Use these colorful pages to track, evaluate, or alter your life goals.
Tanya Dalton is passionate about goal setting! If you listen to her podcast or use one of her planners, you know that her love of goal setting is contagious!
When she originally designed our inkWELL Press planners, she believed so strongly that users should check in with their goals every month that she created the colorful, steppingstone-style pages called mission boards solely for that purpose.
Monthly Mission Boards help you focus on what's important in your life right now, during the current month. You can use it to track past accomplishments (because it's so satisfying to see how much work you've done and how far you've come), and even if you skip a month, you can look back at the previous mission board to see where you left off. It’s a dedicated page for you to see where you’ve been and decide where you want to go from here.
But best of all, each hexagon in a mission board corresponds to a subsection of the Goals page at the front of your planner (with the expectation of Me Time, which corresponds to the Personal goals you set on the Goals page). This is for when you feel lost, you can look back at your Goals page, take one or two of them, and turn them into something you can accomplish during the month.
Goals Page > Quarterly Goals Page > Mission Board
As Tanya says, goal setting looks different for everyone, and that's true, but we offer this guide as a general outline:
- GOALS PAGE: Write your Personal, Social, Health, Dream Big, Home, and Financial goals on the Goals – Make it Happen page.
- QUARTERLY GOALS PAGE: Break those big goals down into quarterly goals on the Quarterly Goals page. This is where you can set action steps and action goals for each 3-month chunk of time. For example, if you want to lower your blood pressure, write that on the Goals page under Health.
- Then, in Quarterly Goals, write some actions steps to lower your blood pressure:
- Exercise 30 minutes a day
- Eliminate salty foods
- Take medicine regularly
- Now turn them into action goals:
- Use Habit Tracker to track exercise
- Join a gym or walking group
- Invest in a Pelton
- Begin a low-salt diet
- Replace chips and crackers with carrots and celery
- Reduce wine consumption to weekends or special occasions
- MISSION BOARDS: Write one of these action goals into the month that you choose to tackle them. Then for the next month, evaluate your progress, and repeat!
Tips
- Our monthly mission boards don't have to be limited to one action goal...you can set multiple mini goals in each category if you find it helpful.
- You can also take one big monthly goal and break it into two smaller milestones. Just make sure that if you set multiple goals, you make them achievable. We want this mission board to work for you -- make it your own!
- Start small. If you're new to the monthly planning process, don't worry about tackling all your goals at once. Instead, start with one or two areas of your life that you want to improve and build from there.
- Break goals into achievable tasks. Achievable tasks are those that can be completed in one day or less (e.g., "Write a blog post" vs "Write five blog posts"). This will help keep things manageable.
Our mission boards are a great way to keep your goals and related tasks organized. They're also a unique way to stay motivated because you can see the progress you've made and know that a new month is on its way.
Our mission boards appear in all inkWELL Press planners, including the wirebound ones we do with Blue Sky. They do not currently appear on our wall calendars or desk pad calendars, but we are considering that addition in the future.
Email us at hello@inkwellpress.com. We want to hear from you!