It’s that time of year again. The new year has come and gone, a couple weeks have gone by, and New Year’s Resolutions are already starting to fail in predictable fashion.

I’ve written in the past that SMART goals can help you to succeed with your resolutions, but that’s not enough. In fact, when I wrote that article two years ago I had resolved to write a weekly post on this very blog. I wrote three. I became one of the very statistics that I referenced.

This year, I have made that same resolution…sort of. I realize that a weekly post is probably overly ambitious. Indeed, this is the second week of the year and my first post. I’ve given myself wiggle room for vacation weeks. As it happens, I took vacation last week so I’m already on track!

There’s no doubt that this goal is SMART. One thing that I lacked last time around was accountability. There are, generally speaking, two common ways to create accountability:

  1. Tell someone about your goal. It can be a friend, family member, social media, whatever.
  2. Create a plan with some micro goals, milestones, and the like.

You can find a ton of information on the internets about how specifically to achieve either of those, so I won’t go into them here. Instead, I’ll tell you how I’m doing it.

For the first bullet, this is it. Right now. The thing you’re reading. Yes! This very blog post is an announcement to the world that I intend to achieve a goal. I’m making my success or failure public. Boom! Instant accountability.

For the second bullet point, I’ve outlined a weekly plan with individual step that lead up to publishing a post every Friday.

  • Monday: Select a topic and research it.
  • Tuesday: Write an outline.
  • Wednesday: Write a rough draft.
  • Thursday: Finalize a draft and search for images.
  • Friday: Publish!

Each day of the week contains a micro-goal that helps move me along to the next phase. What’s more, each of these micro-goals is, in itself, a SMART goal.

All of this should, I hope, help me to stay on top of my goal of weekly-ish blog posts for the year.

See you next week!