2021 Goals

Dear friends I haven’t met yet,

      Last year’s goals didn’t go completely well, as detailed in this post. I can forgive myself, and if you also struggled this year, I hope you can forgive yourself too. Setting aside other goals to just survive and keep each other safe is a reasonable reaction to an unreasonable situation (that is, the pandemic.) This year I wanted to try doing things a little differently. Honestly, I’m constantly honing in on what will work for me, so maybe for you, last year’s goal process would work.

     This is the breakdown of what I’m doing this year:

• Use an integrity report to breakdown what matters
• Use my big page of goal setting to see what I can make progress on
• Make a few measurable goals, of varying difficulties
• Make sure I could accomplish my goals with my current abilities
• Make sure I have an adequate reward system

     On my integrity report I worked on as soon as December came around, I realised there were things I could do differently. For my goal of autonomy, and also to improve relationships, I decided I wanted to cook more. I actually started that with making a side dish for Yule, so I could see I could do it without supervision if I was the one who chose the recipe. I also majorly fell off various health things—mental and physical—which mismatched with my values of health, resilience, growth, and (self) respect. And I realised that while I was reading a lot of articles because I value knowledge, I hadn’t read as many books as I used to. Before the pandemic I was reading maybe two books a month. Maybe, as the pandemic rages on, I could do half that.

SUMMARY: My actions fell out of line with my values, and I began thinking of ways to align them again.

     As I have mentioned before, I have a huge document that lists all my longer-term goals, with as concrete terms as I can manage. Some of them are distant, such as writing a book in my second language. Some of them are closer, like being able to run a 5k. Some of them have been broken down to be quite near, like reading a specific book to progress a larger goal.

     I looked at this page and looked at what larger goals I could work on while doing things to get my actions aligned with my values again. I saw books I wanted to read, such as to progress my spiritual journey, which would work well with my knowledge value. For health, I did have “run 5k” as a goal, but with the pandemic and the new place I lived, running wasn’t accessible. However I did have a goal to travel by my own means “to the moon,” that is, about 238,000 miles. I could do that on my stationary bike.

     And so on, until I had vague goals that looked something like this:

• Exercise more, and specifically, use my stationary bike
• Continue filling my junk journals-- 25 cent, 140 page notebooks meant for stream of consciousness writing in the morning
• Cook more
• Read more books/read books faster
• Work on my morning routine, which’d include things like exercise, writing, and doing chores

SUMMARY: Based on my values and the larger goals I had, I came up with directions to go in in 2021.

     Now that I had a direction to go in, I could see how to measure my progress towards my actual goals—such as going a certain distance in my lifetime, becoming healthier, being more active in my household, or being a writer.

     For exercise, there were several things I could measure. How long I spent exercising, weight, distance gone on my bike, and—with the games I owned or planned to own—I could make progress in exercise games. How long I spent exercising on a given day would vary based on my activity, especially depending on the intensity of the exercise—I limited myself to twenty minutes of intense exercise, thirty minutes of moderate, and forty minutes of light exercise such as yoga, but wouldn’t be very anal about measuring it. So, I didn’t originally think that was a good measure of how well I was doing. For weight, I didn’t know how much I could lose in a given time period while maintaining a manageable lifestyle in regards to food and fitness, so that was out, too. That left distance, which was especially good as I had a very long term distance goal to work towards. However, I realised that two of the three ways I wanted to exercise were two games that didn't have distance measurements. So, as much as it didn't align with bigger goals, I went back to time spent moving.

     For my junk journals, it was easy: Just fill each notebook. I’d done it before and I could do it again. For cooking, it was either each dish, or each meal. Since I likely would only be preparing one dish at a time, dish seemed more appropriate. For people trying to get better at cooking instead of just wanting to contribute to the household, you might measure how long you spent actually cooking. Reading was obviously just books read.

     The morning routine was hard. It was pretty arbitrary and involved multiple activities meant to keep me healthy, happy, and productive. I decided that a percentage of days completed would be good, although number of days completed would be good too. Note: I knew I’d have to exclude days I couldn’t complete the routine, such as if I was sick or not at home, and days I didn’t intend to complete it in the first place, such as holidays.

