New Year, New Goals
I was very excited about the arrival of 2025! The last two years have been particularly challenging and 2020-2022 was halted by the pandemic. So, for the first time in a while, 2025 feels like a real fresh start!
One of my favorite things about the new year is all the goal setting content available. I love hearing other people’s goals and what they want to accomplish in the new year.
So, I thought I’d dedicate this post to my own goals for 2025. When I set goals, I have categories that I use to organize what I want to accomplish or work on. While these can vary from person to person, the categories that I use are: health/habits, family/relationships, creative work, teaching, and projects.
My health and habits goals are pretty consistent from year-to-year.
Sleep: I actually have a very hard time going to bed on the earlier side. I know that I should, but I always manage to stay up later than I would like or than I should. So, sleep is a big priority for me this year - particularly making sure that I am in bed and asleep by 11:00PM. I try and get up at 5:50 or 6:00AM to exercise, so I really should not be staying up later than 11:00PM. I have alarms on my Apple Watch and I just modified the times of the alarms so that I can get to bed earlier. Getting enough sleep made a huge difference when I was going through chemotherapy and afterwards when I was recovering and getting my life back, so it’s something that I want to keep consistent with.
Exercise: At this point, I feel like I do a good job with exercising each day. When I was diagnosed with cancer, my surgeon told me to do some type of exercise each day - even if is only a walk around the block. I took that really seriously and have been able to exercise pretty much every day since I was diagnosed. I want to continue this and tweak it a bit to include longer workouts in the morning and I am seriously debating adding an extra 20 minute SoulCycle class after my kids go to sleep - just to get some extra movement into the day, particularly during the winter months.
Nutrition: I knew nutrition and diet were important, but again, I had no idea the extent of how important until I went through cancer treatment. I maintain that I was able to make it through chemotherapy as well as I did due to following the dietary guidelines so carefully. So, I am going to continue to stick to my strict diet plan in 2025 - making sure to eat lots of vegetables, fruits, and protein and fewer carbs and sugar.
In terms of family and relationships, my goal is pretty straightforward. Last year, we really limited the number of people we saw because I had to stay healthy. This year, my goal is to see more people and have more of our friends over at our house. We are almost finished renovating our house - it’s been a project since we bought the house - and we are almost done. I would like to have others over and really enjoy being with our friends and family.
I have a few creative projects that I am working on this year. My goal for this work is to be consistent, put in the work, get it done, and out there. I have tended to push this work off until I am finished with everything else that needs to be finished, but I’m really trying not to do that this year. And, so far, so good! I have been working at showing up each day and doing some of the work that I have on my list.
I have been teaching for a while and feel like this is going well and is pretty well-situated, but I still have some goals that I would like to focus on.
Be knowledgable about my students: I want to make sure I know what and where my students are teaching. I have a good number of students and this can get challenging to keep track of, but I want to make sure I know their teaching positions. I also want to make sure I know something about each of my students. I took the time to do the activity I suggested at the end of 2024 and wrote down something about each student. This was really helpful and I want to make sure I am connecting my students’ lives, teaching, and interests to the content of the classes.
Give feedback quickly: I want to make sure my students are getting feedback on their work in a timely manner so that they can learn from the feedback.
Bring in current children’s and young adult literature: I have some ideas for how I plan to do this with my classes, but I really feel that being aware of more current literature will benefit my students.
Finally, I have a few projects that I would like to finish (and some need to be started). The biggest one is making photo books from the past TWO years. I make a photo book each year for my kids and did not make one in 2023 or 2024. My kids have been asking me to make them and have even offered to help me with making them - so this is on the list to do. I also have pictures to print out and frame. I put up pictures of the girls in each of their Halloween costumes each year and have not printed nor have I framed the photos from the past two years. The same goes for their Christmas photos. So, I’d like to get these projects started and finished, especially since it’s important to my daughters.
I feel like this is a good amount to work on and focus on for 2025. I’ll check-in at the end of February/early March about how I’d progressing with these goals.
What goals did you set for 2025? I’d love to hear them!