I didn’t stay up until midnight last night. That was on purpose, and I had a delightful time greeting the New Year with the soft light of dawn.

Beginnings of months always make me happy – it’s like a fresh paragraph, just awaiting thoughts, experiences, and adventures to spill on to the page. A new year is even better. It’s a new chapter, fresh, clean, promising to be full of surprises. A new decade? Well, I’ve lived through so few of those that I don’t even know where to categorize them.

If you’ve been around long you know I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions. From what I’ve heard, those don’t seem to stick, and who wants to start out a new chapter with a failure? Instead, I write goals. And normally I’m pretty good at keeping my goals because I’m a very goal-oriented person.

Twenty-nineteen kinda laughed in my face and not only did I literally lose my goals (I’m still not sure how that happened since I had them multiple places), but my life went in a way different – and wildly more exciting – direction than what I’d imagined.

The last known list of goals I have from 2019 was when I reassessed my goals for the year – something I highly recommend since looking at twelve months is important, but kinda hard to predict.

Although I lost my Goal List, I did still have a mental inventory of some of the goals and plugged away at them during the last six months of the year. Since I’m used to recording goal wins and losses here in my little sphere of the internet, here’s what I have/can remember:

• All writing goals – NO (When I move to Kentucky I decided I needed to put writing on hold until I settled in. Then after I’d finally settled into one job, I was promoted and had to learn a whole new set of responsibilities)
•  Track all the money I spend for three months – YES (more like six)
• Walk at least twenty miles a month – YES (December I walked 143 miles)
• Read two nonfiction books a month – YES (I read forty-two nonfiction altogether)
• Add all books to Goodreads – YES (I actually changed this do Instagram stories, but for the same reason I was going to do Goodreads)
• Write monthly reviews – NO
• Write monthly and weekly goals – NO (I stopped around October)
• Journal once a week – YES
• Four Instagram pictures a month – YES and NO (Did until I reassessed in May and decided to drop the goal)
• Blog twice a week – NO
• Drink Ionized water and share devotional thought every day – YES
• Go paleo (in May changed to no sugar or gluten) for 100 days – YES

Did I do well with my goals last year? Well, that’s subject to debate. Do I wish I’d done better? On some of them (like blogging) the answer is yes. On others (like writing) I knew I needed to set them aside and focus on other things, so I’m more than okay with DNFing those goals.

As a new chapter in life opens in front of me, I’m thankful for the ability to write goals, and the freedom to let go/change/reassess goals as life changes. Goals are tools, not chains, and I’m excited for the tools I have in my bag this year. 😉

Happy Twenty-twenty, folks!

Did you write goals in 2019? If so, how did you do with accomplishing them?