Kicking off a New Year
I’ve never been one for New Year’s Resolutions. I personally find them over-ambitious and, more often than not, feel I’m just setting myself up for failure. In that vein, I’m focusing more on open-ended goals and habits that I would like to nurture and develop as I kick off 2024.
These goals and habits are, of course, specific to me and my targeted areas for growth and improvement, but I encourage you to use this as inspiration if it’s helpful.
My Guide
As noted above, I find New Year’s Resolutions to be over-ambitious on the whole. I’ve also never been a huge fan of using a specific date to arbitrarily decide when I’m going to kick off a change. For me, it encourages putting it off.
You know the party lines – diet starts Monday!; just need to get through the holidays before…. Instead, what I’m hoping to do is start small – whenever I have the time and feel ready – and build from there.
My Roadmap
In the past, I’ve often bitten off more than I can chew. On that note, my new method, outlined broadly below, is set up to be more manageable for me.
- Research
- I’m prone to grandiosity. I often get an inkling of an idea, get really excited, then either start and quickly burn out, or realize very early that I don’t have enough knowledge to effectively do what I want to do.
- To help avoid this, I plan to research the habits and skills I want to nurture. Through this research, my intent is to determine a bit more clearly if what I’m aiming to do is feasible for me.
- Questions for myself:
- What is the initial cost output for trying this?
- Is my current skillset broad enough to get me started at a beginner level?
- If not, is it a reasonable expectation that I will be able to develop those early skills?
- Why am I interested in this?
- What does success look like for me?
- Learning
- If what I’m finding is that I will need more development to take on this goal or habit, I need to find cost-effective and engaging ways to expand my skill set.
- Building
- Will I need materials to effectively start this habit or goal?
- What is the pricing breakdown for the basics of getting started?
- Setting off
- Once I’ve put in some effort to get my head around what I’ll need to know and have to get started, I’ll start moving forward.
What Does Success Look Like?
In order to measure the success of my efforts, I plan to use habit trackers and journaling to keep myself accountable.
In the end, that’s largely what success looks like for me when working towards a new goal or forming a new habit.
A lot of what I want to try requires building habits to make it a part of my life. In that respect, the habit is as much a part of the goal as the result itself.
My 2024 Goals and Habits
1. Goal and Habit Tracking
- This may seem ridiculously simple, but for me it’s important. I often lose track of if, when, how often, etc. I’ve completed tasks, which makes me frequently either over- or underestimate progress.
- To counteract this, I’ll set up habit trackers in my bullet journal (another habit/goal I’m working on).
2. Journaling (Bullet, Reading, Streaming)
- I’ve always been rubbish at journaling. I could fill an entire bookshelf with all of the empty journals I’ve gotten, vowing to use them, then leaving them empty over the years.
- My problem? I get too fancy. I need to create a simple, bulleted list of what I did throughout the day, not try to make it a creative writing assignment.
- I’ve already started on this goal (yay!). I’m trying not to let myself get more than two days off, so I’m not frantically catching up and forgetting too much. So far, I’ve stuck to this for about two weeks.
3. Reading
- I like reading – I’m a strong reader and have been all my life. Where I’ve struggled is pulling myself away from screens long enough to make myself get into a book. To be fair, reading also tends to make me drowsy, so it can be tough to get far, but that does seem to be getting better the more I’m reading.
- I’ve already started this goal (yay!). Thanks to starting with books that were the inspiration for some of my favorite shows and movies, I’ve reinvigorated my love of reading. Beyond this reinvigoration, I’ve finished more books in the last several months than I had in the previous several years, which is a fantastic feeling. BookTok is also to thank for inspiring me to start a reading journal and set some more realistic reading goals for myself.
4. Blogging
- I started this blog over the summer to get myself better set for affiliate marketing. As is typical for me, I may have bit off a bit more than I could chew, and have since neglected my blog.
- My goal here is to create more of a habit of blogging. My content scope is broad, but my catalog is small at the moment.
- What I’ve also found through creating and maintaining what I have so far on this blog is that it gives me a great creative outlet. As I mentioned above, I’m not a creative writer – I thrive with the structure of an essay. What blogging allows me to do is marry the creative side of my brain with the logical and routine-oriented side so I can create content that interests me but, by nature, needs some structure to fit the format I’m using.
5. Content Creation
- When I started my blogging and affiliate marketing journey, I also made a push to start creating more content to promote my blog and the products and services I’m passionate about.
- Like blogging, this has slipped a bit for me. I hope to make this more of a habit again and set a goal of reaching more people with my content, hopefully converting them to followers of my pages.
- My current social media portfolio:
6. Photography
- For our honeymoon in 2017, my husband got a Canon DSLR camera that has sat largely unused since late 2018. As such, I’ve decided to commandeer the camera and start learning how to use it … and bring you all along on the journey.
- As a guide, I’ll be using a combination of past challenges to give me some inspiration. I’m not sure how closely I’ll follow these yet, but if you’re interested in trying them for yourself, here’s what I’ll be using as a pick-and-choose sort of guide:
- Hidden Treasures from Digital Photo Mentor
- Shoot at 100 Paces from Digital Photo Mentor
- Photo Challenges from iPHOTOGRAPHY
- Focusing mainly on:
- 30 Day Photo Challenge from Click it up a Notch
- The 30 Day Photography Challenge Project from Expert Photography
- Fun Photography Challenge Ideas to Try in 2023 from Fix the Photo
7. Health and Fitness
- As I’ve mentioned before on TikTok and started to lay out in my Health and Fitness blog topic, I’ve let my health and fitness fall to the wayside over the last several years.
- Stress, poor sleep, and emotional/binge/disordered eating, all of this has contributed to weight gain, poorer overall health, and depleted energy.
- I don’t have a big-picture goal here, more a goal of reintroducing the habit and maintaining it. I’m not happy with where I am physically and want desperately to improve. I’m not sure what this will look like for me in terms of types of diet/lifestyle changes and exercise, but I’ll keep you in the loop!
The Wrap Up
Why such a long list of goals and habits?
While this is a relatively long list of goals and habits for the upcoming year, it’s not comprehensive for me.
One of the things I’ve been working on overall is choosing sections of my life that I want to improve as starting points to avoid overwhelming myself. To that end, I have larger, overarching goals and habit adoptions that fit into categories like continuing education, career growth, personal growth, and spiritual growth.
My goals and habits listed above work into that structure, but it does not catch all of the growth I hope to accomplish in 2024 and beyond.
The Takeaway
The biggest thing for me at this point is to make sure I’m not taking on too much at any given time. The goal is to weave and mix so these habits become just that – habits – that are an integral part of my life.
If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading! I’d love to hear from you about your goals, habits, and resolutions for the coming year – leave a comment or just use this page for reference. Good luck to you!