HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! 😀 Back here after a bit of hiatus! I loved spending time with family and friends during the holidays and enjoying some quality down time 🙂 Makes it feel super good to be back and working again, crossing all the to-do’s off my checklist. As I’m sure you know if you’re reading this, I am a total organizational nut. I live off of my to-do lists and out of my planner, and am all for accomplishing those big goals by breaking them down into smaller tasks and getting through them.

Last month I did just that, I sat down in a coffee shop for a couple of hours and reflected on everything that I had accomplished in 2017 in terms of photography and made a list of everything that I wanted to improve upon or get done for this upcoming year. My long term goal is of course to go full time with wedding photography, but before I can get there, there is a LOT to get done! This year, I’m looking to keep building off of the momentum from last year to keep moving towards that end goal. It’s scary thinking of putting these out there because what if I fail? It’s possible that not all of these will be accomplished. But as I’m sure you’ve heard, goals are only good if you write them down and get them on paper so to speak. If you look wayyyy back through my blog posts you’ll see that I actually had written down my 2017 goals. And looking at those now I’m laughing because they seemed very basic and kinda easily accomplished! I want to change that for this year, I want to dream bigger & better. And despite my fear of failure, I’m publishing these goals here on the blog today so hopefully I can look back next year, laugh to myself, and keep pushing for even more success 🙂 But until then, here goes nothing (this is kinda long and detailed so bear with me):

Obviously, this is A LOT! But, since each of these large five areas has smaller tasks underneath them, I’ve already crossed some of them off within 3 days! Now that’s progress, and I don’t know about you, but for me once I’m able to cross a couple things off a list, it’s a lot easier to keep going and getting more things done!

For anyone else that’s going towards a big goal, I suggest you put it all out there! No, you might not get everything done but it will give you a good big picture idea of where you’re going towards with small, actionable steps you can take to get there. Here’s my exact process for how I came up with all of these for anyone else who’s trying to accomplish something HUGE this year, but is overwhelmed as to how to figure out just about everything they need to get done!

1. Make a list of everything you accomplished the previous year
2. Make a list of all the things you did not accomplish/could have done better the previous year
3. Make a list of what you are looking to get done the next year
4. Look at your three lists and make a master list of what you want to do next year
5. Look at this big master list to figure out if you can come up with 3-5 categories
6. Categorize this master list under your 3-5 topics
7. Assign tasks to each month of the next year
8. Give yourself a month or two that have less tasks than most others in between, it’s always good to have a buffer to avoid stress!
9. Schedule check-ins on a quarterly basis of your goals
10. Find someone who will hold you accountable to your goals on a monthly basis! This I think is the most important part of all of this!!! I can’t tell you how many blog posts would not be up on here if my brother did not ask me when the next one was coming out, multiple times a week!!

That’s all I have! If you guys have any additional tips, feel free to shout them out in the comments! If you made it to the end of this, you deserve a cookie 🙂

If you liked this post check out these!

2017 Photography & Personal Goals

The Big One Oh Oh!

The First Post of 2018! – Making moves on these goals!