Challenge Yourself: 7 Tips to Create Your Personal Plan

Have you ever wanted to accomplish more but just never seem to quite finish or achieve as much as you want? I don’t mean just crossing off things on your to-do list, but bigger goals related to improving your health, learning new skills, building better habits, or getting more done with your hobbies.

Maybe you struggle with finding enough time, especially with other demands from home, family, work, and life in general. Or, like me, your intentions sputter out after a few days or a couple weeks.

Now that I’m retired, I’m getting more done in some areas – such as my sewing and cross-stitching time – but I still don’t feel I’m making progress on some goals and in using my time as productively as I could be. I feel like I need some additional encouragement to motivate me to meet my goals.

Last year I teamed up with co-blogger and friend Heather on a month-long joint walking challenge for some extra accountability and encouragement. Having someone else who cares if you complete your target minutes of walking each day was helpful for a few weeks, but then I started missing some days as we moved into the second month. Still, that buddy support system was helpful, but maybe I needed to add some more variety to my challenge plan.

As I was completing my daily Italian practice session in Duolingo (to keep my daily streak going), I realized that adding a little competition to the mix is a good motivator for me. In the language app, I also compete against other users to move up levels and score points to win tournaments. So, I wanted to try adding some competition for myself to reach more of my goals.

After reflecting on what has worked and not worked for me with other game plans, I’m ready to create a month-long personal challenge plan that I can tailor to my specific objectives with enough variety to keep things interesting. I’m going to also allow myself some flexibility to make minor tweaks to my plan – such as substituting a different kind of exercise for my health-related objective.

Creating Your Personal Challenge Plan

I’m sharing the tips I used to create my next personal challenge plan, which is included at the end of this post. Use the tips that make sense for your challenge plan but remember that there are no challenge police. So, think about the actions you want to take and how you can best complete them to meet your goals for the challenge. Then, you can always create another challenge plan to keep making progress or add new goals to the mix.

Tip 1: Identify High-level Objectives and Challenge Duration

Think about the types of categories of goals you want to achieve. Do you want to eat more healthy meals or build new job skills to foster career growth? Then consider the duration for your personal challenge – two weeks, a month, or maybe as much as six months. Starting with a shorter duration, however, gives you the opportunity to see how well you can stick to the plan and how to fine tune the next challenge plan.

Select a few high-level objectives on which to focus during that duration time. I recommend limiting the total number of objectives to no more than four or five, so you don’t overwhelm yourself throughout the challenge. You can always save some objectives for future challenges.

Tip 2: Specify Actions for Each Objective

What actions or tasks do you want to hone in on to work on each high-level objective? Make them as specific as possible – such as how much of a craft project you will complete, how many healthy recipes will you try, or what tasks of learning a new skill will you focus on.

Depending on how much time you’ll have for your challenge, try to limit the actions to what you can realistically accomplish. If you’re worried that you have too many actions, make some of them optional. That way they are still there as an incentive, but you don’t feel too much pressure if you can’t complete all of them.

Tip 3: Determine Timelines, Frequencies or Deadlines for Actions

Adding timelines and frequencies to your actions helps you clarify your challenge plan and, just as importantly, lets you know when you’ve completed the actions. For example, how many times per week/minutes a day will you exercise or by what date do you want to finish a project or task.

If, like me, you have procrastination tendencies, adding deadlines for actions throughout the challenge duration can help keep you on track to finish everything. You can always adjust a deadline, as needed, to account for changes in your availability or simply missing a deadline. Remember that “no challenge police” rule.

Tip 4: Set Up Accountability

You may assume that you can keep yourself focused on your challenge without any extra motivation. Perhaps you can, but I’ve found it helpful to build in other ways to hold myself accountable. The easiest way to keep yourself focused is to tell someone else – a friend or family member who will cheer you on and celebrate your successes. Or you could share your progress more publicly on social media or on a tracking sheet you tape to the refrigerator or post online that’s visible to roommates, friends or family members.

