What goals did you set for yourself this year? What goals do you have for the next few years and beyond?

Today’s prompt is another amalgamation I created from ones I saw on Sage and Bloom from their post on personal growth and self-improvement.

After I read a couple of similar prompts around goals, I did a little introspection and looking back over the year to see what I’ve accomplished versus what I had planned for. A couple of my goals I won’t reveal specifics but I will give an idea of progress.

Starting a year ago, on about October 15th, I had put up a couple of goals for myself with a target completion date of my 36th birthday in late March. One goal was focused on physical fitness (and I failed spectacularly) while the other was on writing. On the physical fitness side, I was planning to do one of two things at least 4 times a week: go to the gym to work out, or do body weight/resistance bands at home. I think the total count targeted was supposed to be around 120 and I made it maybe a quarter of the time. The writing goal was a little more straightforward. Write every day and hit something like 160 posts for the blog. (If you’ve been following along for the last year, you know that I absolutely CRUSHED that goal!)

Tracking those two goals was easy. I have a small whiteboard in my room where I marked out a grid space for the calendar month and a space above it for reminders and tracking totals. In the grid space I would use a red mark to indicate the fitness activity for the day (just a simple check mark to say I did it) and green for the writing. Then, at the end of each month (or beginning of the new month if I forgot to do it before bed) I would tally up the marks and add them to the running total in the reminder space above. Easy stuff! It felt good to add the marks, but the writing goal was so much easier to manage because I was literally able to do that anywhere at any time because I was using my cellphone and posting from work during breaks or downtime between meetings.

Anyways, those two goals were meant to be short term ones that would help me build a habit and routine. The writing one has worked out great! I went from aiming for less than six months to just keeping up that momentum for over a year now. (I’ll have to go back to the drawing board and do some reflecting on that fitness goal.)

I did have a couple of other writing goals that I put together earlier in the year, and even made a checklist on my phone as a reminder of some “six month strategy” goals but I haven’t made as much progress on them as I would like. One was just a reminder of doing my daily writing prompts, the other two were other writing projects which, although I HAVE worked on, I’m still just in planning and world building. Technically speaking, I still have time in my “six months” but not a lot at this point. Those will likely roll over into the new year.

So, current goals from the past year? Daily writing: crushed. Fitness, writing projects: needs a lot of work.

Goals for the future? Well, I’ve mentioned before in various ways that I struggle with setting goals and sticking with them when they’re focused on myself and I’m only accountable to myself. So, while I might have goals I’d LIKE to achieve in the next 2-5 or 5-10 years, actually getting them across the finish line is a different story. A simple list of those goals is getting some novels written and published, owning my own home, being debt free (outside of the house, most likely) and being self-sustained financially on my writing. Will all that happen? Well, only time will tell.

Looking back at the year so far (we still have about two and a half months to go) I’d say I stand a fair chance at actually accomplishing what I want. I just need to make some changes.