Here is what I realised about most of the goal setting advice I’ve seen out there. Most of it was not written for me.
It was written for someone with a relatively clear schedule, a reasonably predictable life, and the kind of mental bandwidth that allows for morning routines and journaling sessions and weekly reviews done in peaceful solitude. It was written, frankly, for someone who is not already running on empty before the month has even started.
If you are reading this and you are a woman who is managing work and relationships and a household and possibly a new country and a new identity and family responsibilities and your own quiet dreams all at the same time, this post was written specifically for you.
Because you deserve goals too. Not someday, when things calm down. Right now, exactly as your life is.
A Personal Reflection
What 2016 to 2018 Taught Me About Goals and Survival
In 2016, I made the biggest transition of my life and I made several of them simultaneously.
I moved to Sri Lanka permanently, leaving behind work I had built abroad. Almost overnight I became a full-time wife in a new country, navigating a culture that wasn’t mine yet, learning the rhythms of a life I hadn’t lived before. At the same time I was building a freelance career from scratch, chasing clients, delivering projects, trying to prove myself in a space where nobody knew my name yet.
And then my sister-in-law had a baby girl. I became an aunt for the first time. A whole new kind of love arrived, unannounced, in the middle of everything else.
2016 to 2018 was two years of rebuilding an entire life while the house was still under construction. I wasn’t just doing too much. I was doing too much across too many different versions of myself, the wife, the freelancer, the foreigner finding her footing, the new aunt, the woman who had left a previous life behind and wasn’t entirely sure yet who she was becoming.
I had goals in those years. But they were buried under the weight of just getting through the day. And for a long time I thought that meant I had failed at goals. Now I think it meant I was surviving something and survival is its own kind of achievement.
What I wish someone had told me then is this: goal setting looks different when your life is in a season of radical change. The frameworks that work for someone in a stable, predictable life will not work the same way for someone who is rebuilding everything at once. You don’t need better discipline. You need a different approach, one that was actually designed for the life you’re living, not the life the goal-setting book assumed you had.
Let’s Name it Honestly
The Real Reason Goal Setting Feels Impossible When You’re Overwhelmed
When you are already doing too much, conventional goal setting fails for a specific reason that nobody talks about: it requires cognitive and emotional bandwidth that you simply do not have left at the end of a day that has already taken everything.
Setting a goal requires you to think clearly about the future. Pursuing a goal requires sustained focus and regular decision-making. Tracking a goal requires you to pause, assess, and adjust. None of these things are possible when you are operating in survival mode when the to-do list is longer than the day, when the emotional labour is constant, when you are pouring from a cup that never quite gets refilled.
You are not bad at goals. You are depleted. And depleted women need a different kind of goal not a smaller dream, but a gentler system.
This is not an excuse to stop dreaming. It is an invitation to stop using a system that was never designed for your circumstances and start building one that was.
A Different Approach
Five Goal Setting Shifts for Women Who Are Already Doing Too Much
These are not tips for doing more. They are a different way of thinking about goals entirely, one that respects where you actually are.
01 – Start with one goal, not five
The internet loves a vision board with twelve categories. Your nervous system does not. When you are already stretched, having five active goals doesn’t multiply your progress, it divides your already-limited energy into pieces too small to move anything forward. Choose one goal for this season. One thing that, if it moved forward even slightly every week, would make the biggest difference to how you feel about your life. Give that one thing your best energy. Everything else can wait its turn.
02 – Separate the roles and protect at least one goal that is purely yours
When you are navigating multiple identities simultaneously, wife, professional, daughter-in-law, aunt, friend, woman-in-a-new-country, it is easy for your goals to all be about other people or other roles. Make sure at least one goal on your list belongs entirely to you. Not your career goals, not your relationship goals, not your family goals. Something for the woman underneath all the roles. She is still there. She still deserves something to work toward.
