Planning Your Best Year
This is one of my favorite seasons of the year. I love Christmas, with all the cozy cuddles, and happy surprises, but as soon as it is over, I am eagerly dreaming and planning for the new year. I use several questions to help me formulate goals, and I keep any goals that I do set, closely aligned with my personal essentials and our family essentials. This book can help you understand what Essentialism means.
Download our free Family Vision Planner to help you develop your family essentials below.
Family Essentials
Our family essentials include things like travel, quiet time, debt free living, togetherness, and helping others. We developed these essentials by simply writing a list of things we loved to do. When we saw that a common thread on that list was spending time outside, traveling, and developing our spiritual life, it was easy to develop our family essentials. Having our family vision and essentials written down, helps us make reasonable goals for the year.
Before we start writing goals down, we also brainstorm what we want to try, read, learn, and see over the course of the coming year. Using a brainstorming worksheet as a family helps us to see where our interests lie before we start setting goals. This worksheet is a part of our planner (updated each year).
goal setting
Once we have filled out the dream building worksheet, then we move on to actual goal setting. Our planner includes a monthly goal setting worksheet in 10 areas; home environment, personal development, physical health, spiritual health, homeschool, professional development, play, friend relationships, family relationships, and finances.
Home Environment
This might be goals for better home care habits, simplifying belongings, or even learning a new home related skill such as bread making or gardening.
Homeschool
This is for making goals for skills to learn with your children, or projects to do over the course of the month. Memorizing poetry, learning math facts, or accomplishing a new project could all make this list.
Spiritual Health
I will often make a goal for devotional literature reading, fasting, giving, or other spiritual practices for this category.
Financial Health
This might be a goal to pay off debt, reduce spending, or start investing.
Professional Growth
This category might include work for income, or work for fun tasks. This category could also be thought of as parental development, or teacher training.
Personal Growth
You can use this category to write goals for books you want to read, or new hobbies you want to try, or other ways you hope to develop this year that aren’t directly related to vocation and homeschooling.
Family Relationships/Friend Relationships
These are goals I make for building relationships. Things like eye contact, date nights, or gentle responses might make this category.
Play
Play is an important part of a healthy life, so this is where I write down ideas for how we will play this month. Maybe walking in nature daily, or taking a beach trip, or just having a game night.
Physical Health
This is for making goals to take care of my physical body. It could be starting a new exercise program, eating a gluten and sugar free diet, or doing a cleanse protocol that month.
After I have filled in the categories, I will also take time to check in with the yearly goals we made at the beginning of the school year, and I’ll look at our calendar and weekly planning sheets (included in The Peaceful Press Planner) to see if I’ve overscheduled us, and therefore crowded out the time needed for our essentials.
Making space for a little quiet planning time before we dive back into school is a valuable investment for creating a life that is sustainable and peaceful.
If the joy has gone out of homeschooling for you, check out our Parent Guides. They are designed to require a minimum of parent planning and to create an atmosphere of joyful connection.
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