The calendar can be your best friend or your worst enemy when it comes to New Year’s Resolutions.

It’s your best friend when it provides structure, motivation and momentum to your goals.

It’s your worst enemy when it slips by unnoticed and in December of 2012 you finally see it and exclaim, “This year went by so fast! I didn’t finish any of my resolutions.”

I’ve fought the calendar for years. It’s a miserable enemy. It’s time for all of us to make it our best friend.

How?

Simple, just place your resolutions in the right places on the calendar. That’s the dream of any calendar, to serve as a bucket for information and a reminder for action. Calendars love to do that for you. But how do you know where on a calendar you should place your goals? An easy way to start is to ask these four questions:

1. Do any of your goals have natural deadlines?
Are any of your goals date driven? Two of mine are. The first goal I am working on is to make the Quitter Conference awesome. Since the conference on February 10-11, I have a natural deadline. Right off the bat it becomes crystal clear that I don’t need to place that goal in July. Either I knock it out in January or I miss it all together. If you’re running a specific marathon, submitting your manuscript to a publishing conference or doing anything date driven, place that goal well before the deadline.

2. Are any of your goals monthly, weekly or daily?
One of my goals is to read one non-fiction book a month for a total of 12 in 2012. So what do I do? I take the name of a book I’ve picked out for each month and write it down in the month on my calendar. Some of you have goals to read the Bible everyday or exercise five times a week. Go ahead and with the greatest clarity you can, places the goals on the calendar.

3. Do you have any cousin goals?
In the past, I would start each year with a list of 20 or so goals. I would then proceed to finish approximately 0 of them. This year, instead of doing that, I created a very small list and came up with something I call “cousin” goals. My 6 goals are like my immediate family and the cousin goals, while close to my heart, didn’t exactly make the list to sit at the adult table during Thanksgiving. They’re sitting at a fold out table in the living room by an old brown piano no one has played for years. If someone at the adult table finishes lunch early, one of the cousin goals can take their seat and eat desert there. What’s one of my cousin goals? Well, this year I want to handwrite out the entire book of Proverbs. My suspicion/hope is that I will greatly enjoy this activity and want to do it with other parts of the Bible. So I’ve got a cousin goal to handwrite out the book of Psalms after I’m done with Proverbs. Knowing I have a cousin goal waiting in the wings, I’m going to shoot to finish Proverbs by the end of March. The result will be that I get to finish my goal and enjoy starting a new one. Win-win. Are there any goals you want to finish before the year is over so that you can start a different goal?

4. Are there goals you want to take all year?
Wait, I thought this was FinishYear? Don’t we want to finish these as fast as possible? Nope. Some of the goals we all picked are about changing habits, behaviors and attitudes. We want those goals to take all year. For instance, one of my goals is to empty a box of thank you notes. That’s a goal I created in order to give me a tangible way to work toward having a grateful heart. If I wrote 100 thank you notes in January, crossed the goal of the list and didn’t write another all year, I would have finished the goal but failed the intent. I’d much rather spend the entire year on that goal, writing 10 a month and staying constantly reminded of my need to be grateful. If you’re trying to lose weight or get in shape, you’ll have target actions you can complete, but to really knock out those goals, you might want them to take all year. Place them on the calendar accordingly.

Hopefully those four tips help you make friends with the calendar. Why does it matter though?

Well, here’s the thing about the calendar, it’s like DJ Khaled and Ludacris, all it does is win.

The calendar never loses. It’s going to continue marching forward and finish the year with or without us.

You want the calendar on your side. Trust me.

Question:
Have you put any of your goals on a calendar yet?