037. The 5 Keys For A Beautiful Life in 2025: How To Create A Working Mom’s Quarterly Plan For Success

If you're a working mom, whether you work from home, you own your own business, you work in an office, hospital, university, garden or zoo, you know you need to plan so you accomplish the things you want in 2025.

But how do you make sure you stick to your goals and actually achieve them? What types of goals should you be setting as a working mom or entrepreneur?

In this episode, I'm sharing the 5 keys to setting goals and achieving them:

1. Set quarterly identity-based goals that align with your values and life
2. Create a Weekly Plan that focuses on forward progress towards the quarterly goals
3. Do a daily 1-minute Winning Morning to keep your goals top of mind
4. Stay motivated to stick to the plan by having accountability that makes you feel good, and using time audits with time management strategies to help you focus on deep work.
5. Set up a social structure ensure increased happiness and "feeling good" while  working on your quarterly, weekly and daily goals.

Here's how to create your quarterly plan in less than an hour: join me  for the Beautiful Living Planning Workshop on Monday, January 20, 2025!  This is your social way to plan for the best year you can have. We'll have some laughs, you'll learn to set your goals, and you'll complete a weekly plan to execute on your goals.

Sign up for the Beautiful Living Planning Workshop here now! The workshop is only being offered once this entire first quarter!

Also listen to Episode 33: Organizing for Beautiful Living: How To Organize Your Home Simply, and Live Beautifully.

Take the quiz: What's Your Organizing Personality?

Connect with me:

My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fireflybridgeorganizing
My Website: https://fireflybridge.com

Transcript

If you're new to the podcast my name is Zee, I'm a professional organizer and productivity specialist based here in Miami, and this episode we’re going to explore how to create a quarterly plan that actually works for you: working moms, right?  So you have your best and most successful year ever in 2025, and all the while living a happier life. 

We’ll look at evidence-based methods that will drive your success, and I’m gonna tell you how you can get all this done in less than an hour!

So I was at Podfest in January this year. Podfest is I think it’s the biggest annual Podcasting conference in the world, maybe? Not 100% sure about that. But I think it is.

But at lunch on the last day of the conference, at a table with a handful of other women podcasters who are also business owners, someone asked the question that is inevitably asked at every conference, “So what did you think of Podfest?” 

Well the amazing women at the table replied that you know  they thought it was great, they’d met so many people and learned so much, and they told me you know which sessions were most useful to them, and so on.

I mentioned that I hadn’t even heard about Podfest until November of last year, and my friend and fellow podcaster Diana and I, at the last minute, we decided that we needed to go to learn as much as we could about podcasting! It was within driving distance for me, and I stayed with friends, so the expense was really just the conference itself. 

And I said something like, “Podfest wasn’t even on my radar, but I built it into my quarterly plans as soon as we decided to attend, and, oh, I’m officially a podcaster!”

Now, a bunch of ears perked up at that and one of the people at the table asked me what I meant, how did I add it to my quarterly plans, what would I be doing with all of this quarterly, and I already had a podcast, so why do I say that I’m now officially a podcaster?

So I briefly explained to them my planning process, and how it’s based on identities. And I’ll tell you all about that in a minute.

But during this whole conversation, I asked them all how they were planning for the year, and how podcasting was going to fit into their business plans and their personal plans because, you know, it was January, and the entirety of 2024 was essentially ahead of us.

All 7 of the women sitting at the table said they had overarching goals for the year, or New Year’s Resolutions of some kind. But only 2 of them had a detailed plan of how they really planned to achieve those goals.

The other 5 had goals, yes, but they admitted that they struggled with sticking to goals that they came up with at the start of the year. One person very honestly said that she started out with goals at the beginning of each year, but as things ebbed and flowed in her life and in her business, her goals were ever-changing, so she really wasn’t confident in her goals to begin with, or and she also wasn’t that tied to them because she changed them so often.

In essence, she created goals because she felt like she was supposed to as a mom and business owner, but she really just kind of didn’t worry much about them, and she would even re-create a goal document as things changed during the year.

I think this is how so many people feel, right? I mean, it was exactly like that for me when I first started my business 7 years ago, and I had no idea what to expect in the organizing industry.

We tend to come up with goals because we know we’re supposed to. And also because psychologically, it’s a little like making a wish to a genie? We write down our desires for the year, and then if we have no accountability at all, it’s, like, 50/50 whether we actually achieve any of those goals or not, right?

You can call these goals New Year’s resolutions, if you want to, because new year’s resolutions are often tied to personal goals. We don’t tend to call work goals “resolutions”. We call those goals.

