January 2021 Goals

Setting new monthly goals based on my annual 2021 goals

Hi and welcome to my monthly goals post! It’s been a long time, but I’m resurrecting my goals posts where I include pictures of my dog dressed up all cute (or at least I think he’s cute) and I talk about my goals for the month. Since this is my first goals post of the year I’m just going to set new monthly goals based on my annual goals. Going forward, I’ll recap how I did for the last month and set new goals for the next month.

As a side note: even though I didn’t share my goals for pretty much all of 2019 and 2020, I still set monthly goals and intentions and did a retrospective in my bullet journal for each month, and I highly encourage you to experiment with your own goals! If you’d like to set up a new habit of monthly goals, intentions, and retrospectives, you can join me on my monthly Bullet Journal Plan With Me videos and use my printables, or just follow along on your own. Literally all you need for this is a pen or pencil and paper! Or if you’d like to post your goals as a comment, I’m happy to be your accountability buddy! (Fact: You’re more likely to stick to your goals if you talk about them publicly or with an accountability buddy.) Welcome to January 2021, and may your year be intentional and fulfilling!

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January Goals

Quick reminder — for this year I’m linking my goals to core values (Creativity, Adventure, Curiosity, and Community), and grouping goals by category under each core value. I set a lot of goals — probably too many — but I also treat goals as aspirational, and I just like to track how much I do or don’t do in a year, quarter, or month. I strongly encourage you to do what works for you! If you want to set a gazillion goals and trackers, go for it! If you want to just set one goal a month, that’s awesome! If you just want to follow along with my blog, you’re welcome to do that too! I just like to (over)share, so I hope you enjoy it and get some ideas!

Creativity

Writing

Write 1 short story or poem. Even if it’s crap, I should still do it; by doing this regularly my stories will hopefully be less crappy over time.

Write 5,000 words for a novel. This can’t overlap with the short story or poem words. I stubbed out my word count for December in a table below so I can start tracking this on a monthly basis.

Write 40 pages in personal journals. This can overlap with words for the novel and/or poem or short story (since a lot of that writing originates in my longhand journals). Similar to tracking my word count in a table, I’m tracking pages written in a table below.

Show up for a writers’ group. I started participating in some zoom calls for writers and I want to carry that forward to 2021. (Once again — accountability buddies work wonders. And it’s also just great to chat about writing with other writers)

Write a blog post. Hey look! This counts! ::check::

Art

Share January bullet journal Plan With Me video and printables. Create February bullet journal Plan With Me video and printables. Yay! January’s Plan With Me video and printables are up! And I’m already starting to think ahead to February…

Sign up for an online class. While things are still shut down (and probably should be shut down even more! Geez, NC, get your COVID numbers down please….), I figure I can follow along with some basics on YouTube or CreativeLive or something similar.

Type up and edit Stella’s story. I wrote a children’s story for my best friend’s daughter and it was both super nerdy (all about stars and different celestial objects) but also sweet. I’ll start by typing it up and editing it this month. Next steps are to ask a scientific expert to read it and make sure I got my facts right. Then I’ll start storyboarding and illustrating it. Hopefully by the end of the year I’ll have a completed children’s book that I could send off and/or self-publish!

Adventure

Running

Run 70 miles. I’m trying to ease back into this. Being sick put a real dent in my running. Similar to the trackers I set up above, I’m going to track miles run each month in a table. And I started with my December 2020 miles which were…abysmal. Pro tip: Don’t get the COVIDs. It sucks.

Create race calendar, annual training outline, and quarterly training plan. Yay for adventures! (And being prepared for adventures! lol)

Attempt South Mountains Marathons 50K. So…I know with COVID everything is cancelled, but some races are happening. And by some I mean mountain trail ultramarathons that are out in the middle of nowhere and are socially distanced even in the best of times. Small number of participants, contactless packet pickup, staggered starts means some of these races are reviewed, permitted, and moving forward. Like South Mountains Marathons. That said, I’m undertrained for this. As in…I’m not trained for this. COVID devastated my training cycle, so the gameplan is to just show up, put in an attempt, and see what happens. If I have to DNF, that’s fine, it’s a kickstart back to some mileage. (Basically…this is going to suck.)

Climbing

Climb or hangboard twice a week. This gives me flexibility in case I don’t feel comfortable going to the climbing gym.

