Having goals certainly seems like a good thing. After all, isn’t it important to have something to strive towards? And to be continually bettering ourselves?

But how often are you setting goals that fall by the wayside, or get forgotten, or that you quit just before achieving success, never knowing just how close you were? 

It can be difficult to know where to get started with goal journaling. After all, how do you go about creating a goal? How do you ensure it is not so big that it becomes overwhelming and you end up quitting, but also not so small that you achieve it easily and gain nothing from it? 

It is not enough to simply set a goal either. The real work comes in creating a plan of action for how you will achieve your goal, tracking and monitoring your progress and documenting your successes along the way. 

Writing your goals down isn’t just a vanity project either. A fairly recent study claims that you are 42% more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down. By creating a goal journal, you’re committing to working towards the things you want to achieve, and making yourself more accountable.

If you’ve been putting off getting started with journaling because you’re under the impression a journal is solely for the expression of emotions or creativity, then goal journaling can be a great place to start because it provides a practical, structured tool for success. This article will talk you through how to get started and tips to keep going.

Why start a goal journal?

If you’re the kind of person who keeps their goals and plans internalised, or you find it difficult to express your goals, you might be wondering why you would want to start a goal journal. Besides the science which says you are more likely to achieve your goals when you write them down, starting a goal journal can have many benefits:

Boosts focus and clarity

When you start writing down your goals you are forced to articulate them. This might be something you’ve never truly done before. You might have a vague notion that you want to be a millionaire for example, but when you come to write about your goals you might realise what you actually want is financial independence, or to start your own business, or to have enough money to retire early.

By writing down your goals, and writing regularly around them, you will clarify your thoughts and discover what it is that motivates and drives you.You are able to plan paths to success and reflect on the process of moving closer towards your long-term goals. 

Clarifying what it is you want in your own mind is an important first step to making your goals more tangible and therefore more achievable.

Tracks progress

Your journal is the ideal place to track your progress towards your goal. You can use progress trackers which are visual representations of your commitment to achieving success, and to highlight the steps you have taken so far, but you can also record your achievements along the way and make note of any important lessons you learn or any mistakes and pitfalls to avoid in future. 

Encourages accountability

Making your goals tangible by writing them down gives you a sense of dedication and responsibility. If you journal regularly, you’ll be seeing and writing about your goals a lot, and this keeps them front-of-mind. When you get to the end of the year and conduct an end of year review, or even just go back through your old journal, seeing which goals you did and didn’t achieve, and reflecting on why, can be highly motivating and help you set new goals going forward. This increased accountability is a key driver of success and a huge benefit of goal journaling.

Improves productivity

When we don’t write our goals down, or we just think about what we want to achieve, we have a tendency to go big. ‘I want Brad Pitt’s Fight Club body’, ‘I want to be a multi-millionaire by this time next year’, ‘I’m giving myself a month to write, edit and find a publisher for this novel I’ve had an idea for’. 

It’s great to be ambitious in our goal setting, but it is equally important to consider the how and why, not just the what. Journaling forces you to slow down, to break the big long-term goal into smaller, achievable chunks. You are asked to consider why you want to achieve those things and discover your motivation for doing so. You should be creating plans and strategies that answer the ‘how’ you are going to achieve your goals. 

In this way, you aren’t just focusing on the one ‘big’ task, and therefore making it more likely that you’re going to be disappointed, but you’re breaking it down into lots of daily tasks, meaning you achieve more, move closer to your big goal every day and keep yourself on-track more easily. It’s much easier to achieve, say, ‘I’m going to avoid the bacon sandwich for breakfast tomorrow’ or, ‘I’m going to walk to work’, then it is to achieve, ‘I’m going to wake up one week from now looking like Chris Hemsworth in Thor’, but by achieving those little things every day, you are more likely to achieve your healthier, happier body, without the disappointment and demotivation that comes from failing at an unrealistic goal.

Choosing the right journal

Once you’ve committed to the process of goal journaling and understood the benefits, it’s important to consider how you’re going to journal. This isn’t necessarily a decision of which notebook and pen you are going to use (although it can be!), but rather is the process of trying to figure out the right method, format and frequency of journaling that will work for you and allow you to stay consistent. Your main considerations when choosing your journal should be:

Types of journals

There are many types of journals, but the main thing to think about here is do you want a digital or a physical notebook? 