SUMMARY: I figured out how I could measure my progress. Exercise was time spent moving, for writing it was journals filled, for cooking it was dishes made, for reading it was books read, and for my morning routine it was applicable days completed.

     Once I had a direction to go in and a way to measure how far I’d come, I had to figure out what I was capable of right now and make specific goals based on that. Last year, I’d assumed the amount of progress I’d make and that my capabilities would increase a certain amount, and I don’t think that worked out well. It made me feel like I’d fallen behind when, really, I just had set unrealistic expectations.

Here’s what I was already doing or had already done in 2020:

     I could exercise most days for about ten minutes, but sometimes only five. I was ambitious with my new games though, as they could suck me in for longer periods of time without me realising it. If I converted what my original distance goal (not the moon one!) was into how long it would have taken me to complete it, I got around 60 hours of exercise, or just over an hour each week.

     I could fill up a junk journal in a month, although barely. In December though, I found I was too busy with end of the year work, and would usually spend more time on the holidays as we had to celebrate multiple times for the different holidays our family observed. So, not all months. If December was the only exception, I could fill 11 junk journals.

     For cooking, I used to cook multiple times a week, but they weren’t very elaborate dishes, and I used the same dishes a lot. This wouldn’t fly with a foodie in the household. Figuratively speaking, I was starting again from scratch here. One dish a month seemed like a good starting point, or 12 dishes total.

     In the beginning of 2020, I was reading about two books a month: one nonfiction, one fiction. That petered out, especially since some of the nonfic books couldn’t be “marathoned,” and had to be taken a little bit at a time or it’d make my brain implode. I could read a book a month, or 12 books total.

     As for the morning routine, I was on and off about it. Lately, I was more on than off, however. And of course, I changed my morning routine based on my needs instead of letting it go stale, so it was flexible. I figured I could do my morning routine 90% of normal days.

SUMMARY: I figured out what I could do, and made goals to keep doing that as much as possible.

     One thing I am notoriously bad at is motivating myself to actually get things done. That comes with the chronic illnesses, but I still had a hard time forgiving myself. One thing that was supposed to help was rewards, even as simple as sticker charts. I had a history of starting out with rewarding myself for things, but then petering out when I hit a hypomanic episode due to my bipolar. I decided to come up with rewards for goal milestones, preferably relevant to the goal itself. Here’s what I came up with with the help of my best friend:

     Exercise, and specifically biking, has the most exciting rewards system. Using an app to update my distance run, I can buy race rewards like medals, coins, shirts, and headbands if I complete a certain distance in my own time. I can only afford to get these things every few months, but since I’m only doing a couple miles a day, it’ll take me a while to complete each race anyway. I call them accessible, asynchronous races. As for the exercise I did with games, the games themselves had rewards systems built in--such as defeating a boss, or unlocking new cosmetic items.

     For cooking, I knew being able to eat food I made would be enough of a reward.

     For reading, I usually read digital editions of books, and usually they were borrowed from my local library. I figured if I managed to read 12 books in a year’s time period, I could buy a physical edition of a book I read before and enjoyed.

     My junk journaling I figured could benefit my bullet journaling. For every junk journal I filled, I decided I’d get a big sticker (that is, about two inches) to put on my bullet journals for the next year. This meant even if I only filled half my junk journals, I’d still have something to work with.

     With my morning routine, I really just wanted to benefit from the thing itself. So, I’d do a checkmark for every day I completed it, a star for when I did especially well, and a sticker on my “wins” page for when I did it even though it was hard.

     I also wanted to reward parts of my daily routine that often got neglected. I knew I should go outside more, so if I spent at least ten minutes doing more than just heading to the car, I would take a selfie outside. For card reading, I might reward my efforts at doing it myself by requesting a reading from a professional.

SUMMARY: For each difficult habit and goal, I came up with a relevant rewards system if possible. If not, I could at least give myself stickers.

     In the end, I started looking forward to accomplishing my goals, not just for their own sake, but for the new rewards system I'd handcrafted individually. For accountability, here's my goals and their rewards:

     See you next time!

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

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