If you are homeless, precariously housed, or struggling with any kind of housing instability, you’re juggling a lot just to meet your most basic needs. Things that many people take for granted, like keeping track of personal belongings, staying on top of hygiene, eating meals, and even knowing where you are going to sleep, are often up in the air for you. As you’re dealing with so much instability with all of these basic needs, it can feel hard to stay organized. Here are some tips for staying organized and moving forward with your goals.
You Set the Definition of Success
When you’re a young person, and especially if you’re a homeless young person, a lot of people are going to have ideas and opinions about what you should be doing. While it’s useful to trust the judgment and perspective of people whom you trust, at the end of the day, you are the expert on your life and lived experience, and you will also likely know more about your limitations than other people will. Remember, what might be a priority to your friends — even some who are themselves homeless — adults, or mentors in your life might be very different for you. You are the expert on what your life has looked like so far, is like now, and the direction that you want it to go. It’s okay if your definition of success, even your short-term goals, don’t look like someone else’s. Even though you might feel powerless, you still get to be in charge of what goals you set and how your life looks.
Short-Term Goals
There are different kinds of goals: some are going to take a long time to accomplish, and others, short-term goals, can be accomplished more quickly. Some very short-term goals might be sending an email or making a phone call, while short-term goals that aren’t quite so quick — like finding a place to stash your stuff or transit you can use to get to an appointment or job — might have a few more steps or take a few days or weeks to accomplish. When setting goals, it can be helpful to break larger goals down into smaller short-term goals that you can more easily accomplish. For example, maybe a bigger goal is that you want to get into college. To do that, you need to get your GED or other secondary school equivalency, so that might be your first goal. Then you need to get our documents in order, and apply. If these steps feel too big still, you can even break them down further: step one might be just to sign up for or research a GED program. Not only can this help your goals from feeling too overwhelming, it can also help keep your motivation up as you accomplish your goals.
Prioritize
When you try to do too many tasks at the same time, it’s very easy to end up actually getting nothing done at all. This is especially true if you are in a housing crisis and everything feels like an emergency or an essential task. As you’re looking at setting goals of any size, it’s essential to prioritize. None of us can do it all, especially not everything at the same time. As you’re thinking about goal-setting, try to think through what is most important, or what is most important to be done first. It can be helpful to start by making a list of all the goals you have, and then under each goal, create a list of the main steps that need to be taken to accomplish that goal. The steps under that goal can then be prioritized on your to-do list to help you accomplish that goal. For example, if your big goal is to get a job, your top priority might actually be getting your own government-issued identification, which you’ll need in order to apply for jobs. Prioritizing what’s most important, or what needs to be the first step, is a fast and effective way to organize your goal-setting. Then, once you have a list of goals that you want to work towards, it’s useful to make a new list, and keep moving your progress forward. When prioritizing your goals, think about what your priorities are and then focus on the steps needed to reach those goals.
Goal-Setting
There are a variety of ways to think about goal-setting to make it achievable and sustainable. Many people find writing their goals and the steps they need to take to accomplish them down to be beneficial with staying on task. You can do this on a piece of paper, a notebook, or on your phone. You don’t need a fancy to-do list, but the act of writing your goals down can help them feel more achievable, and help you to track your progress as you accomplish steps to meet. Even when things are stressful and overwhelming, being able to check off the steps of your goals that have been achieved, and to see later how many things you were able to do so far, can be a huge confidence boost to keep you motivated and moving forward.
Don’t Be Afraid to Reevaluate Goals
While goal-setting is so important, it’s not set in stone. There is nothing wrong with reevaluating your goals if you are finding they aren’t working for you. You might reevaluate goals because they are feeling unobtainable, because you realize they were overly ambitious, and not something that you can achieve right now. In that case, you might want to set new goals that are more manageable. Reevaluating isn’t giving up on your goals, instead, it’s an opportunity to realign priorities and help you stay successful so that you don’t lose motivation. Not sure where to begin? Here are some realistic goals that you might want to consider setting:
- Getting a copy of your birth certificate
- Getting your own ID
- Opening a bank account
- Finding a reliably safe place to sleep
- Signing up for an educational program, like a GED program
- Attending job readiness classes
- Earning a diploma
Dreams Vs. Goals
It’s important to have big dreams. I know that when I was homeless and precariously housed, sometimes it was those big dreams for the future that were what kept me going, especially on difficult days. This included the kind of career I wanted to have, the way I wanted my home and family to look. These were not the things I could achieve in the moment, in a couple of months or years - these were things I needed to really work towards over time.
One of the biggest challenges of goal-setting is determining the difference between dreams, or what could be considered long-term goals, and shorter-term, more realistic or easily obtainable goals. Having dreams is never a bad thing; we need dreams to keep us hopeful and motivated, but they are (often) not the same thing as goals. While dreams can be anything, in general, it’s helpful to keep goals more measured and realistic. I think of goals as something that realistically, we can achieve or be working towards. On the other hand, dreams are something that may be far in the future, or involve things that are beyond our control.
Goal-setting isn’t for everyone, but it can be helpful to add structure and organization to your life. In particular if you’re dealing with housing instability, homelessness, or the threat of homelessness focusing on setting realistic and achievable goals can help keep you grounded, provide structure to your days and weeks and help you to take steps to create beneficial stability in your life.