The advantages of a digital notebook are:

• It is always available when the mood to write strikes you
• You can access it anywhere so you don’t have to worry about forgetting it or leaving it behind
• There are often premade templates available for different kinds of journaling
• They can be easier to organise thanks to tagging and search functions

The disadvantages would be:

• It’s less tangible so it’s easier to forget about or ignore
• It can be hard to get into an uninterrupted flow state with your writing if you have other apps and the internet vying for your attention at the same time.

With a physical journal, the advantages would be:

• It’s a physical presence that lets you write, doodle, rip, stick, highlight, erase etc. This can be a more ‘present’ (or less passive) act of journaling than just making notes on your phone
• It’s distraction free because you can put your phone or laptop away and just concentrate on writing
• It links a mental and a physical process, making you more attentive

The disadvantages might include:

• It takes up physical space so it might not always be convenient to carry round 
• There are limited pages in a physical notebook so you need to be organised to avoid gaps in your journaling hobby
• Your journal can be lost or damaged more irrevocably than a digital version

Ultimately, digital vs. physical is a personal choice. I like physical, because I feel more engaged with the process and I get distracted easily when I’m on my phone. Also, I’m a sucker for owning a nice notebook and pen. If digital is more your thing though, you might want to look at apps like Notion, Evernote or Trello. 

Layouts

How you layout your journal is going to be vital for how successful your journaling habit is. When I started, I loved the look of habit trackers and the structured layouts of bullet journals, so I would spend Sunday evening with pens and rulers, marking out the layout for the week. I was using a pretty simplistic format, some boxes for my to-do lists, some basic habit trackers, but even that became overwhelming quickly. I found I was dreading having to do another batch of layouts for the week ahead, and so eventually my journaling habit fell by the wayside – I’d made it too complex and it felt unrewarding.

I’ve experimented with a lot of layouts since then and now my journal style is much looser and almost completely unstructured. I’ll mostly just write a few paragraphs, maybe highlight a quote or interesting concept I’ve come across, and that’s really it. It took me a long time to get there but I’ve figured out what works for me.

As you start journaling, experiment with different layouts and take what you like, and leave what you don’t. Bullet journals are an excellent, minimalist style that make an obvious choice for goal journaling, but you could also go with just straight blank pages, a template that you’ve found online or a guided goal journal.

Consistency is key

Regardless of if you choose digital or physical, or whatever layout you decide to try, the key to an effective goal journaling habit is deciding on a format that you can stick with and use regularly. Try not to overcomplicate things for yourself and remember that you can always add new elements to your journal at a later date, once the habit is formed.

For more advice on creating a consistent journaling habit, read, ‘How do you journal every day‘.

Getting started: The basics of goal journaling

Now we’ve looked at what goes into starting a goal journal, it’s time to discuss the practical steps involved in writing, tracking, monitoring and analysing your goals so that you can achieve long-term success. The basic steps to goal journaling are as follows;

Step 1: Define your goals  

The obvious first step is to write down what your goals are. Remember, a goal is an ‘aim’ or ‘desired result’. 

This is your chance to be ambitious and go big. We can narrow it down and think about the how later, for now, we just want a list of big, long-term goals.

Try and consider both personal and professional goals and don’t worry about how many you are writing down. If you end up with a lot we can rationalise and narrow them down at a later stage. 

A goal at this point might be; ‘I want to run a marathon’, ‘I want to start my own accountancy practice’, or, ‘I want to benchpress 1.5 times my body-weight.’

Step 2: Break down the goals

Now we have a list of goals, the next task is to begin making them more actionable. For this step, we need to start converting these long term, aspirational goals, into more short term, actionable steps.

Let’s take, ‘I want to run a marathon’ for example. What might some shorter term, actionable steps be for this goal? Obviously it will depend on your fitness level, but it might look something like this;

• Buy some running shoes
• Download the couch to 5k app
• Complete couch to 5k in 6 weeks
• Increase 5k to 10k over another 6 weeks
• Run a sub 30-minute 5k
• Join a running club
• Sign up to a 10k run event
• Introduce 1 hill run a week
• Introduce 3 resistance training sessions a week
• Follow a 10k to half marathon training plan

You could go on like this in small, actionable bullet points until you finally reach ‘sign up to do a marathon’ and then, ‘complete a marathon’.

