If you are anything like me, you set a whole bunch of goals and things you want to do and get around to about 12% of it every year. This has been a pretty difficult habit to fix but this year I think I finally found the hack.
Two years ago I had an idea for Monthly resolutions because a year is just so hard to plan for. I set a list of goals every single month. By March or April though, I had completely forgotten about it.
It turns out the idea was good but the implementation was not so good. I made way too many goals each month, having too many things to balance is my problem in the first place. I also set goals that I knew were too ambitious for me, hoping that I could achieve about half.
This year I'm trying these again but I've gotten the kinks out. I'm setting fewer goals per month, and making the goals realistic enough that it won't be too hard to finish them.
Each month gets 2 main projects and I will spend my energy on whichever excites me more on a given day. In the end if I achieve 50% of what I have on my list, that is a successful month.
My goal for January was to finish 5 chapters of my novel, essentially making the novel half complete. I completed one....but the other goal was to find 5 private students, and I found 5 regular students as well as 5 other potentially regular students, so that is a month well spent! I also had to deal with a lot of stuff between the end of December and now.... losing my wallet, finding my wallet, my boss going nuts, renewing my visa, going part time at the company so I could go freelance, moving. It's the first month I've earned a full working persons salary in about 2 years too!
Next month, my goal will be to:
- Get back to those 5 chapters
- Find another 5 regular students and create 5-10 chapters of a textbook I'm working on.
I have a feeling the pendulum will swing the other way and I will focus much more on writing this time. If I can keep this up, that's 12-24 goals accomplished in 2020. That's some great motivation to get serious.
Here are some other things I want to do this year:
- Finish this first novel (10 of about 25 chapters complete)
- Re-record my first album (currently have demos of each song)
- Learn the pressure points on 12 meridians of the body
- Create a textbook for my students, at least a bare-bones edition this year
- Use Duolingo to learn spanish
- Use Duolingo to learn German
- Use Duolingo to learn Indonesian
- Review Japanese vocabulary and grammar for JLPT 2
- And JLPT 1
- Finally get around to treating Cantonese serious (maybe I'll save this for the end of the year as I usually visit HK close to new years)
- Put more energy into promotion of my work including making a website
- Studying some music theory
- Playing a lot more shows
That is about 24 goals if I split them up a bit. There is also another 3 novels I want to work on....but I've put them aside for now so that I can focus on this first one. There are other things I'll continue to do in between like our podcast and of course, hanging out here!
What do you want to accomplish this year?