Tip 5: Psych Yourself Up for Success

As you get ready to start your personal challenge, you can feel excited to work on your high-level objectives and have great intentions to work on the actions and see positive outcomes at the end. Try to capture and even write down why you want to complete this challenge. Think about why each high-level objective is important to you.

These feelings can help sustain you if you get distracted or unfocused during the challenge. Allow yourself some grace, of course, and the challenge shouldn’t be a “life-or-death” situation, but try to push yourself to the end of the challenge, knowing that you will accomplish things you really wanted to focus on.

Another way to further incentivize yourself is through rewards. What could you give or allow yourself to do as you complete specific actions throughout the challenge, finish all actions within a high-level objective, and/or check off everything for the challenge? Maybe you can treat yourself to a new purchase such as new workout wear because you meet your health improvement objective or you add star stickers next to completed actions.

Tip 6: Track Your Progress

With or without star stickers, don’t forget to keep track of how you’re doing throughout the challenge. Add check marks next to completed objectives and actions if your challenge is documented on your phone, update a status column if you created a document or spreadsheet on your laptop, or write DONE on that tracking sheet taped on your refrigerator or written in your planner or a notebook. When Heather and I worked on the walking challenge together, we kept a shared spreadsheet online to log the number of minutes we each walked daily. Seeing those signs of progress will continue to motivate you to finish the challenge.

Tip 7: Reflect on What Worked Well and What Needs Refinement

Once you complete your challenge – and even if you didn’t finish it – it’s valuable to reflect on how you did, what worked well with your challenge plan, and what you would do differently next time to refine the challenge. Maybe you want to take a break between challenges or you could add more actions/optional actions to motivate yourself even further. Besides learning that I need variety in my challenges, I also realized that I don’t do well with actions that have to be completed every day. Last month I tried a mini challenge to do some sewing every day. Once I missed a day, I felt like I had failed, and then one missed day turned into several.

My Personal Challenge Plan

I’ve followed the tips to create my own challenge plan, which I will start next Monday.

Time frame: Monday, May 5, through Sunday, June 1, 2025

Objective 1: Be more active

• Set a timer to get up and walk around for at least 5 minutes every hour while I’m sitting in the family room.

• Walk for a minimum of 30 minutes on the treadmill (or outside) at least three times each week. (Bonus: Listen to an audio book to help with Objective 2.)

• Complete arm muscle toning exercises at least three times each week.

Objective 2: Increase my reading time

• Finish reading Counting the Stars (written by Kim Van Alkemade) by May 31.

• Finish reading News of the World (written by Paulette Jiles) by May 31.

• Read at least half of Unlikely Animals (written by Annie Hartnett) by May 31. This novel is my next book club selection.

• Optional: Finish listening to the audio book for Mrs. Wiggins (written by Mary Monroe).

Objective 3: Be more productive with my crafts

• Finish sewing Ellie’s Stars baby quilt top and backing by May 11.

• Cut out block pieces for the Misted Pines quilt by May 18.

• Sew binding on the Batik Melons quilt by May 18.

• Complete my May cross-stitch challenge goal (stitch for 10 days on the Peonies design).

• Optional: Cut out and sew the Mad Dash quilt top by May 25.

• Optional: Start a wedding cross-stitch design.

Objective 4: Tackle more house projects

• Hang artwork, bulletin board, shelves, and quilt in my office.

• Plant flowers in containers for front porch and deck by May 11.

• Take barn roof painting to be reframed.

• Reorganize laundry room storage.

• Optional: Donate lighting fixtures to charity shop.

• Optional: Sort through miscellaneous craft supplies and donate what I no longer need.

  
  

Objective 5: Get out of the house more

• Visit at least one St. Louis area museum, such as the Missouri Civil War Museum or the Scott Joplin House State Historic Site.

• Invite friends to have lunch or breakfast together at least once per week.

• Go on a day trip to Amish country around Arthur, Illinois, with friends Heather and Kathy.

• Read on the porch or deck at least once a week.

• Attend the May 27 Bits ‘n’ Pieces quilt guild meeting.

Accountability Plan: Post a weekly update on this blog post.

Reflection: To be added after I complete the challenge plan.

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~ Heather M. and Jodi B.