If you are unhappy with your current level of productivity at work or your effectiveness as a parent or household manager, allow me to suggest to you that tracking your achievements will turn your life around. Without goals and priorities, you may make it through each day and even make a little progress here and there.

Along with a sense of achievement comes great motivation to accomplish more great things, as well as an ease in getting them accomplished. The beginning of this self help success starts with setting goals.

Some people struggle with using “goals” at home and it is understandable. We want to build our happy homes based on love, warmth, and organization, not cold business terms.

Managing your household is as complex as managing a business, and equally as important. If you are not comfortable with the term “goal setting” for whatever reason, come up with something else. “Life list” is a term on the rise and many prefer it because it sounds friendlier and transitions nicely from work place to household management. Call it what you want, put your lists on pretty stationery, whatever it takes to get you to participate because success outside the home is largely dependent upon success inside.

The beginning stages of your goal setting will be brainstorming. Schedule some quiet time with yourself to think about what you want to do and where you want to be at the end of the day, the end of the year, five years from now, and so on. Remove all barriers from your mind, such as money, location, situation, etc. Let yourself imagine doing, and being at, these places. (Be they places on the map or places in life!) From this page of goals, dreams, and wishes, start to put them in order.

It is time to make your lists now, so grab a pen and paper and make some headings.

A long term goal might be to buy a bigger house or become debt free. Take it a step further and in addition to “short term” and “long term”, create your own categories so that every thing that came from your brainstorm has a heading under which to sit.

Make it enjoyable but realize, you are taking a powerful first step toward realizing your dreams because once you chart and realize your successes, you will be amazed by how motivated you are to achieve more, and how easily those achievements will come.