What to Do With an Unfinished Goal

The year is winding down and so are our yearly goals. Even as you gear up for another 12 months of goal setting, you likely have an urge to tie a bow on this year's efforts: to strike out completed goals with a flourish, to celebrate wins. 

And, er, to figure out what to do about those goals that haven't yet limped across the finish line.

Friend, we're in this with you for all of it. In today's blog post, we're sharing three options for what to do with an unfinished goal and how to decide which one you need. By the end, you'll have clarity on how to end this year of goal setting feeling satisfied and hopeful—and ready for more in January! Let's do it.

What to do with an unfinished goal

First, let's separate the finished goals from the unfinished ones. Sometimes that's obvious, and sometimes it takes a little reflection.

Similar to the Marie Kondo vibe of holding each item in your hand and asking if it sparks joy, call to mind each of your yearly goals one by one and ask if you’ve completed them. Look at where you started, your why, the vision of success you sketched out. Have you completed what you set out to do?

If the answer is yes, the goal is finished, hooray! All that's left is to celebrate. Celebrations can be big or small, lavish or simple, but they play an outsize role in our likelihood of future goal progress. Celebrating is pleasurable. Our brains remember that and want more of it! Don't skip this step.

If the answer is no, the goal is not finished, you have three options:

• Retire it with gratitude.
• Bring it to completion, or make progress, before the end of the year.
• Continue it in the year ahead.

We'll take these one by one.

Retire your goal with gratitude.

Sometimes our seasons change, our circumstances change, our desires change, our priorities change, or our capacities change and a good goal we set at the beginning of the year is no longer serving us.

That is okay.

It is okay to lay a goal down and acknowledge that. In fact, stopping to acknowledge where we are instead of letting it hang over our head with guilt and shame for not making more progress is healthy and freeing. When we do, we create space to feel gratitude for anything we learned in the process, or any small wins we were able to notch, and set it aside with gratitude.

What does "setting it aside" mean? In addition to formally ending your efforts on the project, it could mean reflecting in a journal, or writing the goal in next year's goal planner as an idea to revisit. Or it might simply mean tucking it away in your heart to find in the future if the timing is right.

Complete your goal before the end of the year.

Let’s say you have a goal you’ve made steady progress on throughout the year, and you really want to bring it to completion before the year is over. Fantastic! Let’s do it.

Here are three simple steps:

1. Get clear on what it would look like to complete your goal by the end of the year.
2. Write out the small steps that need to happen to get to that finish line —that vision you just wrote down. Break those steps down, then break them down some more, until you have total clarity on how you’ll get there.
3. Divide your small steps by week or assign them to days so that you have a realistic plan. There’s not that much time left—you have the clarity to get specific!

For example, in the year I was pushing hard to finish sewing my felt Advent calendar before December 1, I divided up the number of ornaments I had left in September, consulted my calendar, and then picked six evenings I knew I'd be home and free to work on them in the next few weeks. Seeing the ornaments written in on specific (realistic) days made it much easier to stick to the plan!

Continue the goal in the year ahead.

For many Cultivators, many of our goals might fall into this category. We set big-picture goals and we work at them steadily, but there’s no defined end point. 

Though others might find them discouraging, we love these types of goals at CWM! Becoming the people we hope to be is a lifelong pursuit, and a worthy one. 
Becoming a skilled money manager, tending to our bodies, growing a vibrant family culture... we could work on these things for the rest of our lives!

So what do we do with them right now? If you know you're going to keep working on a goal, do you just copy it over verbatim into your next set of PowerSheets? Not so fast!

Our recommendation is to let the Prep Work do its job. You may be totally convinced that you’re going to want the exact same goal next year, but if you go ahead and write it in, you’re taking away the magic of the Prep Work. You’re cutting off the process before it has time to do its thing!

Instead, we recommend writing it on your goal ideas page: essentially, keep it in a safe place while you do your Prep Work. Maybe you will land on a very similar goal for the year ahead—but maybe it will have some key tweak that was revealed through your Prep Work. Or maybe you’ll land somewhere totally different and unexpected! Both are beautiful outcomes. Either way, you'll have refreshed your why and be entering the year with a renewed passion and focus for the work that's ahead.

Friend, you can hold two things at once:

You can dream about the future while taking action today.
You can plan ahead and hold your plans loosely.
You can finish this year’s goals strong while laying the groundwork for the goals you’ll tackle in the year ahead.

We'll be with you each step of the way.