Keeping Up with Your Bucket List

Each of us has our own bucket list of closely held dreams, and each of us hopes to accomplish them before life ends. But while imagination is infinite, life is not. For your biggest dreams to come true, you will need to make deposits in the two major currencies of life: time and effort. There’s no better time to start than now.

Many dreams end up on a bucket list due to a sense of impossibility. With so much going on in your life, your bucket list items can seem impossibly distant, and your progress achingly slow. You might think, for example, that your career choice precludes extensive travel, or that you have too many parental duties to learn how to play the guitar. When it comes to balancing your life, you have responsibilities that come first, responsibilities that take a toll on your time.

Thankfully, time management is what the FranklinPlanner planning system is all about. Instead of waiting for the mythical period of your life when you have more time and fewer responsibilities, you can use your planner to identify and optimize the time you have right now. All it takes is a proactive mentality, a willingness to decide in advance how you’re going to spend your time.

You can decide to take the small steps toward your goals each day, finding less-important leisure activities to replace. You can set a benchmark goal on a specific date in your planner, and track your progress on all the pages that lead up to it. You can add goal forms, or specific goal-related pages like the Health and Fitness tracker. You can share your journey with those around you, including your family and friends. You can prove to yourself that your bucket list goals are more fulfilling than the small diversions life pushes on you.

This level of determination and organization reflects the imperative: Live Bold. To Live Bold is to take your New Year’s resolutions and make them reality. To Live Bold is to move beyond the excuses, valid and otherwise, that held you back. To Live Bold is to start right now, knowing that in the end, a rich life is built from meaningful accomplishments and interactions.

Write out your bucket list. Explore what you value. Make your plans. Live Bold.