• Lose weight.
• Reduce debt.

At least, that is how I used to define my goals. The big problem, at least for me, is that those goals lack a finite goal and a definitive deadline. I feel that those two shortcomings are the big reasons that I could not achieve my goals. Yes, yes, I know that other reasons I failed to meet my goals include that I love to eat and spend money.

Recently, however, I have found that setting very specific goals and deadlines provide a powerful motivator and help me stick to plans.

For example, since this is a personal finance blog, let me just tell you how I have altered my “reduce debt” goal as follows:

• Eliminate the remaining $115,000 worth of debt and save at least $20,000 no later than April 2014.

I took this goal and put it into Excel. I listed each debt with its interest rate and minimum payment and then calculated out the monthly balances and payments for each debt over the next 5+ years. I also included a column for my savings account that shows monthly balance and interest earned.

By plugging all of this data into Excel, I was able to quickly and easily calculate the extra monthly debt payments required in order to payoff my debt by my stated deadline.

Also, if you are curious, I hope to take my wife and kids to the UK in May or June of 2014. Ever since my son (now 6) learned that I spent two weeks in London shortly before he was born, he is obsessed with going there himself. As my youngest child will be almost 8 by then, it seems like a great time to go.

Something that my wife and I did was to create Debt Thermometers to visually track our progress.

We have one thermometer that shows our progress against our total debt and one that shows our progress against the debt at the top of our snowball:

This is a simple way to provide yourself visual proof that you are making progress against your mountain of debt.