Almost a year into my career, I felt like a total failure as a young professional because I hadn’t achieved all my goals. The missing secret ingredient? I needed better weekly goals and goals tailored to me.
Instead of comparing myself to others around me and feeling “behind,” I needed to focus on smaller, better goals, and tackle things one at a time–weekly. If you find yourself in a similar place, here are 100 weekly goal ideas and weekly focus ideas to help you reach and find the right goals for you.
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60+ Weekly Focus Ideas & Examples
A good work ethic and a list of goals isn’t always enough to achieve your goals. In fact, the biggest challenge of goal-setting is finding the right goals for you.
What is a weekly focus?
A weekly focus is a word, phrase, or quote that inspires you and encompasses the intentions you’ve set for the week. Often your weekly focus will directly reflect a purposeful objective, aspiration, or intention.
A weekly focus is your compass for the week.
Kara J Lovett Co.
It helps you find North, guides you in the right direction, and keeps you from straying from your goals. When things get busy and the world pulls you in all directions, the weekly focus reminds you of what’s most important.
What are examples of weekly focus ideas?
A weekly focus can take many formats: words, phrases, quotes, Bible verses, etc. If you’re crafty, it may be a design, a collage, a poem, or a journal reflection.
Since my artistic talent isn’t refined enough to publish here, I’ll offer up several “wordy” examples. Feel free to use these 40+ examples of weekly focus ideas to come up with your own weekly focus idea.
7 Weekly Focus Ideas for Balanced Living
- Healthy Living
- Simple Living
- Laughter is Medicine
- Grateful Living
- Less Screen Time
- Balanced Life
- Cherish Life
8 Work Related Weekly Focus Ideas
- Never Stop Learning
- Find a New Perspective
- Empowering Yourself
- Fight Imposter Syndrome
- Confidence and Composure
- Learn to Say No
- Create New Things
- Find a New Angle
7 Weekly Focus Ideas for Adulting
- Curb the Spending
- Declutter And Clean
- Get Organized
- Worry Less
- Focus Less on Work
- Stress Less
- Spend Wisely
- Celebrate the good things 🎉
7 Mindset Related Weekly Focus Ideas
- Healthy Mindset
- Positive Outlooks
- Stay Calm and Stress Less
- Be Your Authentic Self
- Lighten Up
- Be Kind
- Show Gratitude
7 Spiritual Related Weekly Focus Ideas
- Focus on God
- Know Your Worth
- Trust God’s Plan And Will
- Rejoice Always
- Stand Up for What’s Right
- Rely on Faith
- Love God, Love Others
- Bible Verses, like 2 Timothy 1:7, Isaiah 43:13, Psalm 46:5
7 Encouraging Weekly Focus Ideas
- Keep Your Head Up
- Try and Try Again
- Encourage and Inspire Others
- Be Your Own Cheerleader
- Give Generously
- Show Self Compassion to Yourself
- Be Kind to Yourself
5 Other Weekly Focus Ideas
- Meaningful Interactions
- Explore New Things
- Adventure Time
- Make Memories
- Genuine Interactions
- Be Spontaneous
20 One-Word Weekly Focus Ideas
- Bloom
- Growth
- Patience
- Prosper
- Gentle
- Peace
- Calm
- Composure
- Understanding
- Daring
- Kind
- Focus
- Journey
- Bravery
- Courage
- Explore
- Rest
- Audacity
- Restoration
- Light
Choosing a Focus for the Week
Choosing a weekly focus helps in setting weekly goals. As you read over the examples of weekly focus ideas, brainstorm some of your own.
Ask yourself:
- Why do certain weekly focus ideas stick out to you?
- What does that weekly focus idea inspire you to do?
- What other emotions, feelings, or words do you associate with that weekly focus idea?
- How do you imagine this weekly focus fitting into this week?
- How would the past week have changed if you had this focus in mind?
- What types of personal goals for work, home, school, etc. relate to this focus idea?
Once you’ve used these questions to choose a weekly focus idea, write it down in your planner or organizer or scribble it in a weekly goals template. Do whatever you need to do to keep that weekly focus on your mind all week.
85+ Weekly Goals: Ideas & Examples
With a weekly focus idea in mind, you can work your way to setting goals for the week. Later, I’ll give some tips for how to set weekly goals.
