Well, it’s that time of year again when I set unrealistic expectations and have to deal with the consequences of my old unrealistic expectations! It’s Goal Book time! I don’t love the cover this year, but it’s done and I’m good with that.
So, a quick history of the ridiculous goal book…
In 2012 and 2013, I started a list of 50 things, of 50 items each… with an expectation of a 50% success rate. This last bit is important, since I just reset at the end of the year. It was my 50/50/50 goal book! These were simple notebooks, just lined pages, nothing fancy. It was fun.
Then came 2014, and I’m not sure what was wrong with me, I decided to do 100 goals of 100 each (please note I do some very creative units to make things somewhat reasonable, and some of the goals were super, super easy) and I decided to include a goal of finishing 100 items from 2012 and/or 2013. This was the first year of the combo book.
From then on, I just started including ALL of the unfinished goals from years past. What happened to being good with a 50% success rate? Who knows. HOWEVER, I did start playing around with swapping out goals that no longer served (for instance, I had a goal about swimming and we’d quit the gym and I had no access to a pool). This did reset that goal to 0% done, but I would usually swap it for something more attainable.
There were a few years I did some different things, 2015 was a year of 15 things of 15 each, 2018 I did a sequence from 1-100 (which was fun, it let me have things like “do X 5Ks" without it being either a multi-year process or truly unattainable), and in 2019 I did the first… 10 (? I think) digits of the Fibonacci sequence, which required some very, VERY creative units.
Goal books on the left, journals on the right. I pulled out all my old journals/bullet journals because I really want to use every single page and I’m just going to start filling in the backs of some of my old ones for this year. Waste not, want not and all that.
2019 and 2020 I never bothered to decorate the covers. Ah well. Also, the ring binders are great for using them, but make it really hard to store them (when do you get rid of journals?) so I decided to just run yarn through them - the binding isn’t super sturdy, not good for use, but it should hold them together in storage.
Some of the pages:
Sorry for the awful picture quality, my office at home is pretty dark (and I painted it navy blue) with not great lighting and my phone camera is barely acceptable, but you get the idea! One of the nice things about not quite finishing things is that i think you get to make more fun pages - the original animal shelter and nerd games pages were just lined sheets, since it’s a list of 50 items!
I’m honestly thinking this might be my last year of goal book (depending on how much I get done) and I might transition to more of a collections-style bullet journal? I don’t know, I’ve been doing this since 2012 and it might be a hard habit to break… we’ll see. Or maybe 2027 will just be all really ridiculous goals!
But I’d really like to get some of those old goals done, so if you’ll excuse me, I need to go write a bunch of haikus, limericks, and short stories, so some gratitude doodles, tangles, and pieces of art, watch some movies, read some books, and play some games… while walking, riding my bike, doing yoga, and lifting weights… 