Command Centre: Monthly Family Goals

Do you ever get to the end of the month and wonder where the time went?  Do have great ideas at the beginning of the month about what you’d like to accomplish and then find that your good intentions vanish just as quickly as the time that keeps flying by?

I am often frustrated at the end of the month because I have so many things on my “to do” list that are not scratched off.

But even more than incomplete projects or tasks, I sometimes feel that, as a family, we’re not being intentional enough about developing the personal qualities that we want to develop in each other.

In today’s post I want to share another part of my kitchen command centre, that has made a difference in how I feel throughout the month, and especially at the end of the month.

Our Monthly Family Goals page

You can see our Monthly Family Goals page in the top right corner of our command centre, above my son’s routine page and just on an angle above the hanging folders.  

We first started using these monthly goal printables when my kids were little. We used them for several years and it really helped us be more intentional about communicating with each other as a family and setting goals for the month ahead.

We had a family meeting at the beginning of the month where we reflected back on our favourite parts of the previous month and looked ahead to the coming month. During the meeting we set goals together.

We talked at each meeting about how we did with the previous month’s goals. The kids especially enjoyed getting to “grade” my husband and I on how we did with our goals.

We wrote those goals down so we could look at them throughout the month.  We found we were much better at achieving our goals when we could see them every day!

At the end of our monthly family meetings we usually had some sort of celebration (a special dessert or breakfast, an outing as a family, or a favourite activity).

Here’s a close-up version of one month.

That month happened to include Valentine’s Day so we focused on love, and better ways of expressing it to each other.  Our family is not perfect and we struggle sometimes to love each other in the best ways possible.  These goals really helped with that.

Our monthly family goals page evolved over the years, but the basic idea stayed consistent.

This is just a page for family goals, not my own personal and professional goals.  This way everyone was able to contribute and be part of helping our family grow closer.

Tips for setting family goals

• Keep them simple
• Make them realistic – especially for younger children
• Let your kids suggest their own – you might be surprised what they come up with!
• Put your goals page in a visible place so you can refer to it regularly (this will increase your success in achieving them)
• Celebrate progress!

Get Your Printable Family Goals Sheets

If you like the idea of setting family goals, I created one for every month. Click the picture(s) to get your free printable copy.

You can print each of these out and write your family’s plans and goals.  I put mine in a dollar store frame that matches the ones I used for the kids’ routine pages.  I just swapped it out each month with our new goals page.

Stay tuned for posts about our calendar (you can see a bit of it in the above picture), weekly plans (these help us achieve our monthly goals), and our storage for the kids’ school work and art work that we keep!

In the meantime, if you’re looking for more ideas for a command centre, you can check out the command centres post I wrote as part of the 31 Days of Organizing Tips series or my Entryways, Drop Zones & Command Centres board on Pinterest.

Do you have family meetings?  Do you set goals with your family?   Please share your ideas in the comments so we can all be inspired by you!

If you need help decluttering or organizing, contact me for in-person services in the Mississauga area, or virtual organizing services anywhere else.

Happy organizing!