As the new year gets closer and closer, it's natural to start thinking about what we want to achieve next year. But with that also comes pressure. We set so many goals wanting to make it the best, most productive year yet. And then we get so overwhelmed that we're not achieving all of our goals that we simply stop working towards them. So in 2022, let's set some achievable goals!

In this blog, I'm going to link to a lot of resources to help you pick and set your goals, but also give you the tools to track them throughout the year and stay motivated! If that sounds like something you want to do, keep on reading!

Supplies For Goal Setting

• Archer and Olive Journal – The lovely and thick pages have no bleeding or ghosting, so you get a clean start for each journal page!
• Pen – Your favorite pen to plan with—something that flows well!
• Decorative Touch (optional) – This could be anything from stamps to acrylographs, or of course, nothing!
• Goal Setting Ebook - If you prefer, we have included an amazing Ebook at the end of this blog where we go into more detail about helping you to pick, plan, and track your goals in a printable booklet. If you're not feeling creative or want to save some planning time, this may be a great option for tracking goals in 2022!

Two Steps To Goal Setting

When it comes to goal setting, there are two steps to consider to set you up for success—picking/setting your goals and tracking/achieving your goals. And really, that's all that's important! It is necessary to consider these two steps separately, and in this blog, I will help you understand and give you resources to do both!

Picking and Setting Your Goals

When picking your goals, it is important to consider what is achievable for you in the timeframe you set. If you pick too many, or set your expectations too high, then you are way more likely to make no progress and give up on your goals. For example, let's say your goal for 2022 was to buy a house. If you're starting from 0, then it will become disheartening very quickly when you realize you're not able to achieve this no matter how hard you work on it on one year. It may be more achievable to set a goal of starting to save for a deposit. Even give yourself a goal savings amount for that. This gives you something each month you can do to work towards this big goal. Likewise, setting 5+ goals that all require a lot of energy or saving a large amount of money is also not going to be manageable. Pick one that you really want to focus on or split them all into smaller, achievable chunks.

Here are some great resources to help you consider what things you may want to achieve, and help you pick goals that will be manageable!

Setting New Year Resolutions 

This blog by our design team member Jess is AMAZING at helping you brainstorm and really consider what goals you want to focus on. Find the blog here. She also has great advice to picking goals you can actually achieve. Therefore, if you use only one resources from this blog—make it this one!

Setting Financial Goals

I feel like every year we all set a financial goal for ourselves. If you need some help figuring what level of savings is manageable for you and tricks to saving throughout the year, check out this brilliant blog by our design team member Hayley!

Setting Health and Fitness Goals

Another popular goal is improving or working on your health and fitness. And maybe the most given up on? I know I've struggled with setting my expectations way too high in the new year, which is why I loved this blog by Hayley where she talks about setting realistic fitness goals!

Hopefully now you have some manageable goals in mind! Now the hard part— achieving them!

Tracking And Achieving Your Goals

Now for the difficult part... staying motivated and achieving your goals. In general, I find breaking up goals into smaller goals is a great way to keep working on them. Something that can really help with that is a goal journal or bullet journal. It can be a separate notebook just for goal process, or included in with your regular planner. Writing down the goals and the broken down steps can help you plan exactly how to achieve your chosen goal. Just writing down these steps each month can give you the extra boost of motivation to continue working on it. Who doesn't love checking something off your to-do list, right? Therefore, here are some great spread recommendations for goals, but also for generally keeping up with important tasks each month!

Vision Board

Now while this isn't necessarily tracking your goals, visualizing your goals can be SO important for motivation. Therefore I highly recommend creating a vision board. Masha also explains her blog why this can be so powerful!

Goal Tracking Bullet Journal 

If you're really keen on getting your goals achieved, you can create a dedicated goals bullet journal, or if you bullet journal already, add in extra spreads to keep you on track. This blog will help you track your goals through dedicated and commonly used spreads. Definitely recommend checking this one out!

Weekly Tracking

If you think a weekly check in will help you keep on track, this blog has some great inspiration for you! Having a task each week to work towards your goal, or even just having the reminder to keep working towards it can help so much! Vivian goes into great detail about what type of goal setting and tracking works well for her, and it may really help you too! Check out the blog here.

Dedicated Goal Pages

Finally, you could simply make one spread each month, or even once a year, to track your process. This one is definitely less time intensive as it only requires one set up, however do be mindful it can be easier to forget about goals this way. Make sure to have some check in reminders to work on your goal or see how it's going! See how to set this up here.

Further Resources: Printable Guide 

I hope these resources helped! If you still need more guidance on setting achievable goals for 2022, or you want an easier way to track them then setting up your own spreads, we've put together this super useful Goal Setting Ebook.

This Ebook goes into much more detail than I can in this blog—helping you to pick your goals, break them down into steps, and track your progress. The amazing templates mean you can save some time creating spreads by simply printing the book and getting started.

I hope this blog helped you come up with some new ways to keep track of goals in 2022! Make sure to let us know if you feel like these tips helped you! Find us on Instagram at @archerandolive @archerandolive.community, and tag #archerandolive and #AOshare or post them on our Facebook group at Archer and Olive Community so we can see your creations!