how is your new year shaping up ?

Here we are January 1. The best day to set forth goals. If you wait till tomorrow you will probably also wait until the next day, and then the next. So do it now. Get out a notebook and write down your goals for 2009. Realistic, attainable goals. Paying off your mortgage is probably not possible but paying down $10,000 might be. Or even $1200. Losing weight a goal? Choose how much is possible for 1 year. Putting money in the bank, or paying down credit? How much? Set a goal. Want to learn a new trade, or hobby? Set yourself a goal. Somethings cannot be achieved by a number of hours or dollars invested such as improving a relationship. But a relationship will improve if you invest time in it.

After you have your goals (and you should have already been praying about this) we are ready to break them up into bites.

Remember the old saying, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time of course.”

Well take that goal and cut it up into bites. Say you want to save $2000. Well divide that by 12 months, =$166.66 per month, now break it down further into weeks, we will round off to 4 weeks. So 166.66 divided by 4 = $41.66.  And you can probably find a way to do that. Either spend $41.60 less or find a way to make $41.66 more. If that still seams too big, break it up some more. How about dividing it by 7 days, $41.66 divided by 7 =  $5.95 per day. Is that a small enough bite to chew?

You can do the same thing with time. Any trade or hobby or relationship will grow with an extra 20 minutes per day invested, or how about an hour? 1 hour daily times 7 days times 4 weeks = 28 hours a month. That would be 336 hours a year rounded off, it would actually be more. That is the equivalent of 8 and a half full time work weeks. That would be quite an investment of time, but it all started out so easy, 1 hour per day.

I have heard it said that if you do the same thing for 21 days it becomes a habit. So just think, whatever your “bite” is after a month it becomes automatic.

You could do the same thing with weight-loss. Say 1 hour on a treadmill every day. That is 336 hours a year. A nice walk on a treadmill will burn about 400 calories an hour. That would be 134400 calories per year. Since each pound of fat is equivalent to 3600 calories it would be feasible to lose 37 pounds just from that one change. Now there are lots of variables to weight-loss and metabolism but you can see my point.

So, set your goals and charge forward one bite at a time!

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