To Do Lists... The {Real} Kind

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was crossing things off my "to do list". You may have gathered that I wasn't speaking of the general, Things to Do before I sleep kind of list.

Two years ago, we have a unique situation in our family.  Nothing major was going to happen.  My husband wasn't going to war.  We weren't having a baby.  We weren't moving.  We weren't planning major career changes.  You may think "Ah! Heaven!" but for us, it felt very strange.  We get very good at planning our lives in packets of time- time between deployments, time left in a duty station, etc.  And we are great at making the most of those little packets of time.  So, facing a whole year felt daunting and like we were going to get to the end of it, with a move fast approaching the following year, and say "Huh, we should've..."  And I strongly dislike "woulda, shoulda, coulda" type moments.

So, I challenged myself and my husband to write out lists of things we'd like to accomplish in the next year.  It was loosely taken from a few sources- the 101 things in 1001 days blog (um, but seriously?  1001 days is enough time for us to move at least once and I just can't plan like that), as well as friends who came up with awesome coping techniques to get through deployment like making lists of things to do before their husbands returned home.

My list was broken out by topic and I didn't challenge myself to come up with a certain number of them.  My categories were: Personal, Relationship (Marriage), Friends/Family, Community, RAK (Random Acts of Kindness), and Financial.  I've been updating my list as we go through the year and reflect back on it every few months.  So far, my list of 37 items has 18 crossed off it as complete.  I don't expect to complete everything, but it's a stretch goal and I like challenging myself to be stretched like this.

Do you do anything like this?  What would your categories be?