Making the Internet My Accountability Partner

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In a post last week I described my intention to create fun resolutions for reading, writing, finances, and hobbies. Here I’m going to break down what my resolutions are and a little bit of my reasonings or hopes behind them. I do plan to update you at various points I will figure out along the way.

I’m most excited for my reading challenge. This year I am challenging myself to read 26 authors one for each letter of the alphabet by last name. I’d like to give as much space as possible to new authors, but I don’t want to pressure myself, considering how slowly I read. I think I’d ideally like to stick to a split of 7 familiar authors and 19 new authors. My thought is if I have some books lined up on my TBR that fit my needs I can use those otherwise I can pull letters at random to find new authors and new books to read. What I mean by “fits me needs” for this challenge is that they must be the sole author and there needs to be at least 50 pages of material. An additional aspect of this challenge is all of these books will be either already owned or borrowed from a library.

The next most exciting challenge at this moment in time is the baking/cooking challenge. I have a strong feeling this will lean more towards baking but I want to leave the door open for cooking. The idea is that I will make at least two things per month, one of which will be new to me. For this one I’m setting the bar some place reasonable so if I have a bad month I don’t feel disappointed, but still have room to surprise myself with good months. Personally I really like making things from scratch and being more involved on good days so only bigger time/energy investments will count; no bowls of cereal on this list.

In terms of hobbies, the only other one I could think of was knitting, but it’s harder, at least in my mind, to set fun goals for this category. Realistically I could agree to something like spending 20 minutes per month on knitting but that’s not fun. A fun idea is giving myself a number of projects to complete but that honestly does not sound realistic for me. Unfortunately, I’m still searching for a good middle ground.

Thankfully the next two not only have specific goals but also fun tracking methods. Finances has been a major goal category for me this past year and it will continue as a priority in the new year. I am setting myself the goal of saving $6000 by June 1 in my short term savings. This is because my lease ends on June 1st and I want to be in a position of being able to move to a new place, should I choose to do so. This does currently seam really daunting, considering I only have $100 a month in recurring automatic savings going to that account, but I can and will save more per month, plus I’ll be getting something in a tax return this spring which I will put entirely to this goal. For my tracking method I’ve printed out a picture of a flower with markings for different levels of this goal including a midway reward, going to the aquarium, to keep my motivation up. I’ll color in the picture as I progress and will share periodic updates.

My final goal regards this blog. This experience has been so helpful for me and I look forward to continuing in 2025. I am wanting to focus on quality writing, which has been something of a struggle. My goal is to post a total of 20,000 words over the next 12 months, which sounds like quantity not quality, but I believe it’s both for me. Too often I’ve felt like I had a really great idea and then realize I am not able to write more than a hundred words, which means the idea and the writing is not quality. Creating quality writing means having an idea that is worth writing about which naturally leads to a few more words being used. For tracking I have printed an outline of some books and will be coloring them in to track my progress. I haven’t currently attached any rewards outside of a personal sense of satisfaction.

Please share what your goals are below. I’m excited to cheer you on so we can all learn and grow together!