Hey, it’s 2025 and it’s almost the end of January, so it’s time to set some goals. It was probably time to set them about, say, 30 days ago. However, Christmas/New Years was busy and I wanted to think things through a little more before I threw them out into the world.
How 2024’s Goals Went
This became its own post. Everyone be proud of me for showing restraint and not dumping 500 words between the start of this post and the main subject. I’ll post it within the next few days and drop the link in here. I know it’s out of order, but I want to get this post out tonight and don’t have time/spoons left today to wrangle both.
Goals For This Year
I’ve been trying to aim more concrete and less scattered than last year. I feel like I kept losing the big picture, and maybe over-focused on habits. Mostly because habits are good, but I have a lot of bigger stuff I want to properly Finish and sometimes scurrying around to do a whole bunch of small stuff daily means you can’t get the bigger stuff done, even if that smaller stuff, in theory, should add up to the big thing.
High-Level Meta-Goal
A friend of mine, Jill, used to do something every year where she chose a word of the year to guide herself with. (She may still do it, but not on her blog as far as I can tell.) When I was thinking about what I want to do this year, that struck me as a very good idea.
So, my guiding word/concept for the year is finish.
There’s a lot of things I start and don’t finish. This drives me nuts. I’m not talking about stuff I deliberately decide not to finish, like a piece of media I’m not enjoying. I’m talking about projects that peter off, or are on a metaphorical (or literal) shelf, where I know I need to do them (want to do them) and just…don’t. It leaves a lot of open loops in my life and it’s really dissatisfying. I’d like to change that.
The focus will be mostly on finishing things that I’ve already started, at least for the first part of the year. We’ll see how things are going and what new projects come into view on the horizon as we go. But the older stuff comes first. It’s possible on a few I’ll decide to simply not finish them, but it has to be a deliberate decision and, if possible, I want to button it up completely. (So, for example, if I decide I’m not going to fix a piece of equipment after all, I need to responsibly dispose of that equipment and not just let it hang around my house.)
Meta-Sub-Goals
Not content to have just one guiding word, I thought of two others while considering how I want the year to go. I consider these to not be the main goal, but changes in my life I’d like to see. If we’re doing astrology, Finish is the sun sign, and these two are the moon sign and rising sign.
Consistency – I feel like I can be really inconsistent. There’s lots of things I want to do regularly, but I don’t manage building a proper habit that often. Instead, things come in fits and starts. Is this textbook ADHD? Why, yes! I still want to try to be consistent, though. For some things it won’t work, but I’d be happier if I could go (for example) “oh, I’m definitely working on thing XYZ, I can tell because I’ve actually done it every Friday for the past three months.” I think it’d make for a lot less stress, too. It also relates extremely hard to the other word:
Reliability – I don’t feel like I’m a reliable person. I think (hope) that people in my life would disagree with this to some extent or another. Regardless, I don’t like the degree to which I feel like I’m flaking out on things or dropping the ball. Some of this will mean being careful and deliberate with commitments I make so I can be sure I can meet them. Some of this is just me getting my shit together and keeping things at front of mind so I don’t drop them. This ranges from finishing projects I need to do for other people to not being late all the time.
Projects
Given the above, I’m taking a project-focused approach to this year rather than a daily habits one. Daily habits will absolutely be a part of it, but they’re a means to an end and not an end unto themselves. (Habits will also be present for general life- and self-improvement reasons. I haven’t decided that Full Chaos Mode is the only way to live or anything.)
The current projects I have in mind are:
- Finish the novel project I’ve been working on. First draft done, probably 2-3 rewrites, and then sending it out to agents by the end of the year. Hopefully second time’s the charm on this one.
- Fix up the bike I purchased from the Capitol Hill Garage Sale about 1.5 years ago. I actually got all the parts to do this over the summer, but while I fixed up my daily driver with parts from that same order, I didn’t get around to this one. So at least I’m set up for success in terms of having the supplies already?
- Overhaul the website for the West Seattle Food Bank. Long story short, some of their WordPress plugins for site layout/styling broke and as a result most of their pages need to be rebuilt from the ground up. I started this last year, it’s taken me too long and I feel bad about it, but dammit it’ll get done. I worked with my friend a couple weeks ago to set deadlines and everything!
