Is it just me, or does anyone else feel a sense of urgency with the close of a calendar year? I get a little hysterical during the holidays to finish all the unfinished home projects before company comes (Yes! We must do them all!), to try and pinch pennies (while also in a flurry of overspending), and to make sure I acknowledge everyone who has made an impact on our family in the past year on my Christmas shopping list. In this season, I perpetually ask myself: have I done all that I said I would do these past twelve months? Have I been who I intended to be this year?

I can try to answer these questions because every year, my husband and I set goals. While cleaning through some drawers and filing cabinets this week, I found a sweet list of goals that we had written after about a year of marriage, from 2012. We had headings for Family, Relationship, Jobs, Community, House, and Personal Goals for us as individuals. We wrote down boring, adult tasks like “Get life insurance” and “Write a will,”      but we also put down goals for the kind of community we were looking for, vacations we’d like to take together, what we would enjoy doing on our date nights, what we wanted out of our careers, what kind of house we’d like to have some day (3-4 rooms, sidewalks, yard, one-story, large kitchen), and we even put on there that we wanted a dog! As newlyweds, these were our dreams, but when we put them on paper, they became our goals.

The power in setting goals is that goals become a roadmap as to where your time and resources will be directed. Our 2012 goal sheet gave us unified focus through which we could filter all of our decisions for that year. Setting goals is scary because once it’s on paper, you now become accountable to what you have written—but this accountability is exactly what causes goals to turn dreams into reality. As humans, we need the kind of focus that goals bring; without it, most of us would be content to just keep dreaming.

Zig Ziglar said, “A goal properly set is halfway reached”. I have seen this truth in my own life. Setting a goal sets the process in motion, and that’s half the battle. My husband and I didn’t accomplish all the goals on our first list right away, but we kept the practice of goal setting at the start of each year. It is so precious to look back on this list almost 8 years later and see that where we are today is, in many ways, where we dreamed we would be. This list is also powerful reminder to me that if we hadn’t set these goals, we wouldn’t have taken the steps necessary to achieve them, and the “checked off” goals might still be in the dream stage. In the same way, it’s empowering and exciting to know that if we make something important enough to call it a goal, we’ll probably accomplish it!

Although to me, the pressure of close of a year feels a little bit like running through the airport to barely catch a flight before the airplane door closes, I’m grateful for that fire under me. Without      time holding me accountable, I might never pause to think about what is truly important or prioritize what really needs to get done. It feels like everything can wait if it’s February, June, or September—but December? It’s like      time is saying, “Act now!” Following the panic of the last few weeks of the year, I usually regain a sense of control; a new year begins. Although it’s cliché to set goals this time of year, embrace the cliché! Celebrate the way an “end” and a new “beginning” cause an opportunity to reflect. Where I live in South Florida, we don’t have the change in seasons to prompt reflection like most of the world does, but we all have the end of one year and the start of another. It’s time to set some goals.