You can see then, hopefully, how you can take something seemingly huge and ambitious and turn it into lots of much more manageable steps that are more realistic to complete. How hard is it to buy some running shoes or download an app? You could do that from your phone right now, and then mark off steps one and two of your goal to run a marathon. You’ve made progress and you’ve felt that sense of achievement that will be vital to keep you showing up and completing the steps.

As part of this though, you need to go one step further and start setting deadlines and benchmarks for each step. The deadlines can be ambitious or realistic, but it is important you have a way of measuring that you are on track and keeping your momentum and progress going. Deadlines are extremely useful for doing this.

Benchmarks are a way of monitoring progress that allow us to adjust out plans as we go along. If for example, you say you want to be benchpressing your body-weight in 5 weeks time, and it gets to 5 weeks and you aren’t able to do that, you shouldn’t just give up. Instead you should re-evaluate your plan, assess what is and isn’t working and then adjust your short-term goal accordingly.

Step 3: Make it SMART

SMART is an acronym that is predominantly used in business, but which provides a very useful framework for writing a good goal. 

Once you have your long list of long-term goals, and have broken them down into short-term goals with deadlines and benchmarks, the next step is to rewrite your steps with the SMART framework in mind. SMART stands for:

Specific 

Is your goal concrete and tangible? Do you know what success looks like? Be detailed and avoid vague terms. When you think of your goal, you should know exactly what it is you’re aiming to achieve.

Measurable

How is success measured? What trackers can you put in place to keep you progressing in the right direction? Again, be specific here. I want to bench press 2x my body weight at 180lbs is a good goal because it is specific and easily measurable.

Attainable 

It is great to set ambitious goals that challenge us, but they shouldn’t be so far beyond your reach that you are setting yourself up for failure and ultimately demotivating yourself. Be realistic about what you want to achieve, how you will achieve it and in what time frame. Saying you want to be a Men’s Health cover model is great, but if you’re a 45 year old father of three who struggles to find time for the gym, there are a lot more steps and hurdles, and a longer time-frame needed for this to be at all achievable.

Relevant

‘Relevant’ in this case is used to mean, does your goal help you achieve the longer-term, bigger picture goal? And this can be applied to your short-term and long-term goals. For your short-term goals, make sure they contribute to achieving what you want long-term. If your long-term goal is to reduce body fat, your short-term goal probably shouldn’t include a trip to the all you can eat buffet. But similarly, you can apply this thinking to long-term goals.

My goal is to reduce body-fat, but why is this my goal? Because I want to be healthier and happier. So is my long-term goal relevant to this? Yes!

It’s an important step with goal journaling to think about the motivations behind your long-term goals as this will be what keeps driving you forward. That promotion might be your big goal, but ultimately what you want is career stability, or financial stability, or financial independence, and understanding this can help you better frame your goals for success.

Timed

We’ve all been there, where we’ve said to ourselves, ‘I need to lose some weight’, or, ‘I need to stop spending money’ and then, inevitably, nothing changes. For goals to be truly useful and transformative, there needs to be a deadline, or timeline of trackable milestones. Make sure all your goals have a date or period of time to complete them within, and if you can, plan milestones in-between the overall goal to ensure you stay on track.

Daily, weekly, and monthly check-ins

The power of journaling when it comes to goals is really in the tracking, monitoring, reflection and accountability that your journal affords you, and you can maximise this with a regular cadence of journal entries. Again, you don’t have to commit to all of these, but each has benefits and if you can commit to them, no matter how small, you will see excellent results.

Daily entries

Daily Entries keep your goal at the forefront of your mind. Whilst you won’t necessarily see huge progress when daily tracking, you will be able to track the daily tasks or habits that are related to your goals. 

Did you go in the gym? Did you eat your target macros? Did you organise that work meeting?

Your daily journaling will also become a place to reflect on your long-term progress and successes as you commit to a regular habit. You might also use daily goal prompts to focus yourself on what you want to achieve and why, and assess if you’re on the right path.

Weekly reflection

Your weekly reflection is more likely to give you some sense of how well you are progressing. Did you stay on track with your daily tasks? What results have you seen this week? Are you likely to accomplish your goal in the given timeframe or do you need to adjust the plan? What is working and what isn’t? 

Weekly reflections are long-term enough to assess progress, but not so short-term that you can’t base decisions on what you learn. 

You should also ask if you have truly been sticking to your plan. Sometimes it’s easy for us to tell ourselves one story, when the truth is something different. (I’ve been sticking to my diet! I’ve been working so hard!) But your journal should let you see the truth.

