On New Year’s Day, my wife and I sat, exhausted, on the couch after putting our four kids (ranging in age from 7 years to 1 month) to bed. We asked each other about any resolutions we might have for 2026.

“Survive,” we both joked—but it wasn’t far from the truth.

Maybe it sounds like underachieving. Yet for weary parents like us, the basics can feel like big goals: Keep all six of us alive, loved, healthy, and growing (both physically and spiritually) for 365 days; try to facilitate peace and joy in a bustling, oft-chaotic household. The older I get, the more faithfulness in the basics feels like a key to flourishing. And in this season of life—juggling jobs, diapers, Little League, runny noses, never-ending laundry—the “basics” feel especially basic. But that doesn’t mean they’re easy. Or unimportant.

That’s why I resonated with Joe Carter’s article, New Year’s Goal-Setting for People with Actual Lives. “What we need isn’t a better to-do list,” Carter argues, “but a better grid for making wise decisions across every domain of life.” The grid he suggests involves asking three simple questions in whatever area of life you’re assessing:

1. What does faithfulness require of me here? (Priorities)

2. When and how can I actually engage this? (Energy)

3. What constraints should shape my expectations? (Limits)

As a fortysomething dad with a newborn currently sleeping in a bassinet next to my wife and me, I especially appreciate Carter’s emphasis on energy and limits. Prioritizing sleep, for example, may feel like a boring goal. But increasingly it’s one of my nonnegotiables—something that enables me to be a better husband, father, and worker in waking life. What are the “boring but noble” goals in your life?

Remember, as Carter writes, the aim of goal-setting “isn’t productivity for its own sake or self-improvement as an ultimate end. It’s to become the kind of person who loves God and neighbor in the ordinary stuff of life—whatever that ordinary looks like for you.”