Setting weekly goals

Having goals makes life challenging and fun. It’s key to help achieve progress. Therefore you should have small goals and big goals because just having a big goal will only make you anxious rather than motivated and happy. But in this article, I’ll only talk about small goals.

I watched a lecture by Jordan Peterson in which he gave the following quote:

You experience positive emotion by noticing you’re moving towards a goal. – Jordan Peterson 

He also added that this isn’t just referring to achieving the goal because that will cause satisfaction. Moving forward on a positive note will cause positive emotion. So in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been experimenting with setting weekly goals.

Each Sunday I sit down and take the time to make a list of goals I want to achieve the upcoming week. While doing this, the set goals shouldn’t be too extreme. Otherwise, you’ll pressure yourself too much and it shouldn’t. Especially if you’re trying out new habits like reading. If the set goal is to read 300 pages and you don’t read often, it can be terrifying and anxious to look at. Just set a goal to read 1 page a day. This way you’ll build that habit and you’ll probably read more than 300 pages. This is great for building long term habits as well because eventually, it will become a routine. The image above shows an example of a weekly goal list. After setting the weekly goals, I fill in todo lists for every day of the week to make sure I succeed. Therefore you have to schedule small parts of your goals to eventually reach them.

I’m experimenting with online lists too. Below is my weekly goal list in Todoist, which is a todo list app (the free version of the app is good enough for me). This is a great way to manage all your tasks and to quickly write them down. 

After the week, I’ll check which goals I’ve reached and which ones I have to consider rescheduling for the next week. It’s exciting to see what one can do in a week and it’s a great feeling to see the made progress. Even if one didn’t finish them all.

I hope I gave you some motivation to reach your goals. Try to write down the goals you’re thinking about and chop them into small pieces to make it easier to schedule them. Good luck and let me know if you have any questions via my Instagram! 

Thanks for reading.

~ Wouter