A Guide to Creating Monthly, Weekly, and Daily Family Goals

On this blog, we talk about many different ways you can help your kids become more financially literate. We want to help you help them understand important financial concepts, so they’ll be well-prepared to earn and manage money when they’re older.

From time to time, we also talk about other related ideas or ones we think are important. Today, we’re going to focus on one of those: setting goals.

Early in my career I heard about Steven Covey’s “Big Rocks” analogy. If you’re unfamiliar with this philosophy, here’s the general idea:

In his book, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey talks about productivity and how easy it is to fill our days with things that aren’t the most important ones to us.

He compares our time to a bucket and the things we want/need to do to big rocks, pebbles, and sand, in descending order of importance to us.

If we fill the bucket with sand and pebbles first, we cannot fit the big rocks in.

But when we put the big rocks in first (the things that are most important to us), we can add the pebbles and sand, it all fits!

I’ve tried this using real rocks, pebbles and sand, and it works! I’ve tried it with managing my time and – no surprise – it works then, to

When we set goals, we’re choosing the big rocks.

Why Set Family Goals?

While goal setting gets a lot of press around the New Year, it’s something that can add value to your family’s life year-round. While you can set individual and/or family goals, we’re going to focus here on family goals, keeping in mind that each person in the family can follow this same idea to set their own individual goals.

When your family sets goals based on the concepts and values that mean the most to you, it can help you focus your efforts and provide motivation to honor your values. fill your days, weeks, months and years with a family life and actions that honor those values.

Setting goals can sound lofty, but it doesn’t have to be hard. It’s actually a fairly straightforward concept. When your family takes the time to articulate the concepts and values that mean the most to you, it can help you set goals for your family life that honor those values.

Start with monthly goals

When I was a young girl, my family sat down each January to talk about the things we wanted to do together in the coming year. Then, we’d use those ideas to identify family goals and allocate different goals to each month.

One fun way to organize your family’s monthly goals is by themes, identifying a different experience, performance, or activity each month.

For example, one month’s goal may be for everyone to participate in a bike ride and stop for ice cream; another might aim for you all to attend a play or movie; maybe one month your goal could be to volunteer together somewhere.

In my family, my dad liked to teach mini-finance lessons, so some months one of our goals was to visit a place we owned stock. He’d take us to McDonalds, for example and he explained how our purchase (along with everyone else’s) could positively affect the stock price and that, as stockholders, we owned a small piece of that business. It was a win-win situation. My dad was happy that we were developing another aspect of financial literacy and we were thrilled to eat at McDonald’s.

Themes are only one way to structure monthly goals. If there’s another system that works best for your family, use it! Do what works best for you.

Start by brainstorming what’s most important to you to fit in this year and then break it down by month. (If you’ve never done this exercise, go ahead and start this month – don’t wait until January! Then make it an annual practice at the start of each year.)

This is all about what matters to YOU and YOUR FAMILY. If you enjoy doing seasonal activities, like visiting a pumpkin patch or picking blueberries, add those to your list. If not, don’t feel pressured to do so. Commit to activities and goals that speak to your values and desires.

If your children are old enough to contribute ideas, include them in this process. (You can take notes for them if they haven’t yet learned to write.) Hearing them and encouraging their participation reinforces their essential and unique role in your family.

Identifying Weekly Goals

With weekly goals, less is more!

You want to choose goals that are both important to you as a family and also achievable for each individual. In my family, we wrote our grandparents a letter every Monday. My dad wrote the majority of the letter and my siblings and I each contributed our own paragraph. Today, you might commit to a weekly Facetime with grandparents if this is a priority for you.

On Saturday mornings during my childhood, each of my siblings cleaned our bedrooms and a “zone” of the house we were responsible for. Then my dad taught us a finance lesson and we brainstormed together what we’d do for the rest of the day.

Having fun was also important to my family, so one of our weekly goals was having a family pancake breakfast every Sunday before church. I loved that!

You might include exercise or a date night for the parents – again, you want to identify a few things that are most important to you and set these as the priority for your family.

Be careful not to over commit. The important part is prioritizing and consistency. Again, less really is more!

Selecting Daily Goals

If selecting daily goals feels overwhelming, keep this in mind: it can be just one thing and it can be whatever you want. It can be fun: swim in the pool every day before school (assuming you live somewhere warm and have a pool). It can be about time together: have family dinner together (except on date night). It can be serious: everyone has daily prayer time.

In our family, we had four family sayings that we recited every night at dinner. Afterwards, we had our own little dance party. I still smile a big smile when I think about those nights!

If you choose something with intention that works for your family, you won’t go wrong. And you can always change it if it’s not working. None of this is written in stone.

Setting Individual Goals

As we mentioned at the beginning, in addition to family goals, which reflect the overarching principles that are most important to you as a family unit, you can also encourage each person in your family to set individual goals.

If you decide to go this route, I’d suggest starting slowly – begin with the family goals and then add one monthly, weekly or daily goal for each person.

If someone wants to commit to daily journaling, prayer, or meditation, for example, certainly encourage them to pursue that goal. You don’t want goal setting to feel overwhelming. Make it manageable so you can encourage the practice for years to come!