I'll tell you the first thing I think of is lose 30 pounds and get out of debt...two things I think of all the time. I even have a written plan on how to achieve these goals. I've checked off the boxes when I exercise, I've listed the food I consume on a daily basis and I've tightened the belt on frivolous expenses. While at times I have seen some success, I will admit achieving these goals on the whole has been pretty discouraging.
Because goal setting is about change we often migrate to negative things we want to set goals on. I would suggest a better focus would be to set goals based on success, focus on those people who are successful and drill down into how they achieved that success.
Let me tell you about a "success". For the last ten years I have struggled financially due to very high credit card debt. Most of this debt was justifiable (at least in my mind) at the time but it was still debt. I have focused every month on reducing this debt by making sure I made the minimum payments on time, throwing a little extra toward a bill once in awhile, and not incurring additional debt. All great steps to successfully paying down bills S-L-O-W-L-Y. A real eye-opener was this past year when the credit card companies had to put on their bills what it will cost you if you only make minimum payments and how long it will take you to pay off your debt. At the rate I was going I would have been 125 years old and still have had one credit card to pay off. My goal to get out of debt was not to be achieved in this lifetime.
Consequently I did a lot of research on what people did who successfully paid off their credit cards. I realized that their positive success stories did more for me than all the goal checklists and spreadsheets I had been using for years. Bottom line....debt retirement was a priority....higher than birthday presents for the kids, higher than ice cream cones and happy meals for the grandkids, higher than a new shirt (even if it is on sale), and higher than first-run movies in the theatre with popcorn and drinks. For one month I paid the necessities, rent, utilities, gas for the car, the minimum credit card payments and groceries and saved $25 for extras. I then put 100% of the rest of that money toward my lowest bill. It wasn't the lowest interest rate, but the lowest amount owed. The next month my time to pay off this bill had been reduced by two months. I would retire that bill in 2014. The next month I tried the same process again. This time that bill would be retired in 2013...ok so it was December 2013 but it was still ONE YEAR sooner than if I hadn't paid that extra money.
So now although I didn't have a written goal that stated pay an extra $200/month on bills, I had a success moment that helped me see the progress. For the past two years I have applied this $200 to my bills. In fact this year I have actually done even better than that, I have added $200 to the interest on the bill so I am actually retiring $200 of debt on this card every single month.
The point of this is not that I will be out of debt much sooner than I ever imagined, but rather when focusing every month on the "success" rather than the "process" I have changed my attitude about my goal. What at first seemed like an insurmountable, unattainable goal has now become a real success story every month.