But you can see that New Year’s resolutions are goals, yeah? They rely on a plan to stick with them, to achieve them. And of course every year we read that most new year’s resolutions last anywhere between 2 weeks and 4 months. I read a statistic recently that of all US adults who set New Year’s resolutions, only 9% successfully keep them.

Lots of different reasons for that, but we’re here today to explore the 5 keys that will allow to to set your goals and to achieve them in 2025, :

Now the first key is setting your goals in a way that makes sense for your life, or, I’ll use the word “aligns” with your life and your values

Number 2, the second key is creating a plan to achieve those goals, a plan that you can actually follow, even with all the kid and family and home responsibilities you have, along with the work ones

The third key is keeping these goals top of mind easily so you don’t lose your way or get mired in details 

The fourth key is how to ensure that you’ll actually stay motivated to stick with those plans. Right? Let me say that again, how to ENSURE that you’ll stick with it. 

And the fifth key is to make sure you feel good every week while working on these goals.

OK, so hold on! If you’re kind of zoning out already because this all feels like it’s going to be a college course with a professor droning on at the front of the class about setting goals, this is NOT going to be like that! 

Look, I am in need of simplicity! If something takes more than two, three  steps, I’m probably not gonna stick with it long-term. So no way in heck am I ever going to spend hours creating a plan for your successful year. Ok?

Like you, I’m a mom, I’m a spouse, sibling, daughter, friend - there’s a lot we would rather spend our time on instead of writing down goals.

So my process here takes less than an hour to do. I’m gonna explain it to you, but I’ll tell you that it’ll take less than an hour to complete.

You’ll probably need a little bit more time, a few more minutes, for a pre-step, one step you’ll need to take before doing the goal planning, and I’ll tell you about that in next week’s episode. You don’t have to worry about that quite yet.

OK, you ready? So, let’s explore the 5 keys and how they fit into a simple goal planning process.

Key #1: Setting your goals in a way that aligns with your values and life.

This is what James Clear explains as identity-based habits, as opposed to outcome-based habits or goals. In most jobs, and in most companies, we’re familiar with financial goals, right? Our sales targets, our profit goals, and so on. Those are outcome-based goals. But to make a change this year, to achieve something different or new, you have to become a different person. or your company or your department, or simply you in your job, you need to embrace a new identity. In my goal-setting process, I plan my year in 3 month segments. So only looking at the next 12 weeks is a short enough amount of time that makes it easier to stick with the habits that are part of the identity I want to become. Or to take on new tasks for the identity of my department, my work department, that will ultimately lead us to that 3-month goal.

So, for example, if I work in HR, maybe I’m seeing that I want to improve on my response time and have meaningful follow-up with other department heads. So I want to be a more responsive agent when it comes to my internal customers. I’m setting that intention and that’s going to tell me which measurable tasks I’ll want to set up to make sure that I’ll become that responsive agent, that I’ll meet that goal.

That’s a work goal, a work identity. And I do the same for a life goal every 12 weeks, right? A very common life goal for a lot of people at the start of the new year is to be healthier. Yeah? Some people want to lose weight, some people want to work out more, some people want to eat better. So let’s say your outcome goal is to work out more. That’s an outcome. That’s your outcome goal. The deeper identity you want to embrace might be to become someone who does some kind of physical movement for at least 30 minutes 3 times a week. So I want to become someone who doesn’t miss 3 movement days a week.

OK so that’s Key #1, setting quarterly goals that align with your values and life.

Now Key #2 is to create a plan that you’re going to follow despite getting derailed at some point during your 12 weeks. It’s inevitable. You’ll get sick, or one of the kids, or the dog, or something will go wrong with the car, or your home’s air conditioning will stop working…you know all the things that can derail you.

So to create a plan that’s robust, I count on my Weekly Planning. Weekly planning is comprised of reviewing the past week - so what did you miss because the dog was sick or because you had to sit at home and wait for the air conditioning repair person - and then planning what you’ll do next week. And each week, you’re choosing what to do, what your priorities are for that week, that are bringing you closer to achieving the quarterly goals that you’ve set.

Included in that is my weekly meal plan, by the way. And weekly planning is something that takes about 30 minutes. I do mine on Friday afternoon because to me, taking time to do Weekly Planning on Sunday, which is what a lot of people do, for me personally it means cutting into my weekend. It’s just purely something that I need, to have a full weekend without already starting to dead Monday mornings, so I prefer to do weekly planning on Friday afternoons.

