Happy New Year! New Year’s Day is one of my favorite holidays. Something about starting a fresh new year (and a fresh calendar–this year I have Gretchen Rubin’s Happier calendar) is so satisfying to me. I love setting goals and thinking about the things I want to accomplish in the coming year. However, I’m more of a starter than a finisher–unfortunately–so it’s always a bit depressing to look at what I set out to complete but didn’t.
The past couple of years I’ve chosen a word for the year, and I really like picking one thing to stay focused on. This year my indecisiveness kicked in and I ended up choosing two words, home and simplify. I may try to continue setting monthly goals, but I’ll stick to these two words rather than setting yearly goals for 2017.
{words of the year for 2017}
I chose “home” because since moving into our new house in October of 2015, we’ve done very little organizing or decorating. While I get frustrated with the clutter and bare walls, I haven’t made it a priority to take action. This year, I want to take time to make our house feel like home, by getting rid of excess clutter and by decorating room by room.
I chose “simplify” because I’ve been craving simplicity since Violet was born. Having a toddler and a newborn limits the amount of free time I have, so I have to be choosy about the things I can do on any given day. I tend to make to-do lists that are miles long, and then get frustrated when I can’t check off all the boxes. I’m starting to realize that I need to make my lists shorter, and only include the things that are most essential and meaningful to my life.
{2016 recap}
Last year I made a virtual mood board of the things I wanted to accomplish in 2016. Here’s a recap of how I did on those goals.
{word of the year – confidence} I think I did a decent job making this word my focus, although I still dreaded networking and social events with a lot of people I don’t know. Realistically, I think that will always be the case, although I know the more I say yes to going to events like that the easier it will be.
{be a better wife} Aaron and I had a lot of date nights over the past year, and we even made it to the Nutcracker ballet right before Christmas as our first post-Violet night out. Of course I want to continue to make our relationship the priority in my life in the coming year.
{be a better friend} I suppose my friends can say whether I was successful at this or not, but I had a lot of in person “friend time” this past year and it was really nice. We took a trip to Nashville with some close friends, and spent lots of weekends just hanging out.
{improve my photography} Well, this was a total fail. Not only did I barely use my camera and take mostly iPhone pictures, but I didn’t even look into taking a photography class.
{save more money} Nothing like having a baby to derail a savings plan. Between Christmas, hospital and doctor bills, and child care, our poor savings isn’t looking so good.
{grow and monetize Shea Lennon} I put a lot of effort into my blog in 2016, and I’m happy with the content I was able to produce. I didn’t do much in the way of monetization, but as of right now I’m okay with that. In my efforts to simplify this year I know that working full time and raising two young children doesn’t leave a lot of room to treat blogging like a job. And for the first time in a long time, I feel okay about that. Maybe one day I’ll be able to earn money blogging, but right now I just don’t have the time to make it a reality.
{find flexible, part-time work that will allow me to be home more} While I didn’t take a part time job, I’m very lucky that my current job is going to let me work from home a couple of days a week. It will be a challenge to get work done with Jona and Violet at home, but I appreciate that they’re going to let me try.
{decorate and organize, room by room} I hoped we would have more done by now, but we did buy some furniture and accessories for our upstairs living room. We just need some pictures and a few small decorations to get that room done. Next I want to finish Violet’s room and then get to work on our den. We have a long way to go!
{get family photos taken} Yes, we did that this year! It was in September when I was still super pregnant with Violet. I shared a few of my favorites in this post.
Do you have a word of the year for 2017? How did you do on your 2016 goals?
