2026 Goals
Mar. 15th, 2026 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fourohfourrealitynotfoundIn a way I'm kind of glad. I got to weather out the beginning of the year back-from-holidays motivation crash without actually having any goals set for myself yet. And I got to practice not meeting my standards for myself (like the expectation to have my goals set at the beginning of January) and picking myself up again to try anyways.
In my 2025 goals wrap-up post, I talked a bit about struggling with not having capacity to work towards my goals because of my ongoing health struggles. At the end of last year I started anxiety medication that did help my anxiety issues, but also revealed some issues with executive dysfunction that have kneecapped my motivation and productivity. Apparently my anxiety was creating a sense of urgency that was helping me overcome issues with task initiation. Things are a little bit better now, but still very much a work in progress.
Because of these hindrances, I've been stuck in a really bad shame loop. Setting expectations for myself, failing to meet them for one reason or another, beating myself up about it, searching for ways to fix the things that prevented me from being productive, and starting the cycle over again. It's a really demotivating place to be in, and not very sustainable, as the stress this causes can exacerbate my other issues.
So when I went to draft my goals for 2026, I went into it with the idea of creating a "any win is a win" mindset. Instead of trying to complete x number of set goals (a number I had reduced from 2024 to 2025 in an effort to make my goals more attainable), the goal is to complete any number of goals.
The way I've gone about this is maybe a bit counter-intuitive. I'm calling it "25 Goals for the Year I Turn 25." Yeah, 25 goals is kind of a lot. But the idea was to create a lot of broad-category goals and go into it with the mindset that I'm not going to achieve all 25. I'm going to achieve at least 1: my free-space goal, which is to turn 25.
I'm actually super proud of the way I set this up in my hobby journal. I'm not going to post pictures of it (it's handwritten, and I don't really want my handwriting out there), but I'll try to describe it. There's 5 page spreads of goals at the front of my journal, with 5 goals each. The left-hand page has each goal written in a bubble, with lots of space around. The right-hand page has any further description of the goal or ideas of ways I can complete it (eg, 'write a oneshot' has a list of oneshot ideas I'm wanting to work on under it). When I start a goal-- make any degree of progress on it-- I can outline the bubble. When I finish a goal, I can color it in. If I complete the goal more than once (eg, write more than one oneshot), I can add a little bubble to the side of the bubble to count it as extra. I'm hopeful that all of this will make it a little bit easier for me to at-a-glance see how much I've accomplished.
I've kind of just finished setting out my journal and catching up on the year so far (January/February roundup coming soon), so I haven't gotten to put it into practice that much yet. But I've got a fair bit of hope for how the rest of this year could go for me.
Without further ado, here's my 25 goals for the year I turn 25:
- Turn 25!
- Finish reading Donna Tartt's "The Little Friend"
- Do a Geocache
- Start making homemade vanilla extract
- Make a homemade cocoa mix
- Make something leavened with my sourdough starter (eg, bagels, bread, etc-- discard bakes don't count!)
- Do a fun/technical bake (eg, cheesecake, Swiss meringue buttercream, meringues, macaraons, etc)
- Pay off student loans
- Build a 3 month emergency fund
- Buy one of my buy goal items (eg, replacing too-small clothes, getting a printer, etc)
- Go through my 'new music to listen to' list
- Do a room cleanup project (eg, donate clothes pile, clean off desk clutter, organize laundry room shelves, etc)
- Organize a digital space (eg, phone apps, watch faces, tab wallpapers, phone photo gallery, etc)
- Move recipes to cloud (I've got a bunch of random photos of recipes in my gallery that need to get moved to my recipes folder)
- Back up devices
- Finish my 50 chapter keith/lance/hunk vld college au
- Finish outline for a specific original story
- Write a oneshot (eg, valentine's day klance fic, klance space oddity fic, etc)
- Write a poem
- Make tatted lace ornaments for my dad's Christmas gift
- Make a quote canvas (these are my home art pieces with song lyric quotes done up aesthetically with scrapbook paper and modge podge)
- Start a paint by number project my dad got me
- Finish my 2025 temperature blanket
- Finish a miscellaneous crochet project (eg, scarf I started at Christmas, crop top I've got a pattern for, etc)
- Get back into bookbinding
