The Rewards Jar - Short Term and Long Term Goal Achievement

For today's post, I'm sharing a process that I use personally for both short-term and long-term goal achievement.

As my husband Ron (@rwebb_apqc) and I were discussing our new year's resolutions earlier this year, he came up with an idea based on the concept of a curse word jar.  Instead putting in money as a punishment for doing something wrong, we would put money in when we achieved desired short-term goals. The money would be used to save for a longer term goal.  We love to travel, so we set the long-term goal as a vacation in December if we achieved and saved consistently throughout the year.  We named our revised version/method "The Rewards Jar". 

Now in order to make this effective from a budget perspective, we had to setup some of the short-term goals such that we saved money which would then be redirected to the longer-term goal of vacation.  Since we typically go out to dinner and/or lunch on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, we set a goal that if we ate in on Friday evening, or all day Saturday or Sunday, we put $50 in the jar for each day it was achieved.  I typically enjoy a glass of red wine with dinner in the evening, so if I did not, I put $5 in the jar.  Ron had his separate goals to redirect funds to the jar as well.

Then we both had self-improvement goals (i.e., the new year resolutions) that we wanted to put in place to help us set new habits and we set dollar amounts for those goals as well.  My goals included spending time doing my daily devotional ($5/day), logging all my food for the entire week ($25/wk) and working out all 7 days each week ($100/wk).  

So by redirecting some of our short-term desires/expenses (going out to eat, glass of wine with dinner), we were able to fund the achievement of both short-term and long-term goals.

I'm happy to say we are at the mid-year point and have already saved over $4000, paid for our airfare to NYC as well as our small apartment overlooking Central Park and some of our entertainment while we are there.  Not to mention the mental and physical benefits of achieving the short-term goals.

The success of this on a personal level has translated to an increased awareness of where I spend my time at work, managing the daily HR operational items with the longer term strategic initiatives of the Foundation.  There is only a finite amount of time, and I am more diligent about leveraging my resources to be successful for both short-term and long-term objectives for the Foundation and our clients.

And for next year, we're are definitely continuing this new process of goal achievement, setting our sights even higher: Queenstown, New Zealand, the "Adventure Capitol of the World"!

I hope you have the opportunity to serve and make a difference today!

Kellee Webb, SPHR

PurposefulHR@gmail.com