Friday 29 December 2017

2017 Goals - How Did I Do?

At the start of this year, I sat down to work out my goals for the year, as many people do. For the last two years, I've been categorising them by areas of my life, according to this grid:


I didn't share all of the goals I set myself, as most of them were quite boring ("review my health insurance") and a couple too private (though I think I'm more open now than I was a year ago). Looking back on my goals, I completed about a third of them to my satisfaction. Despite knowing better, once again, I set some that were vague and hard to measure (e.g. "plan a regular yoga practice"), so it's hard to say whether I achieved them or not.

Goals I felt I did well included:

spend more time outside -- the place where I'm working at the moment has a huge park right next door, so I spend every lunchtime outside for an hour. It's wonderful!
See if my sewing machine still works -- I did, and it does! I used it to finish one small project, but didn't have a chance to sew anything bigger.
Share more on the blog -- I didn't write as many posts, but I wrote more personal ones, and that was important to me.
Continue my rune studies and other spiritual pursuits -- I did a daily rune reading most days, longer readings once a month, and in July I also enrolled in the Grey School of Wizardry. While my studies are going very slowly, it's given me a chance to interact with teachers and other students in the forums, and expose myself to other points of view.


Goals I failed completely included:

Finish Kon-mari'ing my house -- it's a much bigger job than I anticipated, and working 6 days a week didn't give me much time or energy to dedicate to it. Plus, I slipped back into impulse shopping several times and acquired more stuff that I had to deal with. I will do better next year!
Re-open my online shop -- This just became less of a priority for me as the year went on.
Research herbalism -- My track record on growing herbs is extremely poor: they always die before I can harvest anything, and this was very discouraging. I would still like to work with herbs, but I might need to content myself with buying them instead of growing them myself.


In the end, I concentrated more consistently on the activities in my 101 Things in 1,001 Days list than on my yearly goals. I'm not sure if this was because they were things I'd rather do, or the new goals just added too much on top. Nevertheless, I'd still like to set goals for 2018 as it helps me to stay positive if I'm planning my life and have things to look forward to.

In a few days, I'll update you on how my year went in general.

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