My 2024 goals + 2023 recap

My favorite holiday is New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day because I love reflecting on our achieved goals and creating new ones! 2023 was quite the whirlwind. We became totally debt free, got married, pregnant, went on a family vacation to Washington DC, got a new (used) vehicle we love after an unexpected life event, and started working with the builder! It was such a great year with lots of change, and I feel like we really set a great foundation for all areas of our life. This will also be our first full year with a shared budgeting tool (YNAB) that will be so helpful as we soon enter a costly time with variable payments for a construction loan, one off purchases for the new home, and of course baby expenses.

Now before I talk about my new 2024 goals, I’ll recap my 2023 goals. Honestly, they weren’t written as well as I’d like after learning so much about how to set good goals at work. I think I focused a lot on whether they were measurable (did I do them or not?), but I really missed out on saying what they help me achieve or what my outcome is.

1. Read 20 books: Done! I actually exceeded my goal by reading 33 books!
2. Get married: Done!
3. Blog weekly: I can’t say I blogged weekly. I think I blogged in spurts, and averaged about 3-5 posts a month. This is an example of where I wish I’d focused on outcomes instead of tasks. My goal was probably to blog regularly, whether that be measured by posts per week or month.
4. Complete 5 Chloe Ting Challenges: I completed two full challenges once I got back into the habit of exercising regularly and found my groove with the when/how. The last three months of the year I still worked out or walked 4-5 times a week, but I had to set aside Chloe Ting in favor of 2nd trimester friendly exercises.
5. Find a salad I like: I found a ranch dressing recipe I really like, and I’m not sure why I don’t make it more often. I think I accomplished this goal, but achieved little because it didn’t measure whether or not I actually ate more salads or vegetables!
6. I won’t post specifics here, but basically my goal was around how to stop going over in food, gas, and personal spending categories: I achieved this! Once we got set up with YNAB and started creating a combined budget together where we could take into account all of the things going on in the month, this issue went away. I don’t think budgeting jointly was the fix because this was an area where I struggled before Brandon and I started living together, but basically I just didn’t have a good budgeting system down. I would budget my spending and savings per paycheck, so a gas heavy trip at the beginning of the month may have made me feel in the negative until the lighter half of the month. There wasn’t enough of a date range in my budget/expense tracking to have variable costs even out over time. Budgeting and planning at the month level (and really – sharing accountability/responsibility as a couple) helped so much!
7. Stay within my time limit on my phone regularly: I think by the end of the year, I achieved this goal. Having monthly goals and working off of a Microsoft to do list showed me how precious my time is!

Overall I am very happy with how 2023 went, and I am so grateful for all of the wonderful things that came with it. I will never take for granted how easily I was able to get pregnant and how smooth my pregnancy has been. Now, let’s talk 2024!

This year we have quite a lot going on and while we won’t plan any vacations, we’ll make sure we make time to attend events that celebrate our friends’ life milestones such as a new babies or weddings. We’ll have a new baby girl and hopefully a hole in the ground this spring. And maybe by the holiday season, we’ll be all settled in with our new home and mortgage payment!

As far as my personal 2024 goals, here’s what I have. I’m going to go into the why behind the goal and what I hope to accomplish with it. Then I’ll discuss all of the little subtasks or activities that help me achieve it!

Focus on my interior design passion: I love interior design and have so many things I want to do with this passion someday. However, as Dave Ramsey would say, if your business isn’t profitable, it’s just an expensive hobby. We must balance all of the things we want in life right now, and financial security + new house are near the top of that list! That said, there are things I can do to continue nurturing this interest of mine and keep it nice and toasty on the backburner.

1. Render our existing house in SketchUp (I want the mental challenge of digitally renovating it before it’s torn down!)
2. Render new house in Sketchup
3. Do 5 Sketchup courses
4. Renew Sketchup next November
5. Reach 100 posts on the blog

Most importantly, I want to make sure I continue investing in my 3D design skillset through Sketchup because it does help us with our current house plans, will help us with future basement/reno plans, and is something I genuinely enjoy learning and doing. I also want to make sure that I stay in the habit of blogging, so I have a platform to share my design work someday. I’m hoping as our home build journey picks up, I’ll have more interior design posts to share. Until then, I can show my Sketchup work or focus on lifestyle/home goods posts!

Maintain a normal weight for optimal health: I put this goal on my 2024 list because I’ve felt all of the benefits of having a good weight and fitness level for the past few years, and it’s not something I want to give up! January 2020, I made it my goal to lose some weight gained during college and get fit. I was feeling good and about 10lbs down within a couple months, and then the pandemic actually helped me with my goal by forcing me to meal plan and ration my store pickup groceries instead of going out for snacks whenever I wanted. Later that year, I started doing Chloe Ting and started to love fitness! While my weight loss slowed down, I was getting more fit and was building muscle. My goal someday was to develop a natural identity of living a healthy lifestyle. In 2021, the world started opening up again as people got vaccinated, and I started dating my now husband then moved in with him. I wasn’t able to count calories as easily anymore just with our dinners and lunches being from scratch and portion sizes being harder to measure. With just naturally being more active taking care of a home, eating delicious meals we cooked together (that are usually healthy), and finding workout time as ‘me time’, I ended up 30lbs down from what I weighed when I first started my health/fitness journey. It’s so nice to feel confident, healthy, and fit! Plus, I accomplished my long term goal of making being healthy and active just part of my identity.