That’s the time when I’m excited about the upcoming weekend, my outlook on the next week is really positive, I can knock out my weekly planning in 30 minutes.

So Key 2 is to create a weekly plan to achieve your quarterly goals that can take any derailments, because you have a simple way of reviewing what you did or didn’t accomplish last week, and then laying out what you want to accomplish next week as a result.

Key #3 is to keep your goals top of mind easily. In the busy-ness of our lives, and yeah, in today’s world, we are ALWAYS busy, we can get lost in the daily stuff we have to do. Maybe you didn’t do your weekly planning for the past 3 weeks because of dance recitals, Christmas shows at school, and a work holiday lunch. So all of a sudden, you’re kind of lost a little. Where are you on your goals? Are you off-track? What should you prioritize for next week?

In order to minimize stressing out about “Oh, I missed my weekly planning for 3 weeks in a row, and now I’m just not gonna meet my goals, so I’m just gonna give up!”, one very easy thing to do is to take 2 minutes - ok, just 1 minute, if that’s what you want - and you’re gonna ask yourself 1 question. The same question every single morning, and I usually ask myself this question while I’m in the shower. And the question is: What did I say my top priorities are this week, and how am I doing on them?

It’s that simple.

By the way, you can do this in just one minute, or in the shower or wherever you happen to be, because you don’t have a list of 8 top priorities for the week, right? Priority means priority! If you have 8 things on your list to accomplish, there is evidence to show that either you won’t actually achieve any of them, or you’ll choose to finish the easiest ones first. The idea is that your priority tasks are the one, two or maybe at most 3 tasks that are SURE to move you towards your quarterly goals.

Now they might be easy or they might be hard. But whatever they are, they are the ones that you have chosen that you know are moving the needle forward toward your 12-week, your 3-month, goals.

This 1-minute asking yourself the question of what are your week’s priorities and how are you doing on them, I call it the Winning Morning. So I name my 1 or 2 or, if I’m really punishing myself, 3 priorities, and then the simple follow-up question is, “OK, so what’s the one thing I can do today that would make me feel good about my progress? If I only accomplished one thing today, and I would feel like, yeah! I made progress, what would that one thing be?”

And this is, by the way, for both your work goals or your personal goals ok?

Now maybe that one thing is simply sorting the employee feedback results because I’m feeling kind of low-energy today so I don’t want to do the entire analysis of sending a report to department heads. So I’m just gonna sort employee feedback. Or it’s making that one phone call you’ve been putting off. 

So that’s Key 3, do your 1-minute Winning Morning to keep your goals top of mind so you keep moving forward towards them and not get mired in the every day busy-ness that you lose track, ok?

Key #4 is where a lot of us falter. It’s to ensure that you somehow stay motivated to stick with the plan, that you stick with the new habits that you want to develop this year. Evidence suggests that brute force doesn’t do it. You know we join a gym and pay lots of money sometimes thinking that because we paid for the membership, well surely we’re going to go! Ok, we all know the ending to that story, right? You keep paying but maybe you still don’t go regularly. 

So what DOES work? Well evidence suggests that accountability that also makes you feel good can work, and time audits also work.

First, accountability that makes you feel good. Typically, this happens when the accountability you’re getting feels either social, or makes you feel praised. But not contrived praise. 

I mean, just think about when you feel your best. Typically, that’s when you’re - you’re hanging out with friends or your family. So if you could do your weekly planning sessions together with a group of friends, which is something that my online program provides, by the way, then you’re more likely to stick to doing it because it feels energizing, a bit like a social activity, your mood is raised while you’re doing this task, right?

You’re meal planning but with a group of friends!

Now, you can also feel good when someone praises you for your accomplishments, right? Like, “Hey, great summary of the employee survey! Your comments are really actionable!”

But that praise has to be genuine. OK? The Spin class teacher saying, “Nice job!” to the group at the end of class isn’t really going to be the thing to bring you back next week as you hobble out of class and you’re a bit nauseous. The motivation has to come from something more genuine, more personal, than that.

One thing that has been shown to help with developing habits, or interestingly, cutting back on BAD habits, is time audits. A time audit is simply keeping a log of the amount of time you spend doing something. 

If you want to walk on the treadmill 30 minutes, 3 times a week, and you’ve blocked out time for doing it but you find that you’re always running late on those mornings trying to get yourself and the kids out the door, so you’re maybe getting 10 minutes in twice a week, well just keep a log of how many minutes exactly you walked each day. Keeping track will keep it in your face, right? It’s a nudge of motivation - I only did 10 minutes each time last week. This week, I’m going to, you know, try up to 12 minutes, then 15, until you reach your goal. 

