Salvage Goals

Don’t Let a Bad Start Ruin Your Whole Year, Month, Week, Day. Re-frame. Restart. Keep Trying.

If you are one of those people who sets new years resolutions….. Now is around the time people start to give up on them. Halfway through the first month of the year, and a lot of people are ready to throw in the towel because of a bad start. When you actually think about it out loud your realize how ridiculous it sounds… but under the weight of failure and unmet expectations that realization can be a bit more far off.

So, how do you deal with it? How do you come back when your ‘New Year New You’ just isn’t going the way you meant it to?

Salvage Goals.

Take the goals you set, that now seem impossible because of lost time and re frame them. Break them down in to more bite sized pieces, and celebrate the success of those pieces, even if the whole is lost, or pushed back… You can still win the year.

Maybe you already had bite size goals… and it’s not your year goals that are failing, but your month goals…. how can you possibly salvage them with only two weeks left? Maybe you aren’t a New Years Resolution sort of person, and you set weekly or daily goals…. and they just don’t go the way you want so you give up on them half way through your allotted time frame.

Stop letting mini failures turn into big failures. Take a step back. Learn what can be learned. Try Again.

What are Salvage Goals?

Salvage Goals are new goals set based on the still possible remnants of your original goals. You set them when time (or other resources) become to little making your original goals next to impossible. The rewards for salvage goals are less than your original rewards, but still motivating, and still well-earned if achieved.

Still Confused? Here are some examples:

1: Year Goal: Lose 50 lbs. Reward: 200$ Shopping Spree. Fail: End of February, up 20 lbs from start (Holiday Stress Binges)…. losing 70 lbs in 10 months too overwhelming with your circumstances. Salvage Goal: Follow Diet 9 out of 10 days remainder of Year. Salvage Reward: 5$ Towards smaller but still significant shopping spree every successful set of 10 days.

2. Year Goal: Save $10,000. Reward: $500 mini vacation (Budgeted outside of savings) Fail: End of January, no savings. Not enough earnings to reasonably achieve goal. Salvage Goal: Every month you save $1000 Salvage Reward: Each successful month puts $30 towards a mini mini vacation (If you end up with not enough for a hotel, then make it a lazy weekend where you have fun with the little money you did earn)

3. Month Goal: Establish new habits. 5-10 new habits completed successfully every day. Reward: Something you really want but don’t ‘need’. Ex: A Video Game, A Piece of Jewelry, A fancy water bottle. Fail: You miss a day. Salvage Goal: 21 Successful days (They say that’s all it takes to form a habit anyway). Salvage Reward: Same as original reward but an item of lesser value.

4. Week Goal: Work on a project X amount of hours. Reward: A meal from your favorite restaurant. Fail: At some point in the week you end up with not enough hours left to commit to the project. Salvage Goal: Work on project X amount of hours (Whatever is manageable with remaining time post ‘fail’.) Salvage Reward: Your favorite sweet treat.

Important Notes:

Failing isn’t failing unless you quit…. Don’t completely give up on your original goals even after you set a salvage goals… Maybe with a lot of effort and a little luck you can still pull it off. The salvage goals is just to make the now almost impossible task less overwhelming. It’s to remind you that effort is still important even if your results are no longer perfect.

Salvage Rewards should always be less than Original Rewards. This is to prevent a careless mindset when you set new goals. If you think you can just adjust your goals as you go and still get the full reward, your rewards will no longer be as motivating.

Leave Room for Bad Days. Both when setting original goals, and salvage goals. There’s a sweet spot here between lazy goal setting, and realistic goal setting. Short term goals don’t need as many allowances for bad days… but if a year goals has a requirement of 365 days…. you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Anecdote:

I wrote about this today because as I was flipping through my planner (Which is sorted into year, three months, month, and weekly goals)… I realized that my monthly goals had shifted into near impossible territory. There were a couple goals that were to do certain things a certain number of days and after each less than ideal week I’d just cross them out and lower the number of days. But, in doing so, I made the original goals meaningless.

I didn’t want to just give up on the goals though, especially the top 4 goals (which the planner has a dedicated space for)… not with half the month left… Because if I wasted another half a month, then I’d be much closer to wasting another year and letting more and more of my life slip through my fingers. So I set salvage goals for myself. I did it a little different than I wrote about, because the way I did it was a little complicated. I have 4 main goals for the month, each one has it’s own reward. All of the rewards were specific purchases. So for my salvage goals and rewards I added up the value of the purchases. I then broke down my four main goals into 6 bite sized pieces that are managable but still difficult. I cut the value of the reward in half, and then divided that between each piece.

So my total reward value was about $600 dollars… it was made up of a piece of furniture, a hair cut, and other things. My salvage was 6 new goals (related to the original goals) With 6 Dollar value rewards equal to half the Original. So $50. At the end of the month I can combine the dollar value and use it towards whichever of the original rewards it allows me to afford.

I’ll Update at the end of the month to let you know how my salvage goals worked out.