Looking for monthly goal ideas to help turbocharge your success and spur personal growth? You’ve come to the right place!
If you’ve always put off working on your personal goals, you probably feel they are overwhelming. This is where monthly goals come into the picture.
Monthly goals are a great way to break your big goals into smaller action steps and make them less intimidating so you can start working on them immediately.
The more often you take action (no matter how little) in the direction of your goal, the better you feel about yourself and the more motivated you are about achieving your goal.
As I mentioned in my accountability exercises post, who you become in the process of setting and smashing your goal is more important than the goal itself.
Remember that success is not one huge event that happens in one fell swoop. Instead, it is the culmination of all the small actions ― the result of all the little, seemingly unimportant steps ― you take over a long time.
If you’re struggling to give your life a sense of purpose, I suggest you take your pick from these monthly goal ideas and commit to making progress every day, no matter how small.
Do You Really Need Monthly Goals?
Having yearly goals is great ― creating long term goals help shape your focus and direction and gives you a sense of purpose for the entire year.
There’s only one small problem, though.
Sticking to long term goals can be a bit tricky. It doesn’t take too long to lose motivation, and all the zest to smash your goals will gradually and steadily wane.
Soon enough, those long term goals will feel like a distant memory!
As Zig Ziglar puts it, “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing; that’s why we recommend it daily.”
That’s another way of saying you need to break down your year-long goals into actionable steps to keep up your initial motivation toward meaningful goals.
Think about it for a minute.
How often do you put off an extremely urgent task? If you’re like most people, the answer should be almost never unless you’re a chronic procrastinator!
The reason for this is simple.
A sense of urgency puts you in the getting-things-done mode. On the flip side, you’ll likely put off doing things if you think there’s more than enough time to complete them.
I’ve said all of that to say this: Having monthly individual goals creates a sense of urgency! It helps you realize that you have only 30 days to smash a specific goal, so you must make every day count.
We’ll get into the various monthly goal ideas in a bit. Before then, here are a few tips to help with successful goal setting.
Tips for Creating Realistic Monthly Goals
Nearly everyone knows the importance of goal setting, especially if they want a sense of purpose. Unfortunately, not everyone knows how to create realistic goals. That’s mostly why many people abandon their New Year’s Resolutions before the end of February!
To help you avoid this pitfall, here are a few tips to remember when creating your monthly goals:
- Set a realistic and measurable goal. Your mind will have difficulty figuring out ways to help you achieve un-actionable and vague resolutions like “I want to be a nicer person this month.” A better way to frame your goal would be, “I will do at least one random act of kindness to one person every day for 30 days.”
- Focus on achieving just one important goal per month for a start. You can gradually increase the number of monthly goals when you’ve disciplined yourself enough to master a ritual or habit in one area of your life.
- Take action every single day! That’s the whole idea behind having a monthly goal. Make sure to break your goals down in a way that allows you to work on them daily, no matter how big or small the action is.
- Remember to pat yourself on the back when you see reasonable progress. Celebrating your milestones creates a sense of accomplishment for yourself and keeps your motivation up.
- Your monthly goals don’t have to be big; just keep them simple. However, remember that simplicity isn’t the same as thinking small. Make your smaller goal challenging enough to be worth celebrating once accomplished.
- Put your goals list where you can see it several times daily. It doesn’t matter whether you put the list on your bedside table or work desk; the most important thing is to have your goal list somewhere you can easily see. The more frequently you see them, the higher your chance of taking action to achieve them.
- Share your goals with a trustworthy friend or family. This is one way to hold yourself accountable.
15 Monthly Goal Ideas to Turbocharge Your Success
The best way to achieve your goals is to make them into a habit. To help you with that, here is a list of goal ideas to do a month.
Think of these goals like a 30-day challenge.
Indeed, recent research discredits the 21-day habit formation timeline because there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to forming a habit. However, committing to doing something (or avoiding something) for 30 days in a row is a good way to increase your chances of sticking with it or shaking off a bad habit.
As you go through this list, remember to choose the monthly goal ideas that fit into your big long term goals.
Challenge yourself to follow through with these habit-forming goals for the next 30 days. Keep doing them if you find them beneficial after a month. Or else, try something else.
1. Wake Up Earlier Than Usual
Want to get more tasks accomplished every day? Get in the habit of waking up earlier than most average people.
Most high performers and highly successful people wake up between 5 and 6 am to make the most of those quiet morning hours and set the tone for the rest of the day.
2. Run Five Days a Week
You may want to consider adding running to your exercise routine if your physical fitness is a source of concern or you simply want to improve in that area.
