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Now that your goals are on paper (or computer), depending on the kind of person you are they probably seem either more daunting or more doable.  Hopefully the latter.

Take your goals to be, do, see, and have, and spend a few moments prioritizing them.  It might seem a little silly or impossible to put gradient priorities on your dreams and goals, but I’ll wager they’re not of identical importance after all if you stop and think about it.  Isn’t it more important to you to visit your grandparents’ hometown you’ve heard stories of all your life (for example) than the fun beach resort you saw on tv last week?  They can both be goals, but when it comes right down to it and one has to be let go, you’ll rest easier knowing you let go of the less important one.

There are two basic ways to prioritize a list of items.  One is to number each one uniquely in order of importance.  Then you work your way down the list from the most important (#1) to the least (#104 or whatever).  This works for some people who can see all the infinite shades of grey – these are usually people who appreciate 20 buttons on a blender, if you know what I mean.  The simpler, in my opinion, way to do it is to use A, B, and C (or 1, 2, and 3 if you’re numerically inclined).  The way I read these designations is A *must* be done, B *should* be done, and C *could* be done.

If you use the number priorities (1 to infinity), the other choice to make is whether to number each list separately or lump them all together.  This is really a “whatever floats your boat” issue, but I’ll offer this: If most of your goals have some kind of money requirement, purchasing supplies, plane tickets, whatever, I would put them all on one list so you can better plan your resource allocation.  But that’s just me.

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With goals to be, see, do, and have set, the next step is to plan how to reach those goals.  Goals without a plan will just sit there and so will you.

Think about *how* you plan to achieve your goals, and how you plan to track your progress.  Lay the foundation for that by setting up a part of your Panel for such plans.  Will you need financial records and charts, blueprints, idea files, timelines, delegation charts, research files, shopping lists, checklists, weightloss charts or more?  Find or make a place for them now, before they become so much unuseful clutter.  Once that is done you can start incorporating action steps into your active Control Panel and increase your chances of completing them.

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If you know what you want to be in life, then you can decide on some other goals.

You’ve seen lists people have of things to do before they’re 30, 40, 50, dead, whatever.  Bucket lists, they’re often called.  Do you have one?  Can you think of anything you’d like to accomplish in life?  Some adventure experience, travel, etc.?  Pick an appropriate benchmark for yourself and set some ambitious goals.  This is a place to dare to dream.

Next (or as part of the above), expand your horizons and picture places you’d like to visit.  Want to take your kids to the campground your parents vacationed at when you were young?  Want to see the Mona Lisa in Paris or the pyramids in Egypt?  Are you a sucker for the natural beauty of glaciers and virgin forests, or an urban explorer looking to hike the streets of San Francisco?   Ambitious enough to visit every country in Europe or Asia, or every state in the US?  Make your wish list today.

Now the materialistic side of our dreams: those things we want to acquire in life.  Not necessarily just the huge things either – need a new garage door opener?  How about a clothes dryer?   It’s not a pipe dream, but it’s too big for the weekend’s shopping list.  It might help you to walk through your home, triggering thoughts of what you’d like to have to fix or enhance each room.  Go ahead and pipe dream if that’s what you like – but I would caution you to keep in mind the concept of “enough”.  Is it really necessary to be a millionaire – and live like one – to be happy?  Not that I’d turn down a million dollars, mind you!  Far from it, but a million dollar portfolio isn’t on my goal list, because it’s not something I need for a happy life.  Only you know what your personal priorities are so I’ll only say be cautious of going overboard, and have fun dreaming!

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Now you have the bones of your Control Panel set up, your regular tasks filed neatly so you know what needs to be done when, and you’ve established flexibility in those parts of your Control Panel.  There is more to a Control Panel than things you have to do.  Much, much more.  Filing information so it can be referenced and found easily is the primary purpose of a Control Panel, and the next thing I want to cover that you’ll want to have accessible to you is a written set of goals.

Sit down with yourself and put into words what you want to be in life.  This is not the place for things to have or places to go, those will come later.  Right now articulate how you want yourself to be.  I think of it this way – When your children are grown (or when your obituary is written) what do you want to be remembered for?  How would your children, spouse, friends, acquaintances describe you in the ideal future?  What personality traits or habits do you want to foster, or conversely rid yourself of.  This is a day for introspection, so grab yourself a quiet moment and a nice drink of your choice and think for a while.  Then write a few statements that you can put in your Control Panel to refer back to when you need a little course correction.

Previous articles available here.

As we all know all too well, life doesn’t always work out as neatly in reality as it does on paper.  There are going to be exceptions to your weekly and daily routines.  The key to the success of any system is its flexibility, and your willingness to let it be flexible.  If something comes up that prevents you from completing your routine, roll with it as best you can.  Skip tasks if necessary, trade routines or days if possible, whatever works to keep you moving forward.  Don’t let one day – or even a week or more – take you completely off course.  Veer a little, veer a lot, but with routines in place you’ll always have a path to return to, and that alone can be comforting in trying or hectic times.

Another wrench in the weekly works is not exactly an exception, but an irregular or regular but infrequent addition: the monthly or seasonal tasks from our master lists.  There are, in my opinion, three basic ways to handle these.  One is to follow a Zone system for housework (Flylady), wherein each room or section of your house is assigned one week of the month and you rotate through the entire house in one 5-week stretch (the 1^st and 5^th “weeks” being whatever portion of a week the beginning and end of the month fall into).  Each week, on your cleaning day(s), you would complete any monthly or seasonal tasks that fall into that zone.  Another method is to group tasks by type – all the carpet steamcleaning, all the silver polishing, all the closet straightening, etc. – and each cleaning day of the month you do one set throughout the house, rotating when you finish everything.  The third way is to randomly assign these infrequent chores to cleaning days and go from there.

Gather all your recurrent, infrequent (less often than weekly) chores and tasks from your master list.  Decide whether you will group by zone, chore type, or some other way.  Insert them into your Panel however you have decided to incorporate recurrent tasks.  Add cards to your file, set up reminders in Outlook, make zone cleaning reference lists for your notebook, etc.  When you’re done with today’s work, you should have every task from your master list assigned a frequency and appearing in your Control Panel to “pop up” when it’s needed.  Yay!

It’s been a while since I covered this topic, so it’s time to get moving again.  I will be posting regularly (and much more frequently) this year, honest.

Now that supplies are gathered and plans are set, as much as possible collect any and all information related to your Routines and Schedules that you already have – calendars, school sheets, scribbled notes, organization paperwork, computer files, etc. – in one central place.  Make it someplace comfortable, where you can work and access any part of your Control Panel as necessary.  For many of us, this will be a desk.  Some may use a kitchen table, a corner of a dining room, or a craft area.  Wherever you feel you will concentrate best is where you should find your Control Panel.  My Control Panel is my “office”, which consists of a worktable in the dining room and some plastic drawers to house files, tools, and craft supplies, among other things.  So, get together anything you think might be useful in creating this part of your Panel, and we’ll start next!