Happy Sunday, ladies! Sorry it’s been awhile. My normal system for writing posts is on the fritz so I’m trying to work up a solution that’s comfortable and relatively long term – but I’ll actually be talking about that in today’s post. I’m sharing my 2019 resolutions today and my mindset going into the year, with lots of advice woven in. I feel like this post might be a long one, so let’s get into it!

MY 2019 GOALS & HABITS

Okay, I’m breaking this section down because, much like our goals themselves, we need to break down how we approach the new year as a “starting point.” But remember – any day can be your Day 1 so don’t wait to make your goals happen.

LET’S TALK RESOLUTIONS

I feel like the word “resolution” can be a bit dangerous. It gives off a connotation of wishful thinking to me. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But wishful thinking doesn’t make goals happen. So starting the year, I thought about my resolutions, or my I wish I could…‘s and then translated them into goals and habits.

Goals can be a little ambiguous, but generally are measurable. And then there’s habits, which are, by definition, measurable. Habits are things you do regularly. Not every goal can be turned into a habit (I’ll talk about that when I talk about my own goals), but most can. 

LAST YEAR VS. THIS YEAR

Last year I used my Day Designer to help organize my goals. There are goal planning and habit forming pages at the beginning of the planner which were helpful, but they lacked something for me to make them truly successful.

First of all, the fill-in-the-blank format made me feel like I need to fill in every blank (but not every goal can be made a daily habit, remember?). And the time periods for progress check-ins were just too far apart. Setting a quarterly marker is important, but it didn’t allow me enough small successes to stay motivated.

Finally, the format was geared toward tackling every goal from the start, which was really overwhelming for me. Again, this is a bit my fault. I didn’t have to fill in every blank, but I wasn’t prepared to think that way so I set myself up for failure. Or at least not complete success.

HOW I’M CONQUERING MY 2019 GOALS

This year, I kept in mind the importance of limiting the number of goals I attempt to accomplish. The Day Designer limited me to 10, I think. This year, I limited myself to 12. But before you say anything about how that’s more and I struggled last year – here’s the difference: I set one goal for each month. I set a loose focus for each quarter. Then, I arranged my goals in order of easiest to most difficult to accomplish.

I used this order because I wanted to give myself the motivation of having success right off the bat. I also wanted to give myself time to work up habits over several months, which you’ll see below. About 10 of the 12 goals are habit based. I say about because the goal is more vague, but developing a habit for it makes it accomplishable.

I think the easiest way for me to explain how I’m looking at goals this year is just to share mine in the format of “broad goal: measurable habit or definition of success.” So here we go:

2019, Quarter One Goals: Low Hanging Fruit

1. Wake up at 0530 every day: I’m waking up 15 minutes earlier each week until I’m at 0530 by the end of January.
2. Doodle-A-Day: I really wanted to get back into drawing regularly this year. So this goal is offset until February. In February I’m working up by increasing the number of days each week.
3. Read (a book) 30 minutes a day: I want to increase how often I read proper books this year. So this goal is offset to March, where I will accomplish it by increasing the amount of minutes I read per day each week of March.

2019, Quarter Two Goals: Prepping for Summer

1. Invest in a new computer: Like I said above, my system is on the fritz and it’s time to upgrade. For quarters 2-4 of the year, my goals become something I start in Q1 rather than offset. So my goal is to invest in April, which I plan to do by setting aside a specific dollar amount to put in saving
2. Fit back in my bottoms: Ahem, I’ve gained a bit of weight since college. But really since moving and having my daily routine shaken up so bad. This was my goal last year, but I failed to fully conquer it. So I’m using pounds as a way to make this goal measurable. I have a feeling the scale isn’t going to be accurate since some of my other goals have a lot to do with building muscle. So May is my goal for this because 1lb a week was very do-able and that puts me in May!
3. Get back into a hair/skin routine: So since moving to a house, my self-care routines have been thrown way off. But I know this year will be busy, so I didn’t want to jump in head first. Instead, starting January I’m slowly increasing aspects of my routine until I get it back to where it was, ideally by June.