All that backstory leads me to the why behind my goal. Going through a long weight loss process or having to spend a bunch of time rebuilding my fitness levels is not something that I’m wanting to do again. While I am so lucky to have had an easy pregnancy so far, I do think that my general eating habits and activity levels have helped me feel so good! I want to make sure that I stay active during pregnancy and return to a healthy weight and fitness level post baby. It’s not just about staying active either, I can say from experience that I feel physically better when I’m at a good, healthy weight for my body.

1. Gain healthy amount during pregnancy
2. Stay active during and after pregnancy
3. Return to pre-pregnancy weight
4. Do one Chloe Ting challenge

So to accomplish this goal, I will need to gain a healthy amount during pregnancy. Every body and every pregnancy is different, so there’s no number here. I want to make sure that I don’t try to limit my intake or frequently overindulge. I’ll listen to my doctor in terms of whether my weight gain is in a healthy range. I’ll also make sure I’m prioritizing some physical activity about five times a week. Since the second trimester, this has looked like walking outside when the weather is nice or doing a 30 minute cardio/walking video from a prenatal Youtube channel. One time, I even counted the hour long grocery trip we had at Walmart as my activity because I was getting so tuckered out from walking and filling the cart! After the baby’s born (and I’m cleared to start being active again), I’ll probably start with this same exercise routine since it’s lower impact. That said, I do miss being able to do my higher intensity workouts! So by the end of 2024, I would like to see myself complete one Chloe Ting challenge. Finally, I would like to also return to my pre-pregnancy weight, that way I’m back at a good starting point for when we have another baby in the future.

Prioritize learning, presence, and keeping a well functioning home: This goal is a better way to say I don’t want to be on my phone all day or otherwise wasting my life away! There’s only so much time in the day, and I want to make time for the right things. I want to learn new things and be in the moment (even though my pregnant brain is constantly lagging or as the kids may say – has controller drift). I also want to make sure our home is easy to maintain and makes life easier and less stressful.

1. Read 20 books
2. Avoid Instagram and scrolling traps
3. Create 10 new efficiencies around the house

With this goal, I would want to read another 20 books to keep new ideas and perspectives flowing. It’s an easy activity to put on your list that guarantees doing something productive. I’d also like to avoid Instagram and scrolling traps. I’ve been doing good and not looking at my personal Instagram, but I still want to maintain my design account/community. I’m going to subscribe to my favorite design accounts and only look at their new posts. With us being half way through the first month of the year already, I’m learning that although I have a lot of physical books right now to read, I need to keep one book on my phone or I will scroll Facebook or Google News mindlessly when I don’t have my book around. Finally, efficiencies! What does this mean? Well, I want to find those problem areas around the house that take up our time, money, or mental energy and fix them. So far we’re on track to accomplish our first one of 2024! We bought a small compost bin for the kitchen that not only reduces our trash waste, but also limits the steps we take in the kitchen. No more carrying the coffee filter across the kitchen to throw it away, our compost bin is nearby! Same goes with popcorn kernels in a bowl left by the sink, just dump them in. Our trash will be less gross and we get to feel good about composting. This also gives us a nice way to dispose of things that can feel wasteful when used often – like parchment paper. Just make sure that you get the kind that’s compostable!

Prioritize getting enough sleep and rest: There are no tasks associated with this goal because it’s pretty straightforward. I know what I should be doing to prioritize rest/sleep, I just have to do it. If it’s getting late and I’m wanting a snack while we watch TV, chances are I’m tired and we just need to go to bed (but me needing that snack is becoming more legit as I get further into my pregnancy!). Or if it’s early in the morning and I can’t fall asleep, I need to choose something like reading over further waking up my mind with the news or getting on my computer. With a baby on the way, it’s going to be so important that I take any opportunity I have for rest. Some might see this goal called out by someone pregnant with their first baby and think ‘just you wait’, but I don’t care. It’s a good reminder that if the baby is sleeping and I’m looking to rest, I should choose napping or reading (which if I’m tired, turns into a nap) instead of scrolling or watching reality TV. I can watch all the junk TV while the baby’s awake and needing fed or held!

I hope you enjoyed reading about my 2024 goals and maybe they gave you some ideas on how you can get the most out of your new year. I’d love to hear what goals you have planned or what you’re proud to have accomplished last year!

Thanks for reading!

Davien