In this post, I covered my language goals for 2023. But I realized that I have a lot of other goals I want to pursue, so I want to outline them here.
At a high level, here’s what I want to do this year:
- Plan better
- Identify who I want to be and judge myself by those criteria
- Have strong and healthy relationships in my life (of all kinds)
- Be healthier (mentally and physically)
- Do something constructive towards fighting climate change
- Pursue my interests in cities and urban planning
- Pursue my interests in languages, linguistics, and related topics
- Make progress on a career that fits well for me
- Write and publish things – ideally that are helpful to others
- Read – and try to read things that expand my worldview
I’ve realized that with the limited time I have in my life – especially with how much time just living, working, and having an active social life take up – I might not be able to dedicate a lot of time or energy to all of these goals. However, I want to keep them on my radar and make a concerted effort to spend a few minutes each week on them.
Planning
I want to dedicate time to planning out where I want to go in life and what I want to do. Some of that involves career planning. I started thinking about career planning while I was unemployed in the summer of 2021, and while I made progress on clarifying what I wanted, there’s still more work for me to do. Other parts of that involve general life planning, which involves asking big, existential questions like “who do I want to be?” I’ve tried this exercise various times before, and I tend to arrive at the same handful of things. But I’d like to invest more time in doing that this year.
One place I’d like to start is by reading Steven Covey’s 7 Habit’s of Highly Effective People. I’d also like to synthesize some other life planning exercises I’ve done before.
The rest of my goals
I wrote a private post detailing SMART goals for each of these general goals – but I found that trying to track them all at once and incorporate them all at once was too much. Instead, I’m focusing on a few bedrock goals and habits that will set me up for future ones.
The first goal is quitting alcohol, which I’ll write about in a future post.