that active at this time.
I’ll be sharing pictures from my adventures over on Instagram. Stop by to say hello!
Revisiting an Old Goal for Our Budget
A New Year also brings a new budget! Who else gets excited about starting over with a new spreadsheet budget? We sat down and looked back at what we’d accomplished financially in 2019, and set a few new goals for 2020. One of them is to rein in our grocery spending…again.
We go through this cycle where we will be really good about our grocery budget for a few months and then it will get out of control again. November and December are expensive months because of the holidays, so January is usually a time to buckle down again.
I’m really good at planning out our meals every week. It saves me so much time, money, and stress during the week. It avoids the dreaded question, “What’s for dinner?” I’ve been using Plan to Eat for 7 years now, and it only takes me about 10 minutes to plan out a week’s worth of meals and have my grocery list ready to go.
However, I struggle with meal planning based on sales. Even though I save money just by making a meal plan with a grocery list, we could save much more if I were to spend a little extra time looking at what’s on sale before making my meal plan. That’s the step I usually skip. I’m not sure how this will fit into a SMART goal, but I’m going to set the goal of meal planning with the sales in mind, and I need to find more budget friendly recipes that we enjoy. Setting a goal for how much to save on our groceries and a completion time would make this a SMART goal.
Evaluating our Main Homeschool Goal
When I planned out this school year, I set a goal of doing 4 full days worth of school work every week. We’ve actually done very well with this – better than other years. This work doesn’t just happen within those 4 days. Most times, it’s spread out over 5 or even more days. Some weeks, we play catch-up if a previous week kept us busy in other ways. However overall, we’re achieving our 4 days a week goal. We are just over half-way done with our school year, and we’re on track to finish strong!
Quit Lists and goals are a great way to kick off a new year, but these are things that we can start all year long. We should be routinely re-evaluating our goals and setting new ones. Write down your goals and list what makes them SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable, and time bound. Without those requirements, it’s just wishful thinking.
What are your goals for the new year?
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