2023 goals.

Over the weekend I took the time to write down some personal goals for 2023. I’ve always found accountability to be helpful in my pursuits so here I am, putting my goals out into the world and sharing them with you all.

I’ve separated my goals into four categories: finances, health/fitness, hobbies, and blogging goals.

Here are my goals for 2023:

Finances

• Pay off my student loan. I graduated from law school over 15 years ago and I am still paying on my law school loans. Part of this is because at the beginning I wasn’t focused on paying down my loans and I just paid the minimum amount. I didn’t really know a lot about saving money and debt and I kind of thought, my loans are for 30 years so I’ll just pay on them for 30 years and then I’ll be done. But a few years ago I got frustrated because I felt like I was paying all this money and my loan balance was hardly moving. I ended up refinancing and consolidating all my loans into one single loan that I’m now concentrating on paying off. I’ve made a huge dent in the balance and now it’s gotten to the point where I am just tired of paying each month and having this debt looming over me so my goal for this year is to pay as much as I can on my loan. I don’t know if I will be able to pay the full balance off this year but I’m going to pay as much as possible. I even made a spreadsheet to track my progress (see below).
• Track my spending. As part of paying off my loan, I made a spreadsheet to track my payments and balance. But I also needed to know how much I can contribute to my loan so I need to know where my money is going and what I spend money on. Ideally, I want to look back at the end of the year and know how much I paid for groceries for the year, how much money I spent eating out, how much money I spent on toiletries, how much money I spent at Starbucks, etc. I’ve tried before to track my spending but I seem to always fall behind and then I end up having a huge stack of receipts to enter which makes me just quit. I know it’s only the 10th day of the year, but I am happy to say I am up to date on entering my expenses.

Health/Fitness

• Twelve 5ks. I’m going to return to a goal I had a few years ago, pre-Covid, and undertake to run one 5k a month. It’s not that I love running 5ks, it’s that I love getting out with other people and doing things in a group. There’s just something about all the excitement of the other runners that makes completing those three miles so much easier. Oh, and I can’t forget the swag; I love swag. I specifically look to sign up for 5ks that have t-shirts and medals because I love getting something after crossing the finish line.
• Run a whole 5k. So even though I enjoy doing 5ks, I am not at the ability to actually run a whole 5k. Right now, I can probably run for one minute before I have to start walking. I estimate, if I were able to run the entire 5k, it would take me about 35 minutes or so based on how fast I run. So now I just need to go from running one minute to running 35 minutes. I think this is doable (maybe?). It might take me the whole year, but I’m going to try.

Hobbies

• Knit and finish 6 items. I have been working on the same knitted item for at least six months. It is a shawl and I feel like it is taking forever. I think it’s because I don’t knit every day and also because this shawl is super long! But I have a goal of finishing six knitted items this year. Hopefully, these will all be different items so I have the opportunity to try out different techniques and different yarn and patterns.
• Take a handwriting class. I would love to take a handwriting class to improve my penmanship. I don’t think my printing is horrible but sometimes I look at it and don’t love it. Ideally, I would like to make it neater and I’m not sure if a handwriting class will help with that or just teach me different types of handwriting. Either way, I want to find a class to maybe learn some new techniques. Maybe my problem is I need to slow down. I find that when I am writing fast, that’s when my printing tends to look wonky.
• Write and publish something. I publish blog posts on this blog all the time. But I would love to write an article and have it published somewhere that is not a self-published blog. Bonus points if I get paid for it!

Blogging goals

• Surpass last year’s number of posts. With this blog, I always try to do better than the year before. I posted way more posts in 2022 than any other year on my blog, partly because of participating in blogmas in December. I’d like to try to keep up that momentum and hopefully this year I can surpass 2022 numbers.
• Get more views than last year. Even though I posted the most posts in 2022, my views were down from previous years. I don’t know if that’s because people are not reading as many blogs as before or maybe I am not posting what people want to read. Either way, I’m just going to keep posting and hope that people find their way to my little corner of the internet.

Good luck with your 2023 goals!