This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Compiling 2025.
Reflecting on your year is an important step before moving forward into the new year. Check out my 2024 reflection before diving in here and reading about my goals, and goal-setting.
New Year’s Eve 2024
On New Year’s Eve, as my husband and I sat on the beach, sipping champagne and waiting for the fireworks ✨, we asked each other about our goals for this year. Goal-setting is one of those activities I’ve done for as long as I can remember. When my husband asked me this, I thought about it for a bit—at this point in time, I hadn’t really sat down to set my goals for 2025. But this question prompted me to start gathering my thoughts and thinking about what it was I wanted to achieve this year.
Structuring and setting goals
I believe goal setting is something we should do for all aspects of our life. Every year, when I write my goals, I look at various parts of my existence, and write goals for each of those sections. Here is the list I use when thinking about “aspects of life”:
- Career
- Physical/sport
- Financial
- Family/friends/community
- Spiritual/mindfulness
- Hobbies
- Wellness and health
- Exploration/travel
Each of these aspects represents a different part of our lives and I have goals for each of these. For example, a career goal might be “learn Python enough to build an AI chatbot”, or “take on a leadership position within my company, even if it’s something outside my direct team”. Physical or sports goals might be “go to the gym at least three times a week”, “run 10km in 45mins”. You can see how breaking goals into categories can help us succeed.
It also forces us to think outside the usual goals and categories we often think about when we talk about “goals”. For example, if I ask someone what their goals are for this year, I might get something like “lose 10kg”, or “get a promotion”. You rarely hear someone talk about things like “set aside time for myself for meaningful reflection”. Try and have at least one goal in each of the classes.
🏆 How to achieve goals
Next, how do you actually achieve goals? Some goals might be ‘easier’ to achieve than others, in the sense that they have a set path to winning. For example “run 10km in 45mins”, can be broken down:
- Run 5km without stopping
- Run 7km without stopping
- Run 10km without stopping
- Run 10km in under 60mins
- Run 10km in under 50mins
- Run 10km in under 40mins
- Run 10km in under 45mins ➡️ GOAL
What I’ve done here, is written a list of “mini” goals on the pathway to achieving the main goal. This is a good technique to practice when goal setting ➡️ breaking down large goals into smaller goals. When you reach these milestones, you should celebrate 🥳. You don’t have to celebrate in a massive way, but small wins should mean small celebrations, big wins should equal big celebrations.
We often don’t take enough time out for ourselves to celebrate the small wins along the way. But if we can do this, it will give us consistent motivation to achieve our large goals, and ensure we don’t get burned out along the way to achieving the big targets.
Another way to set goals is to put time limits or dates on your goals. For example “read more books” could be a good goal for this year, but it’s much harder to achieve because you haven’t really defined it. You might get to the end of this year and go “did I really read more books?”. Maybe you read a book, which is one more than what you did last year. Is this a win? It might be. Be specific about the type of goals you want to set. Instead, it might be “read one book a week”, or “read a chapter of a book each night”. Break goals into smaller, manageable, and trackable tasks. This will ensure you feel good about reaching each of those wins each day or each week, and you don’t feel burned out from ‘not achieving’ anything.
You might also like to consider a way to record track your goals. It might be a diary, GitHub Project board, or similar.
What are my goals for 2025
I’ve talked a lot about goals, so what are mine for this year? Well, last year I did a lot of speaking engagements, so this year, my target is to reach ten keynote presentations. It’s a stretch but it’s a good, measurable goal to have. I would like to be on Twitch more, and so I’m aiming for a least 2-3 streams a week, as long as I’m in Melbourne (I’m not counting trying to do live streams whilst travelling).
I have a goal set for every category above, but I won’t reveal them all to you here. Just remember, look at what you want to achieve, why, and then how. Think about how you might celebrate those goals along the way. For example, you might have a financial goal to save a certain amount of money by a certain amount of time, and if you hit your target, then you might treat yourself.