For now, check out this master list of weekly goal ideas and weekly goal examples for:
- Work
- Health & Wellness
- Mindfulness & Growth
- Relationships
- Spiritual
- Fun Goals to Set
- General Goal Ideas for Life
15 Weekly Goal Ideas for Work
- Weekly Goals for Your Working Style
- Meet all your deadlines for the week (maybe even ahead of time).
- Use your time wisely and commit to not working late all week! Close the laptop at 5.
- Use phone calls instead of emails and instant messages.
- Create a relaxing good morning routine for success to start your days off right.
- Attend all meetings on time or early.
- Be intentional about getting to know your coworkers better, either during or after work.
- Check your email only 5 times a day.
- Weekly Goals for Growth
- Find a mentor (here’s how) or volunteer to be a mentor.
- Find a new training class that interests you and sign up.
- Research conferences to attend in your field or expertise.
- Catch up on your LinkedIn connections and connect with your coworkers on the platform.
- Other Personal Goals for Work
- Volunteer for a giveback opportunity or community outreach opportunity.
- Attend a networking event and exchange contact information with someone new. These 14 networking tips will help you in building your network.
- Meet a new coworker and ask them about their work experiences. Have coffee with them.
- Fight the imposter syndrome! Speak up in meetings, work confidently, know that you are qualified, able, and a meaningful part of whatever organization you work in.
18 Weekly Goal Ideas for Health & Wellness
- Setting Weekly Goals for Healthy Habits
- Drink more water.
- Eat more fruits and vegetables.
- Order take out / go out to eat less.
- Try a number of new recipes.
- Recipe swap with friends and try a new one.
- Cook a new recipe with a friend.
- Exercise-Related Weekly Goals
- Exercise more often. (Exercise more days than I don’t exercise.)
- Exercise right after work / Exercise before work.
- Find a type of exercise that I enjoy doing and do that exercise twice this week.
- Sign up for a gym and go at least three times this week.
- Try out different gyms in my area.
- Exercise with a friend. (We love having company!)
- General Wellness Weekly Goal Ideas
- Get more sleep! Sleep 7-9 hours every night.
- Get up earlier (so you can drink your tea / coffee in peace).
- Don’t use electronics 1 hour before going to bed.
- Set aside at least fifteen minutes of every day to take time for yourself.
- Give up streaming services and TV for a week.
- Take a Break from Social Media (7 tips on how)
18 Weekly Goal Ideas for Mindfulness & Growth
- Reading Related Weekly Goals
- Clean out your bookshelf and give away books to a donation center or have a book swap with a group of friends.
- Go to the library and browse the different sections. Pick 3 different types of books to read this month.
- Read news articles from different magazines and newspapers to educate yourself on a topic.
- Discuss the topic with a friend and see what you can learn from them.
- Weekly Goals for Developing New or Old Skills
- Find a class for a skill you’re interested in developing.
- Practice a new or old skill every day. (Like playing an instrument).
- Research skills that may be helpful for you in your career or future career.
- Start a Writing Habit and carve out time everyday to work on a writing project.
- Weekly Goals for Foreign Language Learning
- Find a language partner.
- Sign up for a language class.
- Practice your second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc.) language for 30 mins every day.
- Read 6 news articles in a foreign language.
- Social Media Related Weekly Goals
- Take a break from social media.
- Only check social media networks once a day each.
- Only post once a day on each platform.
- Don’t post or check social media all week.
- Find encouraging and uplifting people to follow on social media.
- Post kind words and uplifting images to encourage others on social media.
7 Weekly Goal Ideas for Relationships
For weekly focus ideas that relates to relationships, here are some good weekly goal ideas that involve spending time with others.
- Weekly Goal Ideas for Relationships
- Host a movie night and watch old movies with your friends and family.
- Catch up with an old friend over the phone or a video call.
- Write a letter to someone who would be least expecting it but would appreciate it the most.
- Make an effort to meet someone new at church; welcome a visitor and introduce them to your other friends at church.
- Go out to eat with a friend or family member you rarely have a chance to see.
- Gather friends together to do an activity you’ve been wanting to do for a while, like hiking or going to a museum.
- Call your parents. No matter how far (or close) you are to them, they always appreciate it!
