Every year I make a list of really ambitious goals for the new year, and every year I fail to accomplish even one of those goals. The goals themselves aren’t really that ambitious, but my lack of motivation and discipline ensures that I never achieve any of them. So this year I decided to make my goal for the new year … to make fewer goals. And more importantly, ones I could actually reasonably achieve.
A Recap of My 2021 Goals
To make my goals for this year, I first needed to reflect on my goals for last year and how well I met them. I decided to score myself on all my goals for last year with 0 being not met, 1 being met, and 0.5 being kind of there but not perfect. So with that being said here’s a recap of my goals for last year:
- Drink more water: Okay this one I think I did okay on. I’m not as hydrated as I wanted to be but I definitely drank more water than previous years so I’m counting this one as a win. 1/1
- Eat healthier: This one … needed a lot more work. 0/1
- Learn how to cook: Unless we’re counting microwavable food we’re still at square one on this. 0/1
- Exercise at least 4 days a week: For this one I really fluctuated between exercising 4–5 days a week and then not exercising for 4 months. 0.5/1
- Spend more time outside: In a coincidental turn of events, I ended up going on hikes and walks pretty regularly so I’ll count this as a win too. 1/1
- Develop and maintain a consistent skincare routine: Without a proper definition for what counted as a skincare routine, I wasn’t really consistent at this goal. I was pretty regular with washing my face however so I’ll give myself half credit on this one. 0.5/1
- Start flossing more regularly: I started off strong on this one, but like many of my other goals, this too died down quickly. 0/1
- Get more sleep: I usually got a pretty good amount of sleep. 1/1
- Become a morning person: This one is starting to look like it may never happen. 0/1
- Start journaling: I was on and off with this one but did put in a conscious effort to become consistent with it. 0.5/1
- Find ways to manage stress: I think I achieved this but not intentionally. 0.5/1
- Become more organized: I may have actually become less organized. 0/1
- Become more productive: Nowhere near the level of productivity I wanted to hit. 0/1
- Learn at least one new skill: Unless that skill was binging new content on Netflix at an alarmingly fast rate, this one was also a fail. 0/1
- Read at least 12 books: Shoutout to my book club for motivating me to read 2 books last year! 0/1
- Write at least 12 blog posts: Ironically, the only one I managed to write was about my New Year resolutions. 0/1
- Meet new people: Met a lot of new people last year so this one I would say I actually succeeded at. 1/1
- Do random acts of kindness: Tried my best to do more than a few of these. 1/1
- Volunteer: Didn’t quite get around to volunteering much. 0/1
- Support small business: Definitely shopped more from small businesses last year so I’ll count this as a success as well. 1/1
- Donate to charity: I actually did manage to donate to a few charities over the year. 1/1
After calculating my overall score, I ended up with a total of 9/21 or ~43%, which, as low as it is, is still actually higher than I expected.
Why I Didn’t Achieve Previous Resolutions
And now, a look into why I didn’t meet all of my goals for last year:
- Having too many goals: 21 New Year’s Resolutions for 2021 looked like a great blog title but in reality it was just an unrealistic amount of goals for me to achieve.
- Setting quantifiable goals that were too ambitious: Reading 12 books and writing 12 blog posts didn’t sound too difficult at all but I guess for someone who stopped reading completely and had barely written anything longer than a grocery list, going from 0 to 12 was too much. Especially considering it required discipline and time to meet those goals, two things I needed to majorly work on.
- Setting goals that were too vague: What even counts as a “morning person”?
- Setting goals that were too specific: Exercising at least 4 days a week was hard for me because there were some weeks where I would exercise 5–7 days but other weeks where I would exercise only 1–3 days if at all. On the weeks where I couldn’t meet the 4 days per week goal, I would feel disappointed and lose motivation to exercise entirely, even though exercising a little bit was still better than nothing.
My Goals for this Year
This year, I have one overarching goal: to improve myself from last year. Instead of aiming to read 12 books or write 12 blog posts this year, I simply want to read and write more than I did last year, which means reading 3 books and writing 2 blog posts. So after this blog post, only one more to go to hit my goal! What I achieved last year will now be the baseline for what I hope to exceed, or at the very least meet, this year. So here are my two main goals for this year, each broken down into a few subcategories:
1.Focus more on physical health + wellness
- Exercising more consistently
- Healthier diet + drinking more water
- Skincare + dental care
2.Focus more on mental health + wellness
- Reading (at least 3 books)
- Writing (at least 2 blog posts)
- Journaling
- Learning new skill(s)
With the start of the new year, I hope to continue the positive trend of self-growth that I’ve developed last year and to continue learning and improving myself. And, of course, to actually achieve my New Year resolutions.