- Fully clean/declutter my apartment. The going through everything, thorough sort of decluttering. The whole KonMari idea, though maybe not that *exact* method.
- Deal With Jabberwocky’s Stuff. Jabberwocky passed all the way back at the very end of September, but I still have her enclosure set up in my apartment, all of the various bits of gear used for her over the years, and other stuff of hers that doesn’t make sense for me to keep. I need to go through it, donate some of it, and probably straight-up toss most of it. It’ll be sad to go through it and to see it go, but having it hanging around isn’t doing my brain any favors, either. :\
- The Great Scanning Project. This is really a subgoal of the clean/declutter, but it’s pretty hefty so it gets its own entry. I went through a bunch of my papers a long while ago and got rid of a lot of them, but there’s some stuff I want to keep at least a scanned copy of. Scanning is a huge pain, but once I’m done I’ll be free of quite a hefty amount of paper that’s clogging up my apartment.
I’m hoping to choose one of these a month to focus on, so I can buckle down and knock it out and, y’know, finish it. It won’t work for everything. It doesn’t work for the novel project, obviously, and it’d be good to break down the apartment clean/declutter into subgoals instead of trying to do all of it in a month. That’ll be the overall method, though.
Rough plan for the next couple months:
February: WSFB Website Overhaul, ideally Jabberwocky Stuff
March: Fix the Bike, Finish Draft 1 of the Novel
April: Decluttering Apartment (heavy focus, even if it doesn’t get finished), The Great Scanning Project if it’s not already done
There will be more projects that come up over time, and they’ll get slotted in when I can do them. I’m trying really hard not to overcommit, y’know?
Additional Ideas
So that’s most of it. I have a few other things I want to work on that don’t work in the project framework, or that I don’t want to 100% commit to just yet.
Publish A Thing A Week – I really like this idea, but I just don’t know if I can manage it. The idea would be to put some piece of art out into the world once a week. A drawing, a chapter of a story, a chunk of an audiobook, a video, anything like that. Something discrete and complete. I’d at least announce it on here, even if I couldn’t share it. (For example, there’s there’d likely be stories I’d want to publish psuedonymously where actually linking them from here would defeat the point.)
There’s be a couple of rules to this: the blog post of “I did the thing” doesn’t count. Generally speaking, progress-update blog posts wouldn’t count. I want to write a post where I reflect on the relationship between Plato and the Bungie game Oni? Sure, that counts. “Hey I’m sad” or “I wrote 1k words this week, everyone be proud of me” posts wouldn’t.
This particular blog post would, because it’s long as fuck and I wouldn’t be officially starting until February anyway.
I’m likely to do this, but I’m worried I’ll get caught up trying to do a bunch of small stuff and never get around to the bigger stuff. So I think I’ll try it for February and see how it feels.
Fitness Stuff – I’m planning on doing some mild bodybuilding this year, to try and get some more muscle on. I think I’m approaching a wall where I’m not putting on the new/additional muscle I need to keep progressing, and there’s some aesthetic goals I’d like to chase. Will I succeed? Who can say.
I want to train flexibility this year, too. I enjoy it, and I’m also terrible at it. I don’t know what a good goal for this would be. As much as I’d like to say “do the splits,” pushing myself to get that far within a year could be a terrible idea. Or it could feel great! I need to feel it out a little more.
Getting back up to 3x/week weightlifting and 3x/week cardio is another ideal to chase. I feel better when I exercise, and I want to be more consistent about it both for fitness reasons and for mental health.
Blogging – I’d love to actually hit the average of a post a week, even if it’s just the “I published this thing over here” post. I’d also like to write more posts that are more than just life updates. Nothing wrong with those, but I don’t want it to be my whole output.
Read 50 Books – This is probably not feasible on top of the other stuff, which is why it’s down here. I don’t read enough, and it bothers me. I feel like I’m not refilling the creative well very, uh, well these days. Reading more would help that, and I think help me get more inspired in my writing. Hopefully help me level up a bit, too.
Tattoo – I haven’t forgotten about this! I feel like I can’t do it until I’ve got my money situation more figured out, though.
Jesus, Dude, Wrap It Up
Is there more I want to do? Absolutely. But I’ll start with the projects above, plink away at the stuff in the Additional Ideas section, and go from there.
Fingers crossed I can hack it. Talk to you all soon.