Setting realistic standards 101
By: Sydney Fiorentino ‘24
With a new schedule and new goals to accomplish for the semester, you might be asking a lot of yourself, but it’s important to make sure to set realistic standards for yourself. It takes time to accomplish your major goals, and change won’t happen overnight.
Here’s some of the goals I’m working towards next year::
Go to bed earlier and wake up earlier (at least 7.5 hours of sleep)
Get home by 10 p.m. on weekdays
Have a self-care night for myself at least once a week
Appreciate the present
Practice self-love
Most of these goals cannot be achieved overnight. While I may go to bed early one night, creating consistency and not falling back on my old habits is hard. I’m trying to implement this goal by setting a routine or schedule for myself. Part of this is not making plans later than 8:30 p.m. But sometimes club meetings or events run late, and I have to be okay with not perfectly meeting my goals all the time.
Another way to manage your goals is to either bullet journal or simply use the notes app. Writing out a list of what you want to accomplish in the style of a simple to-do list is a great way to encourage consistency. You can also break down each goal into smaller subtasks that can be accomplished in a day and assign them a letter.
It’s important to note that your sub-steps from a-g, for example, won’t just happen in the span of a week or month. Progress happens slowly and is not linear. You can go from step a-c and then come back to step a for another two weeks because you might be feeling exhausted.
Regardless, any goal is attainable over the span of a few months or years, just be patient and realistic of how you’re going to get there so you don’t hurt yourself mentally along the way.
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