Spring Semester Horror

I've been seeing a lot lately that the spring semester is a lot worse than the fall semester. It's been a conversation that I've had with a couple different people and I must say it is true. For what ever reason as soon as you hit the spring semester everything goes haywire and nothing happens the way you planed it. I've though a lot on why this is and can only figure it's because the break in between semesters is so much sorter for the spring. That and it feels as though the spring semester is shorter than the fall. But what ever the reason is we still get super stressed out in the spring.

Personally I've been spiraling out of control. It's super upsetting to make a detailed goals list and hope that you can actually do it this semester, then classes become very overwhelming so you're weeks behind in your planning. It seems to be my trend, plan to do a bunch of things, start them, semester gets picked up, then drop all the planning for trying to keep my head above water. At least I can say I'm passing my classes, which in the grand scheme of things is the important part right.

It's now spring break at my school and I'm going to use this time to try to regroup with everything and maybe get back on track with all the things that I wanted to do this year. I'm also hoping this new work schedule helps me with this.

2016 Goal Setting

I've never been good at Goal setting I always ended up forgetting about the goal or just giving up because it got overwhelming. So recently I decided to try it differently this year. I sat down the other day and told myself this is it you want to do these things you need to figure out a way to do it. These are the tricks I'm using to get my goals in order and achieve them.

My first step was to grab a pen and some paper and write down the areas I wanted to work on. For myself I chose;

-School

-Book

-Etsy

-Blog

I then started with one, in this case School and started to write what I wanted out of this semester. I decided that is how I wanted to organize all four sections, So each section was separated, spring 2016 which is January to May then Summer 2016 (June and July), then Fall 2016 August to December. For right now I just focused on what I wanted out of spring.

The Four notebooks and the Colors.

Now I have a list of goals for each section of my life with a reasonable "due date." I didn't stop there however. I then took to One Note this could be done with just a plain note book but this way I can print off the pages I want. If you haven't used One Note before it is a Microsoft office product that helps you organize your notes and documents all in one place. Now I have never really used One Note before but I love the ease of use it has and thought it would be perfect to use for my goal planning. In one note I made a notebook for each thing on my list, color-coded them with my planner, then moved on to pages. Each notebook, except school, has two pages: one is goals and the second is a timeline.

My Goals page for two of my sections

In the Goals page I've typed up the goals I wrote on my piece of paper earlier. Then it gets fun, The timeline page is where I've made my goals reasonable and easily achievable. I split up my goals put the date I wanted it accomplished then split the main goals into tasks with due dates. This way I know I need to work on a task for my main goal on a specific day and I know I will be able to do the task.

My Book timeline for one goal

Then I moved to my Planner and put the task in there with a sticky tab on the day I want to do it. This way when I plan for the next week I know I have something to do for my goal and I can make the time to do the task.

There you have it my new trick to get Goals done, splitting your large goal into small quick tasks that you can work on once a week. I hope this will help you with any of your goals you may have I know I feel so much better about getting everything done this year!