It’s that time of year again for advice on goals, resolutions, and fresh starts. All you need to do, they say, is wake up at 5 a.m. so you can journal for 20 minutes. Also, set SMART goals and review them quarterly. And be sure to time-block your calendar and protect your deep-work hours.

The advice on how to fix your life arrives every January with the confidence of someone who has never had a toddler wake him at 3 a.m. or worked a double shift on New Year’s Day. There’s no fine print, no “your results may vary.” The articles and podcasts imagine a generic professional with a predictable schedule, abundant free time, and unlimited options.

Think of how many times you’ve heard that you need to delegate your unimportant tasks. Delegate to whom exactly? To your spouse? To the kids? To the cat?

What Would Actually Help

A single accountant in Chicago and a homeschooling mother of four in rural Texas face different constraints, rhythms, and responsibilities. The advice that transforms one person’s year becomes a guilt-inducing burden for another.

What we need isn’t a better to-do list but a better grid for making wise decisions across every domain of life, whether we’re planning our fitness goals or our prayer habits. Such a grid should work for anyone, in any season, pursuing faithfulness in any calling.

Three biblical priorities can serve as this grid: Prioritize your priorities, prioritize your energy, and prioritize your limits.

1. Prioritize Your Priorities

Before you set goals, you need to identify what matters. You also need to be honest with yourself about the gap between your stated priorities and your revealed priorities. Your stated priorities are what you’d say if someone asked (ideal me: reading more books and eating healthier). Your revealed priorities are where your time and money actually go (aactual me: folding laundry and answering emails). These two lists rarely match.

What we need isn’t a better to-do list but a better grid for making wise decisions across every domain of life.

To close the gap, you need to distinguish between three aspects: roles, responsibilities, and goals. Your roles are who you are, such as spouse, parent, employee, church member, neighbor. Your responsibilities are what those roles require of you. And your goals are specific outcomes you’re pursuing within those responsibilities.

Most people start with goals and work backward. They decide they want to run a marathon, read 50 books, or get promoted, and then they try to squeeze these ambitions into an already full life. Wisdom works the other direction. It starts with roles and works forward: Whom has God called me to be? What does faithfulness look like there? What specific goals would serve that faithfulness?

Here’s a practical way I’ve found of applying this. Start by listing the roles you have right now (not what you wish you had). Then for each role, ask, “If I do nothing else here next year, what must I do to be faithful?” This is your irreducible minimum. Any goals you set should build on this foundation of faithfulness.

This is why the same grid can work for vastly different lives. A single working man and a stay-at-home mom have different roles, which means they’ll have different responsibilities and different goals. But the thinking process is identical: Start with who God has called you to be, then identify what faithfulness requires.

The apostle Paul understood this when he instructed believers to “test [their] own work” rather than comparing themselves to others, “for each will have to bear his own load” (Gal. 6:4–5). Your load is not my load. Your faithfulness is not my faithfulness. But we’re all called to carry what God has given us.

2. Prioritize Your Energy

You’re an embodied creature. You have rhythms that repeat or change by the day, week, and season. Your goals therefore need to fit the reality of your actual energy, not some idealized version of yourself who never gets tired, distracted, or depleted.

The mistake most of us make is planning as if we’ll have equal energy and willpower at 6 a.m. and 9 p.m., on Monday morning and Friday afternoon, and in the momentum of January and the doldrums of August. We don’t. And when we ignore this reality, we set ourselves up for failure and then blame ourselves for lacking discipline.

Two clarifications can help you think more honestly about energy.

First, determine when you have the energy to do hard things. The answer varies by person and by season of life, but we all have time frames when we’re more capable of focused effort and times when we’re running on fumes. Match your most important goals—especially those related to spiritual formation—to your high-energy times. Don’t leave Bible reading and prayer to the scraps of leftover moments.

Second, determine where your energy comes from and where it goes. Identify what drains you and what restores you. Some activities cost more than others. Some relationships fill the tank while others empty it. Knowing this helps you plan realistically rather than optimistically.

Consider how differently this plays out across contexts. A working single person might have mental clarity in the morning before work but be completely depleted by evening. Planning serious Bible reading for 9 p.m. is planning to fail. Meanwhile, a stay-at-home mom might find mornings consumed by the chaos of preparing breakfast, changing diapers, and getting kids dressed for school. Nap time might be the only realistic window for prayer or reading.

Neither schedule is better or worse. But both require honesty about when meaningful engagement is genuinely possible.

Even Jesus worked with human limitations. During his earthly ministry, he frequently withdrew to pray at strategic times, rather than random ones (Mark 1:35; Luke 5:16). If the Son of God was intentional about matching important work to appropriate moments, we probably should be too.

3. Prioritize Your Limits

Our culture treats limits as obstacles to overcome and as barriers between you and your best life. Productivity gurus promise to help you transcend your constraints and squeeze more from every hour. But the reality is that limits are gifts that focus our faithfulness.

You’re a creature, not the Creator. You cannot do everything, be everywhere, or serve everyone. And this isn’t a flaw to be fixed but a feature of finite existence. Accepting limits isn’t laziness or lack of ambition. It’s wisdom. It’s what the psalmist describes as a “calmed and quieted” soul, one that has stopped striving for things too great and too marvelous (Ps. 131:1–2).

We face two general kinds of limits. Given limits are unchangeable realities. These are related to your season of life, your location, your family situation, your health, your financial resources, and more. You didn’t choose these, and you can’t simply decide they don’t apply to you. Chosen limits are intentional constraints you embrace for your own good. These include strategies like getting more rest, saying no to opportunities, and choosing depth over breadth.

A key shift occurs when you stop asking “How can I do more?” and instead ask “Given my limits, what’s the most faithful thing I can do?” This reframes the entire project. God isn’t calling you to maximize your output; he’s calling on you to steward well what’s in front of you.

God isn’t calling you to maximize your output; he’s calling on you to steward well what’s in front of you.

Practically, this might mean choosing one goal per major life domain rather than three. Fewer goals, held more loosely, pursued more faithfully. You might even discover that constraints boost your creativity and increase your ability to get things done.

A working single man tempted to chase career advancement, fitness goals, an active dating life, heavy church involvement, and an ambitious reading plan all at the same time might need to pick one or two that matter most this year. A stay-at-home mom feeling guilty for not “doing more” might need to recognize that faithfulness in her current calling is the goal.

God isn’t calling us all to do everything in every season of life. He’s given us each different limits. True freedom can be found in recognizing that your calling is bounded by your God-given limits.

Grid in Action

These three priorities form a grid you can apply to any area of life, such as health, work, home, church, or spiritual disciplines. For each domain, simply ask three questions:

1. What does faithfulness require of me here? (Priorities)

2. When and how can I actually engage this? (Energy)

3. What constraints should shape my expectations? (Limits)

Remember that the aim of setting goals isn’t productivity for its own sake or self-improvement as an ultimate end. It’s to become the kind of person who loves God and neighbor in the ordinary stuff of life—whatever that ordinary looks like for you.

Whether you’re managing spreadsheets or managing toddlers, leading a team or serving one quietly, your calling is the same. God has called you to be a faithful presence in the busy and messy life he’s given you.

News Source : https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/goal-setting-actual-lives/