Start by running a distance suitable for your current fitness level and increase it gradually as you get better. Remember that distance doesn’t really matter as much as consistency.
Commit to running 5 out of 7 days of the week. This can be challenging, especially if you are somewhat out of shape, but it will positively affect your health and fitness.
That said, be sure to check with your physician first if you have an existing medical condition before you start a running program or set a new fitness goal.
3. Repeat Affirmations
Want to make positive changes in your inner self-talk? Affirmations are a great tool for that purpose. Whether you want to eliminate self-limiting beliefs, boost your confidence, or create your abundance mindset, repeating a couple of affirmations daily for a month (and believing them) can help shift your perspective.
If you’ve never used affirmations before, I suggest checking out my collection of affirmations to find a theme that resonates with you.
4. Avoid Checking Your Phone Until After Your Morning Routine
Many people reach for their phones as soon as they wake up. This seemingly harmless habit can snowball into a huge waste of your morning hours, especially if you log into your social media.
For the next 30 days, commit to completing all your important morning tasks before picking up your phone.
5. Tidy Up Your Social Media
Set a goal to declutter the accounts and pages you follow and subscribe to on social media. Every day for the next 30 days, go through your social media and remove at least one account, unfriend one person, and unfollow one page that doesn’t inspire you or make you a better person.
6. Take a Break From Social Media
If social media has been consuming your valuable time, it is time to do something about it. Stay off social media for a month.
It can be helpful to delete all social media apps from your phone to reduce the temptation of checking your feeds.
Taking a month’s break from social media frees up valuable time for doing more important tasks. And even if you do nothing with the extra time, relaxing and doing nothing definitely feels better than unfairly comparing your life with the glamorous and “perfect” lifestyles on social media.
7. Spend an Hour Extra With Family and Friends
Your family and friend are less likely to value you for how busy you are but will appreciate the quality time you spend with them despite your busy schedule.
Challenge yourself to spend an additional hour with the special people in your life every day for a month.
8. Read for an Hour Every Day
Consciously learning might be tasking for some, but if you simply grab a good book and digest the content for an hour every day, you’ll be effortlessly learning things without trying.
As an aside, you’ll get the benefits of reading, such as improving your vocabulary, stress reduction, preventing the cognitive decline associated with aging, and improving brain connectivity.
9. Listen to One Positive Thinking Podcast Daily for 30 Days
Looking for inspiration to follow your dreams? Make it a point to feed your mind daily by listening to positive podcasts.
10. Give up a Bad Habit for an Entire Month
Think of just one bad habit you know you should give up but can’t bring yourself to do it. Here’s one approach you might find helpful.
Tell yourself you’re not quitting the habit forever, but you’ll stop it for only 30 days.
Stick to your commitment, and assess how you feel about the habit after a month. Do you feel better about yourself? Does sticking with your goal help you feel more in charge (instead of the bad habit controlling you)?
If you’re like most people, you will repeat the challenge for a couple more 30-day periods. Eventually, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to give up the bad habit!
11. Do One Self-Care Activity Daily
Most monthly goal ideas push you to work hard to become better. But you can’t function at your best if you don’t make time for self-care. Commit to doing one self-care activity every day for the next 30 days. This will energize you to be more useful to yourself and others.
12. Do Something Nice for Others Every Day
Here’s a goal to help you be more selfless: practice being kind to at least one person every day for a month.
Smile at a stranger, give a friend a big hug, visit a loved one, give someone a handwritten letter, babysit for free… the list is endless!
13. Check off All Items on Your Daily To-Do List
Want to be more productive in the next 30 days? Set a goal to complete all the tasks on your daily to-do list.
To be clear, your to-do list is different from your goal list. However, making sure that you complete the items on your daily to-do list is a good way to overcome the bad habit of procrastination.
By the way, if you struggle with getting things done when you really don’t want to, I strongly recommend reading this article.
14. Prepare Your Meals for 30 Days
If you aim to improve your health, start by eating right. One way to do this is to avoid eating out for a month. Shop healthy ingredients, cook your meals and eat at home. You’ll feel better and improve your culinary skills.
15. Connect With One New Person Every Day
Being extremely shy, timid, or introverted can negatively affect your quality of life, as you might miss out on opportunities. If you struggle with this type of personality problem, you can start the process of overcoming it by connecting with more people.
Find a way to reach out to a different person every day, online or offline. Send text messages, make calls, pay visits, or have dinner with someone to improve your communication and be chattier.