Hiking/Exploring/Travel

Complete 4 hikes/trail runs! Maybe it’s cheating, but I include any time on single or double track in my 52 “Hike” challenge. Ehhh it’s my annual goal, I can make the rules be whatever I want. So I’d like to complete 4 hikes or trail runs this month. And, since this is measurable, I’ve got a tracker table for this too!

Plan out some adventure weekends. I need to put together my race calendar, training plans, and throw in some fun adventures to look forward to!

Yoga

Practice yoga once a week. Whoo let’s do this!

Try out two yoga studios (zoom/online). One of my annual goals is to find a yoga studio that I love! So I figure to move towards that goal I should try out a couple online classes from different studios.

Mountain Biking

Note: I’m not setting any mountain bike goals for January since it tends to be rainy and wet and the trails are closed. I’ll start setting some goals for the mountain bike in the spring, but wanted to keep this placeholder so I don’t forget.

Strength Training

Strength train once a week. I think part of my problem is I never really want to spend the time to plan out a good strength session, so I just don’t do it. I should build this explicitly into my training plans so I can’t back out of doing my strength training.

Curiosity

Languages

Work on Spanish x10 days on DuoLingo. I’ve got the settings set to the max in terms of how many lessons I need to get through in order to get my daily goal, so if I do 10 days on DuoLingo that should be some decent practice. (Yes, I know, I need to do more than DuoLingo to properly learn Spanish…but I took some private lessons as a kid, took intro Spanish about half a dozen times bouncing around at different schools, and feel pretty confident about figuring out grammar, so this seems sufficient. That said, if you have a better suggestion I’m open to it!)

Reading

Read 2 books. Let’s kick off the new year strong!

Read the Trail Runner magazine that just arrived and a New Yorker. I have a bad habit of letting magazines pile up. Literally, they pile up. ::kicks pile that is currently hanging out under my desk:: So I want to make sure I’m keeping up with some of the recent editions and not letting them stagnate. (And then get rid of them and make my husband happy! lol)

Craft

Start planning the garden. I’ll need to order seeds soon, which means I should figure out what I want to grow and if I want to expand the garden this year. Hmmmm….

Community

Read 1 book on social justice. Engage in a conversation. I started reading So You Want to Talk About Race* by Ijeoma Oluo. I’m not going to lie, I feel a lot of shame that I somehow haven’t magically read all the anti-racism books in the world and so I never want to admit when I start reading one of the gold standards. But at the same time, I’m trying to battle my own sense of shame* and want to be more vulnerable, because while I am responsible for the hurt I may cause (whether intentionally or not), I also need to be kind enough to myself to accept where I am in my journey, and be proactive in moving forward along that path. There is no shame in where you are, there is only shame if you do not keep moving forward. So yeah. Sorry I’m behind on reading this book, but I’m working on it now. I also joined a small group of friends to discuss social justice issues on a monthly basis, in an effort to be more intentional and show up and engage rather than think I can get away with just reading and doing the homework but not participating in a more active manner. Because I know it doesn’t work like that, and I need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. (True story: It’s much easier to deal with physical pain like running ultramarathons than emotional pain like confronting my role in systemic racism. But that’s probably not news to anyone.)

Build the Triangle Area Womxn’s Trail/Ultra community. In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a Facebook group dedicated to Triangle Womxn who run trails/ultras! Please join if you’re local and have that interest, I’d love to help womxn with similar interests connect! We’re already starting to buzz a bit about potential races in 2021 and some run-ventures!

Build the NC Oiselle Volée community. Plan and coordinate ideas for the year with the other NC leaders. I was very recently added as an NC Oiselle Volée leader and I’m super excited to contribute to that community of womxn! The other leaders and I kicked off the new year with some brainstorming and I’m super excited about our ideas for the year!

Work on the ultra running coaching class! Awww yeah! I signed up for a coaching class specifically for trail and ultra running! And it started Jan 1, yay!! It’s self-paced, so I’m not sure how long it will take me to work on it, but I want to get started and see how it goes.

Summary

I know I’m trying to pack in a lot in January, but I feel pretty good that I have a good baseline of habits, so I just need to keep up those habits. I think most of my goals are pretty reasonable targets based on how last year went (with the exception, perhaps, of the weekly yoga and strength training). So yeah! Here’s to the new year and a new month!

What about you? Are you setting goals for January 2021? What sort of habits do you want to build in 2021 that will help you succeed in your goals?