I had a goal of reading a chapter of a book 3 nights a week before bedtime, and even though I’d blocked time for it, like I planned to go to bed some time earlier so I would have time to read a full chapter, it just wasn’t happening, right? I would watch a show, or decide to do a load of laundry instead, or take care of some other household chore. 

Then I started logging the number of minutes I would read before bed 3 nights a week. Because I saw that I wasn’t doing it. And I took this log, I wrote down the number of minutes, on a simple block of post-it notes that I kept on my bedside table! Whether I finished a chapter or not, I just wrote down how many minutes I managed to read. And pretty soon, I looked forward to that reading time, whether I was reading a novel, or something non-fiction that was a heavier, and  took more brain power.

But seeing those number of minutes on a consistent basis showed me how much time I was actually spending on reading and actually motivated me to continue reading.

Now time audits work especially well when you’re doing deep work, like writing, creating, strategizing, and you need to focus for a period of time and yet you keep putting it off or you get distracted by practically anything else! So just jot down the amount of time you spent actually doing the work during the time you had blocked off for it. And you can use something like the pomodoro technique in conjunction with time auditing to help with your focus.

So that’s Key number 4, Time Auditing along with a deep work time management technique, like the pomodoro technique for example, to help you get the amount of focus time and the amount of work you want to get done.

And Key 5 to having your best year, most successful year, is to make sure you feel good every week while working on your quarterly, weekly and daily goals. Why? Because the evidence shows that your health is strongly linked to your happiness, and your happiness largely stems from your social interactions! 

If you haven’t listened to it yet, go back and listen to Episode 33, I called that episode Organizing for Beautiful Living, How To Organize Your Home Simply, and Live Beautifully, and a study I talked about in that episode was looking into the types of social interactions every day. 

We need interactions with all kinds of people in our communities to help us feel connected and happy, and we share our successes and challenges with our social contacts. That’s who we are as humans. We all need social contact to make us feel good and keep us motivated in whatever we’re doing.  And that applies to your goals as well. So when you attach a social connection to a goal, you might feel better about getting it done. So this can mean anything from joining a group, like my group program to get yourself organized and be able to be able do your weekly planning together with a group of people who are doing the same types of things, and so you share your journeys, and it’s more fun, or, you use a social interaction as a reward for getting something done. So every Wednesday, after spin class, you have game night with friends or with your family. Or Friday, Saturday or Sunday after a religious service, you go out for lunch, brunch, dinner, pizza, whatever with a group of friends after a week of working as a reward for working or managing your household, right?

So these 5 keys have made a ton of difference in the ability to achieve my goals, and it took me a while to fine-tune how I planned these goals in the most SIMPLE possible way, cause, like I said, too many steps, and I’m not doing it!

So I hope you found these ideas to be helpful for you. And next week, it’ll be a short episode to tell you the quick pre-plan you’ll want to do before you do this quarterly planning.

And to make it even easier for you, on Monday, January 20th, I’ll be holding a Planning Workshop, the Beautiful Living Planning Workshop, for anyone who would like to do this together! It’ll take less than an hour, and we’ll do it together so you don’t have to remember any of the steps, I’ll guide you right through it.

It’s the social way of planning your quarter, right? With a friend, which, like I said, makes it more fun, more fulfilling, and it just feels easier! 

For those who can make it, you’ll get my template that you can use every quarter. 

Again, you guys, I’m a mom, I don’t want complexity, so you’ll get my template in a form that will work simply for you, no matter how you prefer to plan: as a pdf that you can fill in if you like an electronic form, or you can use that pdf as a guide to complete your plan in your own paper planner, or you can get my Notion template if you use Notion.

If you’d like to register for the planning workshop to get your goals set for a successful year, both for your personal life, and for your work, then go to firelybridge.com/blworkshop2025.

That’s fireflybridge.com/blworkshop2025.

I’ll also put that link in the show notes for you so you can find it easily. 

This is your chance to actually create a plan that you’ll be able to stick to, that will help you achieve not only your work goals, but also your personal ones. 

There doesn’t have to be a tradeoff. You don’t have to exhaust yourself, and you don’t need to feel disappointed that you didn’t achieve one of your goals, because when you get derailed, you’ll know what to do to get back on track.

I do hope you’ll join me. Whether you work from home, you own your own business, or you work at an office or a hospital, university, a shop, a garden, or a zoo, this Beautiful Living planning workshop is going to work for you.

I’ll see you there! And in the meantime, have a wonderful week, and I’ll see you on the next episode!