With the New Year upon us, it’s a good idea to start thinking about a list of goals. They don’t necessarily have to be career or academic focused; instead, a list should focus on what goals you want to achieve. Goals don’t have to be anything large, either – they can be steps towards a larger goal. By writing out such a list, it helps to re-enforce a goal in your mind and what you should do to achieve it by the end of the year.

Here are some suggestions for how to visualize your goals:

Career:

1. Are you looking to advance your skill set? Try to think of strategies that will advance this – are there classes at a college that you can take over the weekend that you can use with personal interest or with a career? If you do enough research, this new skill can also help you in the job force – new requirements are being developed all the time.
2. Are you looking to get a promotion? This can be difficult and requires some searching to ensure this is what you want to do; but if you have been at your job for a while, you can either decide if staying is worth it, or look for a comparable job that has a higher salary and more job responsibility.
3. Want to make connections in the workplace? This is what networking is: making connections with people to learn of job opportunities that are not being advertised online. By doing so, you can learn how to interact with your co-workers as not just co-workers, but potential networking allies. Look for ideas – it can help you to participate more in the job environment.

Academics:

1. Do you want better grades? How can you best achieve them? Do you feel a lack of focus when it comes to your courses? Do you think you can benefit from additional help through tutoring with a teacher, peer tutoring (your classmates), or a private tutor? Do you need to find a better learning strategy because you think you are not retaining as much information when writing the test?
2. Are you interested in extracurricular activities? Groups and sports are always good to list on the application to college or university. In addition, it means that you can make friends that you never had a chance to do in class – by exposing yourself to a different environment and a different group of people, you can make more friends, learn something new, and even consider making it a career.

Personal:

1. Do you feel healthy? This is a personal question, and can help both your physical and mental well-being. There are strategies that you can use to help yourself. Perhaps it’s taking exercise classes to help you feel better in shape (but don’t overdo it), or taking breaks from long homework time to give yourself a break. School can be incredibly stressful, and taking breaks can help – you can also get new ideas when you think of something completely unrelated to academics.
2. Never enough time? Have you considered a personal calendar? Phones have calendars that use blocks of 15, 30 or 60 minutes, and by scheduling items that you cannot avoid, would like to go, or even skip, you have the ability to say ‘no’ to someone if it’s something you can avoid or if you are unavailable in that time. Don’t stretch yourself too thin – schedule breaks as well, especially around examination season.

There are lots of questions you can ask yourself in order to best examine what problems you have, and what you can do about them. Set yourself a list of new goals list that you would like to achieve next!