Welcome to January! It’s the start of a brand new year, which means I’ve spent the last few days thinking about what goals I want to make for January specifically for all of 2025. Like I mentioned in my 2024 EOY Series, I realized that I should carefully plan what my year-long goals are and what my monthly goals are so they can better adapt to how life naturally changes from January to December. So I want to talk about how I’m working to make my 2025 resilient to changes and talk a little about what my areas of focus are for this month.
Changes in Goal Tracking & 2025 Annual Goals
I wanted to treat myself and purchased new daily planners to use throughout this year for tracking my goal progress. I’m so excited to be able to use them (there’s just something about a new planner or journal, you know?) and I’m going to use them to monitor daily/weekly/monthly progress on my 2025 Annual Goals. When I was figuring out which ones could reasonably be worked on throughout the year without significant changes, I landed on a few (broken up into monthly installments):
- Increasing my Reading Goal (from 12 books to 24 books)
- Increasing my regularly savings account contributions
- Increasing my daily/weekly step count and weekly exercise time
Broken up into month-by-month goals, it adds up to about two books per month; 35,000 steps per week; etc. It is only the first day of the year, but I’m feeling confident we can work with these!
January Areas Of Focus
Similar to how I structured my targets in 2024, I want to have each month of 2025 have its own separate goal for personal development, professionals development, health, financials, etc. So in addition to the daily habits I am continuing to build and keep track of, January is all about getting myself and my living space ready for another productive 12 months; this includes projects like:
- Winter cleaning/organization and moving items into storage (or giving them away)
- Exploring professional community developmental opportunities
- Revising my monthly budget for January to see if it’ll work for February and beyond
- Getting back into gaming with friends
- And generally exploring some new hobbies and other stuff to see if it can be part of my 2025
This month is really meant to be a way of Starting Small. Taking small little steps to help make my life easier and overall better. I’m not trying to make drastic changes or overwhelm myself — I’m just trying to do small things one at a time in multiple different areas. That’s way more manageable and less intimidating when we’re talking about huge self-improvement over 12 months.
Let’s Keep Up This Momentum
It’s only January 1st at the time of writing this, but I have already done a great job of completing my top goals for the day and working on multiple goals all at once. Committing to baby steps isn’t so hard! If I can just keep up this momentum through this first week, and then the next, and then the next, it’s gonna be great. Let’s get it done!
