My 2020 Goals

I know New Years Resolutions aren’t for everybody, and I don’t really even make them myself, but I do love how a new year always feels like a bit of a fresh start, a reset on the year, and inspiration to make necessary changes and improve on things you’d like to be better. Nothing too major, no strict demands on myself, just some hopes and wants for the year ahead.

I love the feeling once Christmas and New Year (and A’s birthday too!) is all over and I can clear all of the Christmas stuff away, the lounge looks clean, tidy and spacious again (for a minute at least), and I feel re-inspired to live an organised and more simple life. It may not last long, but it feels like good motivation to me, to just figure out what I haven’t been particularly happy with and make some little changes.

So, here are some of my thoughts on my goals and wants for 2020:

Go on holiday

I haven’t been abroad for years now (or even really on a proper holiday in this country) and I would absolutely love to go somewhere abroad, or even Cornwall in the summer. I love Cornwall so much and somehow we usually get lucky when we go and have amazing weather and it almost feels like we’re abroad. It’s so incredibly beautiful and I think I’d live there if it wasn’t for damn jobs.

I would really love to go abroad somewhere hot whilst it’s still cold here, but I definitely can’t afford that right now!

Read more

This always seems to be one of my goals, and I can never seem to make it a priority. I’m still really into Audiobooks so I do listen to quite a few and really like that I can be doing something else like the washing up or whatever whilst listening. But I do so enjoy getting away from it all and snuggling up with a good book. Once I’m into one I can’t seem to put it down and have to force myself to do anything else, but it’s just that first bit of picking one up (from the many, many mountains I own) and taking the time to get into it. I love reading though, and it’s so good for my head and calming my constant anxiety so I really want to make more time for it this year.

Get a dog

I grew up with cats and have never owned a dog, so I’ve always been a cat person and presumed I always would be. We have our lovely, grumpy, fat cat; Molly and I will always want to own a cat; I love them and I would actually love to adopt another at some point and am always falling in love with all of the ones looking for homes in local cat rescue Facebook groups I follow. But, I would really love a dog too and my daughter has been desperate for one forever. She loves the dog in our wider family so much and she asks me for one every day and it’s now something I think we’re seriously thinking about.

The thing I’m really struggling with is that we would like a specific breed ⁠— one that I really think would be so right for us as a family, in terms of size, temperament, and exercise required ⁠— but it is one that can have many problems as some have been irresponsibly bred to look a certain way, which means that we should really only get one from a registered breeder. But I am so, so strongly opinionated on it being best to adopt your pets and give one that is already in the world a loving home that it so desperately needs. I hate that there are so many wonderful animals in desperate need of homes and the idea of bringing more puppies into the world just doesn’t make sense to me, but if we’re to get a dog then it really needs to be one that is right for our family too.

So I really don’t know what to do. I might write some more about this soon as I have so many thoughts about it all.

Shop less

I would really like to try and buy way fewer clothes this year. The past, probably, six months or so I do think I’ve got a bit better at this and went for quite a while without buying anything new (although that could possibly have been at the same time as my operation and recovery when I really wasn’t interested in clothes!). But I seem to have slipped into browsing ASOS again far too often and then I’m tempted by all of the clothes that would obviously, most definitely make me look like a goddess.

I do always seem to think that having these clothes will make my life better which is clearly not the case, so I really want to cut down and wear the (far too many) clothes I already own. I don’t have the money to be buying new clothes regularly anyway, but on top of that, the throwaway culture we have of buying cheap clothes often really does bother me. I want to cut down for environmental reasons as well as money reasons ⁠— I don’t want to be wearing a cheap jumper for one winter and then throwing it away because it’s covered in bobbles and looks horrible and scruffy.

Keep building my blogging business

Blogging has been going a lot better the last few months and I have started to make more money consistently than I was before. I don’t really think I’m working any harder than I was before, but I do think I’m probably working smarter. I seem to be able to get things done quicker and I’m looking for more opportunities myself which has really helped.

I want to keep improving on this over the next year, as well as hopefully get more pageviews and increase my earnings. I love blogging but it is a job for me so I don’t mind saying that I need to be earning decent money from it to keep doing it!

I would also still love to get some regular freelance work again so that I could have a more consistent income every month regardless of how much blog work I get. Plus that would really help when I am owed a load of money but no-one wants to pay me – like right now! I’m broke even though I’m owed so much from many different companies and am spending far too much of my time chasing them up! It’s one of the downfalls of doing this as a job so I’m very willing to put up with it, but it’s very annoying and makes it hard to budget for things.

Build healthy ways into my lifestyle

This year I really want to build some healthy ways into my daily life, so that they just become a part of my routine, and don’t feel like big things that I have to do or add to my list. For example ⁠— we clean our teeth every day without giving it much thought, don’t we? So why can’t we add little simple things into our routines so it just becomes a part of our day and not another thing that we feel like we have to do?

I’ve been listening to Rangan Chatterjee’s new audiobook ‘Feel Better in 5’ and whilst I don’t think it’s anywhere near as good as his two other brilliant books, I do really like his idea of adding 5 minutes ‘snacks’ into our lives. He suggests adding 3 snacks to your day, 5 times a week. So, for example, a snack could be 5 minutes of exercise or 5 minutes of meditation. The idea being that these 5-minute exercises all add up and will make a difference to our health and wellbeing. I’d really like to do this and keep improving on my health in small ways over time, without it feeling like I have even more on my to-do list.

I’m really hoping that 2020 will be a much better year for me than last year, and to be honest I can’t see it being much worse (although I thought that in 2019 too and it ended up being pretty terrible!!). But hopefully, I can achieve some of these things in 2020 and have a much happier year!

Do you have any particular goals for 2020? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.