2019, Quarter Three Goals: Health Focused

1. Do yoga daily: This was one of my biggest resolutions so I deliberately set it at July so I could add a day of yoga per week each month.
2. Run 3x per week: I miss running. Slowly increasing my runs from 0 to 3 times per week,increasing each month.
3. Stop sleeping with my phone: I’m the worst at getting my brain to shut down. I play on my phone and end up staying up way later and getting headaches from the light. I’m working my way into this by eliminating it one day a week and building up each month.

2019, Quarter Four Goals: The Most Challenging

1. Work out everyday: I mean, if I’m doing yoga daily this will be accomplished by July. But I want to think of other work outs, too.
2. Find my ideal blog schedule: So this is my other not really measurable goal. To accomplish this I’ll be testing out a new schedule each month until I find something sustainable. I came up with 11 combinations, so November became the goal.
3. Quit being such a procrastinator: This is the goal that is most difficult to make measurable and is more involved so it’s December’s. I’ve decided to define success as “improvement each month.” In order to track that, I have a tally (see the tools below) of each time I really really don’t want to do something, but then do it right away anyway. Uhm, I have one tally mark this week. So I will consider this a success if I get more tallies each week on average. I’m thinking about turning the tallies into a savings deposit for something fun. But I have no idea how I’m going to do on this one so I’ll probably make that decision after a couple of months.

THE TOOLS TO MAKE IT HAPPEN

Alright, so there’s my 12 goals and here’s how I’m making it happen. First of all, if you skimmed that I just want to note that a few of those goals are redundant. Especially the fitness related goals. They’re all feeding into each other which makes them more manageable.

Next, I took a calendar of 2019 and numbered down the weeks.  Week 5 contained both January and February, and so on. Also, Week 1 was two days short. This was just the most simple way to do the next thing which was more complicated. I was annoyed at how long it took me to achieve success last year – so I broke down every goal into a Weekly Goal.

I created a spreadsheet that ended up having 53 Weeks because of the way the calendar fell. Then I looked at each goal, the deadline, and did a little math and trial and error until I created a document that I could fill in each week. For my two not-really-measurable’s, I wrote those in in the row I included the month and overall goal. Here’s a screenshot: (Note that I’m still tracking the goals that should be established by this point. And I forgot a line next to my wake-up. We’re not going for gorgeous aesthetics here).

I also have simplified my planning system to being more to-do list based for now, and I have a monthly layout in my planner that allows for habit tracking. Here’s what that looks like (also note here that I’ve broken the month down into weeks. I’m tracking things that aren’t goals, since I’m not working on all 10 habits at once. I decided to use the other blanks to track miscellaneous non-goal things that I just wanted some data on. And I’m using MyFitnessPal to track what I eat, which helps me loose weight, my May goal. MFP also gives me more data on nutrition which I can link to mood and other health-related aspects):

MINDSET GOING INTO 2019

I’m always so excited for the New Year, but this year I just wasn’t feeling it. I’m pretty torn down by the way the last half of 2018 went and my confidence is really suffering. It wasn’t until the 4th that I began to feel some semblance of excitement for 2019 and writing this post (on the 5th) has maintained it.

But it’s a trepidation mixed with excitement because obviously a new year doesn’t erase the old one. My mental health took a blow later in the year, and I think I can attribute it to a few things. My goals for 2019 were based around those things so I can hopefully get to the knitty gritty of it.

I do have a few other goals at the back of my mind for this year (like wedding planning and figuring out what I want to go back to school for), but I’m back-burnering those as they can be more stressful and hard to make measurable. If I feel good, I’ll work on them, if not, I’ll work on the things that I can get immediate gratification for until I can make success itself a habit.

So that’s it. That’s how I’m approaching 2019. Breaking down my goals into a weekly format took way less time than I expected so I’m excited to see how it helps. I’m on the last day of Week 1 as I write this and it looks okay, but I’m keeping in mind that I have a whole month to make progress. Week 1 is really just my starting point!

What goals and habits are you trying to conquer and establish this year? What’s your plan to make it happen?!