10 Weekly Goal Ideas for the Christian Life
Is building your relationship with Jesus your focus of the week? Here are some good weekly goal ideas to help you achieve that.
- Weekly Goal Ideas for the Christian Life
- Spend time reading the Bible every day.
- Read through a whole book or passage of Scripture. Doing the 31 Proverbs in a months is always a good place to start.
- Start the morning with a prayer of praise and gratitude.
- Memorize a favorite Bible verse; recite it every day.
- Journal your prayers this week and write about how you’ve seen God working in your life.
- Encourage and pray for a fellow Christian friend.
- Volunteer at church or investigate a way to get more involved with the Christian community nearby.
- Join a small group, Bible study, outreach ministry, or prayer group.
- Be thankful! Find something different to thank the Lord for every day and write it down in a gratitude journal.
- Find a creative way to show God’s love to others.
8 Weekly Goal Ideas: Fun Goals to Set
Outside of the more serious weekly goals, here are some good weekly goals that involve fun, adventure, or just enjoying life.
- Support a local business by trying a new restaurant.
- Get up thirty minutes earlier every morning and do something fun to start off your day.
- Reorganize and color code your closet.
- Read a book 📚 and/or finish a chapter every day of the week.
- Send some unexpected gifts to your friends and family and / or tell them how much they mean to you.
- Do fifteen minutes of calm breathing / yoga every morning or before you go to bed.
- Find all of the touristy places in your hometown and make a plan to visit them. Drag a friend along!
- Cross off something on your bucket list. Need ideas? Here’s a daring 30 before 30 challenge and bucket list.
13 General Weekly Goal Ideas for Life
Included in this last list of goals topics are some general weekly goal ideas:
- Adulting Weekly Goal Ideas
- Set up all of your routine doctor appointments for the month or year.
- Organize your papers and files (print and on your computer).
- Make an apartment hunting checklist and start looking. (Deciding if it’s time to move out of your parents house?)
- Setting a Weekly Goal for Cleaning
- Load the dishes every night before bed. No dirty dishes in the sink overnight!
- Pick a room that needs a deep clean and dedicate a few hours to getting the task done.
- Clean out your closet and donate your clothes and accessories to a second hand store or charity.
- Vacuum the house. Dust the furniture. Mop the floors. (You get the gist.)
- Do an assessment of what
- Review what’s in stock in your fridge, pantry, and freezer. Clean them out and then plan new meals with the ingredients you have.
- Weekly Goals for Finances
- Get your pay stub and make a budget.
- Track your expenses.
- Don’t do any online shopping for the week. (Yes, even Amazon.)
- Implement some of these finance tips for young professionals to better manage your money.
Examples of Daily Goal Ideas
If you prefer to track goals on a daily basis, you can break the weekly goals down into even smaller goals.
- For example, if your goal is to write a chapter of your book, then break that into smaller more manageable pieces. Let’s say a chapter is 14 pages, then for that week, you can commit to writing two pages a day.
- If your goal is to spend less time watching streaming services, come up with another activity that you can do besides watching TV every night of the week. Each of those activities can be a daily goal for you.
How to Set Weekly Goals
Before making a plan to accomplish your weekly goals, employ these 4 simple strategies for how to set weekly goals.
- Use the SMART Goal framework as a reference and guide.
- Set Realistic Goals. The smaller the goal, the better!
- Set Goals tailored to YOU (and only YOU).
- Write down your weekly goals and track them.
1. What are SMART Goals?
Each letter of SMART in SMART goals stands for a certain attribute of the goal. SMART goals are: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
Here’s how to apply the SMART framework to your weekly goals.
- Specific: Avoid goals that are general, vague, or lofty and instead create goals that are concrete and clear.
- Measurable: How do you know that you’ve achieved a goal? By measuring your progress or the results.
- Attainable: Your personal goals should always be realistic considering the other factors at play in your life. I’ll expound on this idea in the next section.
- Relevant: It’s no good to have a goal that doesn’t relate to what you are trying to accomplish overall. If you struggle with his, having a weekly focus idea in mind helps with setting weekly goals that are more relevant.
- Time-Bound: Giving yourself a deadline motivates you to work toward your goal and be proactive about your progress. Of course, for weekly goals, the timeline is 7 days.
