Goal Tracking 2024 — Sara Denny

I’ve been a Goal Setter for much of my life so far. It really hit a head when I joined The Geek Girls of The East Valley Meetup back in 2010 and there was a goal setting group within that meet up. Ever since then I’ve taken setting goals very seriously and have meticulously worked at achieving many of them.

A big goal was running. I was running pretty prolifically at one point and was running in multiple races. I had a half marathon a month goal and I even ran a marathon during that time.

I made a comic with my best friend, Connie, and we went to several Comic Conventions hawking our wares and the comic.

Not to mention the many reorganizing and fixing up my house and yard goals for so many of the places I’ve lived at.

Unfortunately, I feel as if this “Goal Drive” of mine has really lost steam the last few years. I had moved again, I was helping my parents out a lot, then a pandemic, and I just felt tired. Was it age? Was it life? Was it everything? Probably.

So this past New Years I sat down and asked myself…what can I do to set some goals, track them simply, and feel as if I’m getting my act together again. I’ve done so many things to track my goals before. On my phone, vision boards, check lists, fancy journals. I never really stuck with it and I felt like I had to do a new type of tracking every time I started something. So this year I made a god damned excel spreadsheet.

This is for January. As you can see it’s also a pseudo-mood tracker. Every day I open this up (usually in the morning so I can recount the previous day) and color code the date on how I felt while doing each particular activity. I also built in some rest days so I can choose not to do something but it has to be thought of ahead of time and not just an emergency excuse.

I have a lot of Daily Health Goals because I’m really trying to be consistent with food and working out because I’m trying to get lean and strong. I also fell off books for awhile and I’ve made it so as long as I get 10 pages a day, I’m doing well.

It’s going to be interesting to see how my mood changes as the year progresses because right now it’s January and I’m excited to be doing this. We’ll see how I am in June.

Part of the reason I’m feeling successful currently is because I’m starting off and adding to things very slowly. Part of my goal setting problems is that I got overwhelmed because I would keep adding time for activities and there is only so much time in a day. So I’ve given my self large ranges of times to get to so if I’m feeling extra tired I don’t need to do 11,500 steps…I can do 10,000. I don’t have to do a full 30 minute workout, go for 10.

I’ve added an additional daily goal in February of bein creative for 15 minutes a day. I have a lot of projects I want to complete this year and I just need to nick away at some of them a little at a time.

I also have created both weekly and monthly goals.

Weekly goals are tracking my Blood pressure (always health), Work Website Updating, my Tarot Card Draws (see the previous two blog entries for some extra thoughts on what I’ve pulled) and a place to track my rest days and why I chose to use them.

My Burger Time Relax day was especially exciting.

I do have several monthly goals but a few were left off for my privacy’s sake. One of those goals is just getting out into the world more and you all don’t need to see where I go in my time.

I really want to push myself with cooking so I have a goal of making some Julia Child Recipes a month. At least one a month but I’m doing 2 next month because my mother is looking for a good meatloaf recipe, so I want to try Julia’s, but I also desperately want to try the flan. So that’s still happening. I finally feel that all of my dairy-free alternatives have reached a really good substitution point and feel comfortable attempting these without the true ingredients.

I’ll have to make a post about my Claire Saffitz Christmas Dinner I did and the Julia Child Recipes I’ve done so far.

I also have a couple pages on my spreadsheets on Anime I want to watch with my S.O., the art projects I want to create (there are gift ideas on it, so no pics) and even a cleaning schedule to help me take care of my house without getting overwhelmed (Taskito App will be another post, sometime soon).

It’s the end of January and I’m feeling pretty good and accomplished. I hope I can keep it up!