Monthly goals review

Conducting a monthly goal review helps you to assess your overall progress, celebrate your achievements (and analyse any setbacks) and make sure your strategy is the correct one. Over the course of a month, you should have a good amount of data to tell you if you’re sticking to your plan and if you are seeing the results you expect. 

Staying consistent with your goal journal

A key element to success is consistency, and that means being consistent with working towards your goal, but also being consistent with your journaling habit. Losing track of your progress can quickly derail you and cause you to give up on your goals. Here are some tips to help you establish a consistent habit.

Establish a routine

Establishing a consistent routine will help you keep on track. It removes the need to rely on motivation, because you just write in your journal at the time you set each day. Similarly, with the steps to your goal, knowing when and where and how you are going to take the steps and sticking with a routine will help you achieve success.

Keep it realistic 

A surefire way to torpedo your efforts at achieving any goal is to set overly-ambitious targets. If you set out aiming to write hundreds of pages a day or to create stunningly curated templates each week, you’ll likely struggle to keep the habit going. Instead, starting with small daily entries or using prompts is a good way to start the habit, and you can add to it from there.

Incorporate accountability

Using a journal is already a good way to introduce accountability around your new goal, but you can take this a step further by sharing your new goal, once you have properly fleshed it out in your journal, with friends or family who will support and encourage you, and hold you to account as necessary. Introducing community based apps can also be a good way to track your progress and keep you going (think Strava for runners).

Overcoming common challenges

Staying motivated

Motivation can be fickle, which is why it is so important to develop a routine and understand your deeply held reason for ‘why’ you want to achieve your goals. With that being said, there are times when motivation will get you over the line or give you that push to do what needs to be done, or to keep you going even when setbacks inevitably occur.

Use your journal to define the reasons you want to achieve your goal. Why do you want to achieve this goal? What does it mean to you? What will your life look like when you achieve that goal? Your why will help you keep going when things are tough or you experience setbacks. Look back at your reasons why when things get tough. 

Dealing with plateaus

Hitting plateaus with long-term goals is all but inevitable. You will find that there will be times where you don’t seem to be making the progress you would like to be, or where life prevents you from sticking to your routine as well as you have done previously.

When these plateaus do happen, see them as an opportunity to revisit and refresh your goals. Set yourself some new, short-term challenges that feed into your longer-term goals.

In the gym for example, your goal might be to increase your benchpress, but when you find yourself in a slump, you might decide to take a few weeks mastering pull-ups. This keeps you in the gym and working on your strength, but it is enough of a shake-up that it will hopefully get you excited to get back to it, and when you do, you will likely find you can break out of that plateaus.

Go back to your journal and look at your goals, are they still relevant? Is there anything you can add or change to help you break through the plateau?   

Avoiding burnout

I’m a big fan of trying to utilise the initial wave of motivation that comes from setting a new goal and starting a new project. When you’re enthusiastic and motivated, you can achieve amazing results.

However, that motivation is unlikely to last forever. Eventually you might start to run out of steam or struggle to remember your why, and it is at this point you might consider quitting.

With journaling, you’re giving yourself an early warning system, telling you when you are approaching this burn out, and when you might want to consider slowing down or re-evaluating to keep you progressing.

Sample goal journal prompts for men

What are three things I want to achieve by the end of this year?

What small steps can I take today to move closer to my biggest goal?

What challenges did I face last week, and how did I overcome them?

What will my life look like if I achieve my long-term goals?

What is the most exciting prospect about achieving your goals?

What might get in the way of me reaching my goals?

How will I keep progressing towards my goals when motivation is lacking? 

What are milestones and marks of success on the path to achieving my goals? 

What are the biggest goals you have achieved recently?

What goals have you achieved in the past and what lessons did you learn on the road to success?

Conclusion

Journaling is an exceptional tool for goal setting and tracking. If you are making the decision to be more intentional when it comes to your own growth and success, then a goal journal can help you:

• Create tangible, trackable goals
• Monitor progress over the short, medium and long term
• Record successes and analyse setbacks
• Boost your focus and creativity
• Stay motivated and moving in the right direction

If you are keen to start a goal journal today, then I would encourage you to do it. Remember, start small, test layouts, use prompts, stay consistent and find your ‘why’.

I’d love to hear how you use a goal journal in your own day-to-day life and what tips you have for achieving success. And as always, happy journaling.