2. What is a realistic goal?
My second tip for how to set weekly goals is to create realistic goals. High, lofty, unattainable goals can make us feel like a failure when really the goal wasn’t realistic.
Good weekly goals shouldn’t be something you achieve by sacrificing in all other areas of your life, like health, work, relationships, general well-being, and sleep.
3. Why does setting weekly goals mean small goals?
To avoid setting unrealistic goals and feeling like a failure at the end of the week, I encourage you to set smaller goals.
For example, when I started my blog, I had zero traffic. Without the proper tools and knowledge of blogging and SEO, my goal of getting more traffic to my site was unachievable.
So, I adapted and created a more realistic and smaller goal. I asked myself, what is one thing I can do this week to help me achieve the goal of getting more traffic to my blog?
The answer: take one self-paced free course on Christian blogging. It was a small goal, a better goal, and one that I could accomplish in a week.
4. How do you write down your goals?
After using the SMART goals framework and choosing realistic weekly objectives, the next step to setting weekly goals is to write them down.
You can write down your goals by using a planner or organizer, a weekly goals template, daily goals tracker, bullet journal, planning pad, or calendar. ErinCondren has a dedicated planner for setting daily intentions and goals. Here are other planners to help you write down your goals and stay organized.
- Top Planner Picks for Work and Home:
- The Day Designer Flagship Daily Planner has beautiful cover designs and combines clean layouts and effective prompts to help you plan and schedule.
- The Ultimate LifePlanner from ErinCondren: This is the ultimate planner from ErinCondren! A straightforward planner design with tabbed calendars and space for yearly, monthly, and weekly planning.
- Bloom Daily Planners – Weekly and Monthly Planner and Organizer with Tabs: This planner helps with goal setting and organization by giving you dedicated pages for setting your goals, creating a vision board, and other life coaching feature pages. The tabs are a nice bonus, too!
Using a planner to set and track your goals is convenient because you’ll have your personal weekly goals for the year all in one place. Whatever you choose, make sure it’s in a place that you’ll remember to check throughout the week.
Weekly Goals Template & Daily Goals Tracker (Free Printables)
Download the weekly goals template pdf and daily goals tracker here. (No opt-in required.)
Weekly Goal Templates often include pages to help you brainstorm your goals and a place for you to put your weekly focus. Some will even have space for you to break down your goal into smaller goals and tasks so you can track weekly goals more closely.
Similar to the weekly goals template, a daily goals tracker helps you get into the tiny details of your weekly goals. These are especially helpful if you have a weekly goal that requires you to reach a certain objective or achievement every day.
Creating (Weekly) Goal Ideas for 2023
While this post is full of ideas for weekly goals, you can use the goal list ideas to create good goals for 2023. Pick a monthly or yearly focus to set your sights on and start brainstorming.
Just make sure that the yearly, monthly, or weekly goals you pick are still realistic, clear, and meaningful to you.
Some say it’s pixidust and luck. I say it’s hard work and meaningful thought—
Kara J Lovett Co.
that’s whatdreamsgoals are made of.
I hope that all of these tools–the weekly focus ideas, weekly goal ideas, weekly goals template, and daily goal tracker–help you in setting weekly goals and personal goals for 2023.
What are your goals for the week?
Leave me a comment below!
Don’t miss this! More posts in the Living & Adulting Category
- 40 Examples of Personal Goals for the Year (+Free Printable)
- 2023 Weekly Planners and Organizers for Work and Home
- 16 Top Goal Setting Tips for Young Professionals
- 35 Thoughtful End of Year Reflection Questions to Ask Yourself
- How to Create a Morning Routine for Success in 5 Steps
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Very Helpful and in depth article. Thank You for Sharing 🙂
I’m glad it was helpful to you! I hope that the template also helps you in setting and reaching your weekly goals. 🙂
thanks it helped alot
Glad to hear it, Betty!
What a fantastic blog. Thank you Kara. Can’t remember how i came across it, but i found it so helpful i wrote it all out in a notebook!
Hi Lorilie,
Thank you for leaving a comment. It’s always encouraging to hear that you found our content helpful. I hope you will continue to find useful information on our blog.
Trish, from KJL Co.
Great content, still valid for each new year to pass by
Thank you for your comment. I hope the content was helpful with setting your goals for 2023!
~Trish, from KJL Co.