03 – Replace ‘I will do this every day’ with ‘I will do this when I can’
Daily commitments sound motivating and collapse quickly when life interrupts, which, for women doing too much, is constantly. Instead of daily habits, try frequency intentions: ‘I will do this most weeks’ or ‘I will return to this whenever I have a pocket of time.’ This removes the all-or-nothing trap. Missing a day doesn’t mean starting over. It just means tomorrow is the next opportunity. The goal stays alive even when the week goes sideways.
04 – Replace ‘I will do this every day’ with ‘I will do this when I can’
Daily commitments sound motivating and collapse quickly when life interrupts, which, for women doing too much, is constantly. Instead of daily habits, try frequency intentions: ‘I will do this most weeks’ or ‘I will return to this whenever I have a pocket of time.’ This removes the all-or-nothing trap. Missing a day doesn’t mean starting over. It just means tomorrow is the next opportunity. The goal stays alive even when the week goes sideways.
05 – Count what you are already doing as progress
Women who are doing too much tend to measure only the gap — what they haven’t done yet, what they’re behind on, what they haven’t started. But managing a new country, building a career, showing up for family, navigating cultural transition, being present for a new baby in the family — these are not nothing. They are everything. Acknowledging what you are already carrying and doing well is not self-indulgence. It is honest accounting. And honest accounting shows you that you are already further along than the gap-focused version of yourself believes.
Because You Need to Hear This
A Permission Slip for Women Who Are Doing Too Much
→ You are allowed to have goals that are smaller than your potential…for now.
→ You are allowed to pause a goal when a season of your life demands everything you have.
→ You are allowed to start over without calling it failure.
→ You are allowed to prioritize surviving a hard transition over thriving in it.
→ You are allowed to want things for yourself even when everyone around you needs something from you.
→ You are allowed to go slowly. Slow progress on the right thing still gets you there.
Go Deeper
Journal Prompts to Sit With This Women’s Month
Find ten minutes. Just ten. Pour something warm. And write.
Journal Prompts for Women Who Are Already Doing Too Much
1. What are all the roles you are currently holding, all of them, including the invisible ones that nobody sees? Write them all down. Then look at the list and acknowledge: this is what I am managing. No wonder I am tired.
2. Is there one goal that belongs purely to you, not to a role, not to someone else’s needs, not to what you think you should want? If yes, what is it? If you can’t think of one, what does that tell you?
3. What would ‘enough progress’ actually look like this month, not impressive progress, not the progress you’d post about, just honest enough? What is the smallest version of moving forward that you would genuinely feel good about?
A Final Thought
This Women’s Month, I want to offer something different from the usual celebration of how much women can do. Because yes, women can do extraordinary things. We do them every single day, often invisibly, often simultaneously, often without being asked.
But I also want to say: it is okay to admit that you are tired. It is okay to say the load is heavy. It is okay to want goals that fit your real life instead of an aspirational version of it.
The most intentional thing you can do this March is not to add more to your list. It is to look honestly at everything you are already carrying, and then decide, with full clarity and full self-compassion, what you actually want to move toward next.
One thing. The right thing. In a way that doesn’t cost you the last of what you have.
That is goal setting for women who are already doing too much. And it is more than enough.
Ready for a goal setting approach built for your real life?
My Goal Setting Course was designed for exactly this, not the unencumbered, perfectly scheduled version of your life, but the actual one. Reflection first. Realistic sizing. A system that respects how much you’re already carrying.
(We write our content in the hope of making you, our readers, feel a little more inspired in a time when you’re probably feeling low. We hope you feel a little lighter after visiting our site. Then, we know we’ve served our purpose.⭐)
🍀 Let’s Stay Connected
If this post resonated with you, let’s keep in touch. I share more on:
- ✈️ Travel, cozy cafes, food discoveries, and freelance life on Instagram and Facebook
- 🧠 Mindful productivity, instructional design, and digital business on LinkedIn
- 💻 Plus, I regularly share digital products and courses to support freelancers, educators, and startups on all three platforms.
Let’s connect. I’d love to learn about your journey too!
