2024 Goal Review & New Goals for 2025
2024’s list of goals was, well, ambitious. I won’t go through the whole list but I’m going to highlight three goals I had.
One goal was to walk my dog almost every day. I did GREAT for the first half of 2024. Then summer hit. Here in Arizona, summer is too hot to walk outdoors during the day, and sunrise is like 5 am. So walking meant loss of sleep. Still, I tried. But I burnt out. I pushed myself into a crash in July and I ended up barely walking at all for months. I’m still not back to the amount of walking I could do pre-crash. This will be important to remember this summer, when the weather warms up again. This time, I will start reducing my walks in early summer to hopefully avoid a severe crash.
Another goal was to do some form of exercise, in addition to walking, at least three days a week. I completely failed at this. I’m counting it as a win, though, because you know what? I tried. I really did. I tried swimming. Karate. Lifting weights. Rock climbing. Jogging. Dancing. Hiking. I tolerated some of these better than others—some of them I can do occasionally without too many ill effects—but ultimately my body, my heart in particular, just really does not tolerate much exercise besides walking.
The third goal I’ll review is Spanish Duolingo! I wanted to see how long a streak I could get. But after a while, I realized Duolingo was not going to get me to the level of fluency I want. So I pivoted and researched different resources for language learning. I settled on Dreaming Spanish as my alternative to Duolingo and I think I have been making more progress since that switch!
I picked these goals to review because I think they’re good examples of why I make yearly goals, and how I measure success. If I had to answer, “Did you achieve this goal? Yes or no,” for each of these, the simple answer would be no. I didn’t achieve any of them exactly how they were written. But I gave all of them sincere effort; when I failed, I tried to figure out why and try something else if possible.
With that in mind, here are my 2025 goals:
Continue with Spanish. I would love to get to level 3 in Dreaming Spanish, which I believe is doable for me.
The crochet blanket project. It was one of last year’s goals and I’m repeating it because I do not feel I gave this one an honest effort. It was intimidating and I attempted it a few times without really trying too much. I want to give it a SOLID effort before I let myself quit.
Memorize some poetry! I used to do this a lot. I miss it. I also have a poetry scrapbook I’d like to keep working on. So between those two, maybe a better way of phrasing this goal is, to spend more time with poetry.
Keep up with filling out my little planner book. I got this book from a little free library in my neighborhood. It’s not really about scheduling, more about making a loose weekly plan for being intentional about how I spend my time, along with pages to reflect on the previous week and note mindful moments, silver linings, and things I am grateful for. I’m hoping filling this out regularly will help me re-establish a solid sense of myself in time and a new ability to envision and plan for the future, something being sick kinda took from me.
