- All The Joyful Things
- Posts
- January 6, 2024
Hello friends,
So far this year, we’ve thought about our values, our ideal life, and what we are and aren’t willing to sacrifice in order to achieve our goals. I hope that this framing and scaffolding will make it easier to identify the goals that truly resonate with what is important to you and joyful for you.
Over the next few days, my prompts will dive deeper into the specifics of our goals, why they matter to us, and what might stand in our way. Today though, I want to just list out all of our various goals. They might be repetitive or build on each other or utterly unrelated to each other. They could be big and momentous like buying a house or going back to school or they can be small and mundane like going grocery shopping or cleaning your kitchen later this week.
So I was trying to find some citations in peer reviewed journals on whether writing down your goals is helpful or not and if it is, to what degree. I can find a lot of blog posts, linkedin articles, consultants, etc. that claim that it is and very little peer reviewed evidence, at least in my cursory search this evening. So, take the claim that writing down your goals will help you achieve them with a grain of salt. I figure it can’t hurt though.
Take 5-15 minutes and write about
Make a list of your goals (both big and small)
- take the GRE
- take a course in statistics
- find a job or a volunteer opportunity related to counseling or psychology to gain experience in the field
- start seeds for my garden
- fix the plumbing in our new house
- get a quote from our electrician about adding more outlets
- attend more poetry readings
- write more poetry
- write more of my novel
- submit my writing
- restart a poetry reading series
- restart our poetry writing workshops
- attend AWP this year
- book our travel and accommodations for AWP
- apply for 501c3 status for Art Farm
- host the Art Farm planning retreat
- apply for grants for Art Farm
- publish a quarterly?/biannual? literary magazine (hit me up if you write and want to submit!)
- write and record more of my audio project
- unpack the remaining boxes
- set up closet recording studio
- look more into recording audio books (if I want to do this more seriously/professionally, do I need to be a member of SAG-AFTRA and if so, how early on?)
- design a daily planner that perfectly meets my needs (and look into publishing and distributing it)
- paint more
- look into finding an art therapist
- read more books
- write more book reviews
- make (and eat) more chocolate
- try any fruit I encounter that I’ve never had before
- apply cuticle oil at least once every day
- do my skin and hair care every day
- do more embroidery
- make my bed every morning
- keep losing weight
- daily tai chi practice
As you can see, my list is completely out of order and full of both big and small goals, some related to and building off of each other, some utterly unrelated. In the next few days, I am definitely going to go back to this list and structure it more, but for today, this gives me an idea of some of what I want to work on and think about this year.
There is mixed evidence on whether or not sharing your goals is helpful or harmful. If you’d like citations on that and links to that, you can find them in my post on this prompt last year. To summarize though, it really depends on whether the people you share them with are supportive and encouraging or not. I’d love to hear what your goals are this year!
Your friend,
Laura