The Hack That Changed My Life

I realise this is a bit of a different type of post from me but I’ve been doing this for over a year now and I thought maybe a few people would be interested. 


If you are anything like me you will set some goals at the beginning of the year and not do a great job of keeping up the habits and in some cases forget about the goals completely.


It’s only recently I discovered a hack that I would say has changed my life for the better.


The hack isn’t original or ground breaking but it’s free, easy to do, enjoyable and I’ve found it really effective. Because I work in the wedding industry lots of couples follow me and I have found it to be a great couple activity, but if you’re not in a relationship it would be just as interesting to do with a friend. 


Firstly, I need to set this up by saying that I believe setting goals is useful, however, I am huge advocate of having the process as the goal.


For instance in the past I’ve decided I want a restaurant residency. To have that as my goal is completely useless because I have no control if I achieve it. So my goal instead was to email 50 restaurants that I would like to work at, if it resulted in a residency that would be great, if it didn’t then at least I completed the task, that was in my control and so I achieved a goal.
I hope that makes sense ha.


Now I’ve explained that, here is the hack!


So instead of just picking some goals at the beginning of the year and hoping I achieve them somehow, my partner and I have a meeting at the beginning of every month to check on our goals. I am guessing this doesn’t sound that earth shattering? But for me this was life changing.


To make it an enjoyable experience that we look forward to we always do this at our lovely local pub after ordering our favourite drinks. To me, if feels like we are about to celebrate all we achieved the month before with a drink. 


We work out our financials by recording the money we earned and all the money we spent and assigning it to different categories so it’s pretty clear what types of things we have spent our money on that month. This will be scary most months! Ha


We go through personal achievements we did that month e.g. how many times we got out for a run or how much time we spent on a particular project. 


We also record how many friends we spent time with that month and how many times we did interesting thing just the two of us.


Next we look back at our goals we set the previous month and record which ones we completed and which we didn’t manage to do. I think this part is crucial as we try to keep each other accountable to do what we planned to do each and every month.


The last part is to revisit our overall yearly goals and decide what we need to do differently (or maybe just keep doing) next month in order to help us achieve our overall goals by the end of the year.


Maybe this all sound too intentional and geeky for most people but I am so pleased that me and my partner started this habit as I am prone to go with the flow too much. I need to be accountable to someone and regularly track my progression (or regression ha).
It works for us and hopefully someone thinks this might work for them too.

Photo by the Lovely Olivia Amy Photography