I know we are already 26 days into January, but HELLO 2017! 🙂 Who else is hopeful and excited for the new year and all that is to come?! After a year that felt heavy and hard, I am so ready for the fresh start.

I’m grateful that Geoff is as goal happy as I am and that he is always willing and excited to talk, dream and make plans for our businesses and family life. For us, life seems to be moving at the speed of light. We’ve found that if we don’t carve out time to have direct conversations and intentionally make plans for what matters and the things we want and feel called to do, they just don’t happen. In case it is helpful for someone else out there, I thought I would share a little bit about our process for determining our goals and priorities for our family (which can easily be translated for a single person), as well as what some of them are for this year. I’ll also be sharing how we go about bringing these to life AND all about our business goal setting process in separate blog posts.

For the past few years, Geoff and I will call a timeout and get away together either at the very end or very beginning of a year to talk about our family. In 2015, we skipped town and headed to Asheville, NC for a couple days to plan, pray and play. We even themed it and hashtagged it (if you want to see it on Instagram 🙂 ) our #Schultzes2015CoffeeCrawlKickoff. In 2016, we had a brand new baby, but managed to get away to Savannah, GA (baby in tow) in February to have our annual meeting. This year, we simply went on a fun date to one of our favorite restaurants and then to our favorite local Starbucks to hash everything out. In our opinion, it’s important to make it fun! If you can swing a weekend getaway out of it if your circumstances and finances permit it, by all means…do it! If things are busy or money is tight, you can still do something that makes it a fun experience…even if that means a long afternoon at your favorite coffee shop (if it were me, I would bring chocolate).

We keep things pretty simple for this planning time, but some great conversations always come from the prompts we use to get things going. The main questions we ask ourselves (these are prompts found in Cultivate What Matters “Powersheets”):

1. What were our wins/what worked well in the previous year?
2. What didn’t work/where do we want to focus for the coming year?
3. What do we want our life to look like when we are 80 years old? (This is a great one to talk about so we can cut out the fluff and focus on what is really important to us).
4. What do we love/what fires us up? (With the intention to infuse more of this into our day to day).

From there, we have a pre-printed worksheet (super simple…created in Microsoft Word) broken into the following categories that we use to begin to list our ideas for the things we want to do in the coming year:

Health
Travel/Recreation
Finances
House
Relationships (includes our marriage, with our kids – individually and together – and our friends)
Spiritual
Misc
Individual (each of us – including our kids – have a section for personal goals)

And that’s basically it! Pretty simple process, but super important for the health and functioning of our family. Here are a few of our goals from each section if you are interested in seeing what is on the docket for The Schultzes this year. 🙂

Health
Stop eating all of the sugary junk food (very special occasions are the exception).
Meal plan weekly to put good food in our bodies.
Exercise at least 4 days per week.
Have annual physical.

Travel/Recreation
Take 10 year anniversary trip.
Take Boone skiing.
Summer beach trip with kids.
Annual Ray/Wheaton mountain trip.
Make 2017 seasonal family bucket lists.
Tee ball for Boone in the spring; Activity of Crew’s choosing in the fall.
Go see Angel Oak Park on John’s Island, SC.

Finances
Determine monthly budget.
Save 3 months of our salary.
Research opening education accounts for kids.

House
Create a warm, welcoming room for our guests.
Organize the garage to become a functional and useful space.
Simplify our possessions. Own fewer things/owner better things.
Create a backyard space for our family to enjoy.
Create a cozy breakfast nook area.
Hang family pictures in upstairs hallway.
Have our family values lettered and hung.

Relationships
Us – Create new date night envelopes and do them.
Kids – Make monthly calendar of outings/activities from bucket lists.
Kids – Crew and daddy date.
Friends – Continue French Toast Fridays.
Friends – Host 4th of July party.

Spiritual
Have prayer time together on Sunday Night Re-sets.
Pray with kids out loud throughout days.

Misc
Have our yearly family pictures taken.
Create yearly family albums.
Complete Grey’s baby book.

Stay tuned for our process for how we go about making these plans happen, as well as how we go about determining the direction for our businesses in a coming blog post.