How To Review And Evaluate Your Homesteading Goals For Success

If you want to get anywhere you need to have a plan, an idea of where you want to go.

After you’ve out in all the work on planning and laying out your path, you need to have a way of “checking in” on yourself to make sure you’re in the right track.

Evaluating and reviewing your progress towards your goals may not be an obvious thing to do, especially if you’re seeing progress.

But what if you’re not? What if your deadline comes and you’re not where you wanted to be?

Or if you’re seeing and feeling progress, what if you could be having massive growth instead but you’re missing out?

Why Everyone Should Review Their Goals

A person who experiences epic success is 9 times out of 10 someone who regularly checks-in with themselves and their progress.

When you do, those goals and daily action items are right there at the forefront of your brain. Your brain is working on figuring out the next step while you’re going about your day.

By reviewing your goals and progress you stay focused and motivated on taking the next step forward. You can see where you might need to make an adjustment (if necessary! The greatest rewards often come after navigating through tricky waters).

You may a small tweak here or there could be something that implodes your growth. Wouldn’t that be nice?

And there must be something said that by reviewing your goals, you stay accountable to them.

No matter how frequently you touch base with them, you’re either going to get a rush of excitement seeing where you’re at, or feel guilty because you haven’t been giving it your all.

How often should you review

Really, every day to ensure you’re making continual progress but at minimal it should be weekly for short-term goals.

For longer term goals, you can touch base with how your progress is lining up monthly or quarterly.

If you have a long term goal it should be broken down into monthly or quarterly goals, and those broken into daily or weekly goals. So really you’re still doing a review frequently, just to shorter goals.

What areas should you review or track?

There’s a multitude of things you can review and track based on what your goals are.

For example, if you’re looking to cut your expenses you can track what each of your expenses are month or month or week to week and where you want to be.

There are certain things you should be tracking and checking in on.

The first thing is, what have you accomplished?

Even if you don’t feel you’ve made a lot of progress, you have made changes that little by little will add up. Celebrate those small victories.

Then review what you still need to do. Keep that direction in the forefront of your mind.

Check, do you still have the time to meet your goal? Can you make more time to work on your action list?
Often even 15 minutes of focused time can make the world of difference. Get someone to look after the kids or set a timer and just go bananas.

If you feel you have more things to do then you have time then here’s an easy and doable way to Find An Extra 2+ Hours in Your Day, Without Losing Sleep.

Review any expenses associated with your goal. Expenses can run up quickly and can derail anyone’s budget if they don’t have a plan.

Check in and see if you’re on track or need to find savings elsewhere, if feasible.

How to do a good review

When doing a review, you want to go into detail. Of you just do a quick overview you might miss some of those small tweaks that can make a big difference in your progress.

Look for an area you can make improvements in. Is it a skill you can focus on building? Perhaps an area you can automate with checklists or new habits.

This is a great way to set up some systems that will continue to serve your ultimate goal and your life beyond.

Imagine having a checklist on the barn door of what goes onto the chicken feed you make yourself. You always know what to do and don’t have to think about ratios or ingredients. And it can be easy for kids to follow and help too!

Ask yourself these questions to ensure you’re on the right track and will continue to make good progress.

• What have I accomplished?
• Where can I improve?
• Am I giving this 100%?
• Where can I find more time?
• Where should I devote more time?
• What can I automate?
• Is my plan working?
• Do I need to modify anything?
• Am I going in the right direction?
• Is my goal still the same?
• What have I learned?
• What have I accomplished?
• Where can I get help?
• Where can I improve my skills?
• Where can I stretch myself?
• What other goals can I achieve?

When you’re done your review, the last thing you should leave off with is:

• What step is next?

And go and do it.

What to do if your progress doesn’t match your goals

This is where you need to be honest with yourself. Have you taken the action needed and been 100% committed to learning, doing, and pushing through any hurdles? Or have you half-assed and made excuses somewhere along the way?

Then breathe and give yourself grace. Life happens, doing new things can be difficult, no matter how much we may want it.

Human nature will take the easy route before discomfort. If this is you I suggest you read Atomic Habits by James Clear and get on his newsletter list

You have not failed if you are not on track. You are LEARNING. You and learning and implementing new habits and systems that will ultimately help you reach your goal.

This can take time to get your brain and environment set up.

Above all, progress can take time to be seen. Just like when you change your habits to eat healthier and lose weight, you’re not going to see big changes after a week.

You may not even have significant (or any) visual progress, or be where you want to be, after a couple of months. Some times it can be years!

This is definitely in the case of homesteading. You won’t learn a bunch of skills and change your habits overnight, and you shouldn’t expect to.

But consistent perseverance when it all seems to be for naught, gets you the progress you want to see.

How to get back on track

No pity parties! Time to brainstorm and write down what got you off track or taken your focus away from your action list. What feelings or parts of life created a stumbling block?

This list will be a GOLD MINE! This shows exactly where you need to focus on improving.

Look at your milestones or goals. Does your goal still align with what you need? It may not and that’s ok! Perhaps you were planning on raising your own meat birds as part of your self-sufficiency goal, but became vegan.

Are your goals properly laid out? Are they SMART goals? Are you checking in and taking action daily?

Do you need to create smaller, easily actionable tasks that take virtually no effort and are completely doable?
Often we have a to do list that takes too much thought and we give up or get mixed up.

If you need to pack lunches as an action item to your saving money goal. Did you do it? Do you pack a lunch every day?

Break it down further.

Make a meal plan so you know what you need to buy and what to make. Pack your lunch the night before (set a time that you do it!) or make a weekend’s worth of lunches Sundays before preparing supper.

Making as much “automatic” where you don’t have to think, you just do. Oh, supper’s over? I’ll pack my lunch while I clean up. Choose a habit you already do and stack your new habit with it.

Grab an accountability partner. They can keep you on task and provide a different perspective or ideas. Choose someone who can be your cheering squad and someone who can break you out of analysis paralysis or imposter syndrome.

Remember to celebrate those small wins and tweaks and learning you’re doing. THAT is more progress than actually achieving the goal.

YOU GOT THIS!

Summary

Review your action list and milestones daily to keep you focused and on track.

Celebrate the small wins, review the timeline and where you can get more time.

Make sure any expenses are on track and where you can get more savings, if feasible.

Review the details by asking yourself questions and find areas to make even small improvements or where set up automated systems.

Give yourself grace – progress can take time to be seen. The real, lasting change happens in the little, daily actions so stick with them. Seek to continually learn and tweak.

Write down what got you off track. This is your list of improvements to make.

Look at your goals and milestones. Do they still align with where you want to be?

Are your goals SMART goals? Break them down into doable tasks.

Habit stack onto an existing habit to keep you consistent.

Grab an accountability partner to be your cheering squad and offer you a different perspective.

It’s all in the journey! You will 100% reach your goals if you follow this method and put in the effort.

I bet you will find it even easier to do than you think!

So, what’s the goal you’re working towards?