Having just gotten married my wife and I decided to sit down and really think about where we want to be in our lives in 12–18 months. We have always had this chat in the past randomly over coffee. Following our wedding we really wanted to take a step back and look at a much bigger picture than our day to day lives. Not so big that we create these opaque goals and timelines that we have no way of measuring or meeting. Rather, focus on one or two goals we want to meet in the next year that we can reasonably meet and measure progress towards.

The Approach

In the past we have talked about a lot of different things from moving to a different country to becoming photographers that travel around the world. This time, however, we agreed that our goals need to be tangible and we should be so excited by them that working on them thrills us. So we laid the following ground rules:

Timeline of 12–18 months is fixed.

Meet every Saturday to talk about how we are tracking towards the goals.

We must be constantly generating new ideas to help us achieve our goals.

We must enjoy working towards our goals or they are not worth chasing.

With the ground rules in place we could begin having actual conversations about where we envision ourselves being.

The Goal(s)

The obvious place to start was where do we want to be as a married couple. This introduced “house fever” for us as we quickly became enamored with the idea of buying a house in the next year. Living in Portland, however, quickly change our mind, so we came up with the following goal instead.

Goal One: Spruce up our current downtown apartment to feel more like a home.

Photo: Decorist.com

Following where do we want to be as a couple newly married was where do we want to be as a financial partnership. This was a topic that we have discussed a lot in the past as we are always looking for the next thing to further ourselves. My wife recently started her own Virtual Assistant business, vgvirtualassistants.com, which sparked the idea for our second goal.

Goal Two: Generate 50k in side project income.

Photo: sidehustle.nyc

These goals were centered around ourselves and revolved around what we wanted. So we decided to make sure we had a goal that was more free and focused on people other than ourselves. As everyone in our family has moved away from Portland now, we chose this as our personal goal.

Goal Three: Visit a portion of our family, no matter where they are, at least every 6 months and speak to everyone in our family at least once a week.

Photo: The Foxes Photography

It is interesting how getting married can quickly re-motivate you to think of the big picture in life. The day to day life can really wear you down and make you lose focus of the things you truly want to achieve. We found this exercise after our wedding day incredibly refreshing and motivating.

Have you tried this exercise with your partner? How did you continue to measure your progress towards your goals?