🎉 2022: Habit Building Goals

January has already slipped out of our hands, as have most of our New Year’s resolutions and habit goals. The momentum and excitement around our ambitious goals that were flooding our timelines not long ago have vanished. Maybe you were part of this annual movement and had your own collection of dreams to reach this year; and just maybe you’re on course; or perhaps you’re already a month into stopping trying. While I’ve never been much for New Year’s Resolutions, I’m no stranger to setting goals and not quite reaching them. But I’m hoping for something different this year.

✔ Last Year’s Goals

Last year, during February and March I set out to build better habits in my life: eating well, exercising, reading, waking up early, etc. I decided not to focus on big goals, but instead to focus on being consistent with what I call the doing of the habit. In this process of this, I kept hearing about this book called Atomic Habits from a bunch of productivity Youtubers. Curious enough, I picked it up. I ended up reading it twice last year and applied one of the book’s main ideas to my habit building. James Clear, the author, suggests building systems, rather than setting goals, which is the path I had started down already. And although I did have several failures, I consider this as one of the best years for accomplishing personal goals.

Some of those goals, like having a more regular sleep schedule and eating better went exceptionally well. Exercising regular went very well for the summer months, but once November rolled around and it got cold, this fell off the rails and I have yet to pick it backup. And although I did read a lot more than I have in years past, I often would miss several consecutive weeks before picking a book back up. In the Spring I also picked up recording cover songs and uploading them to my YouTube channel. I stuck with this pretty consistent up until October, where my time became a bit more limited. During this time I  changed jobs, and made an intentional decision to take a break.

👀 Looking At This Year

So overall it was a really successful year, but it still had its failures. This year, I am hoping to set some more specific goals and stick to them. I would like to be a year where I can explore some more creative avenues – music & writing in particular; this blog is part of that goal. I’ve considered focusing on just One Thing, but in my current situation, it makes sense to break it out into a few habits. To help me build these habits, I will continue to focus on systems. But I will also tie these systems to some “recurring goals.” I hope these goals will provide me some excitement to keep working towards building these systems. The three areas I’m hoping to build habits in are Writing, Finances, and Music. Let’s break down how I hope to accomplish this.

✍ Writing

Habit: Write daily through blogging and Object Writing
Recurring Goals: Publish at least a monthly blog post on here or Taco Tandem

I’ve never considered myself to be a good writer. Back in school and university, I had to build myself up to writing because I had so much dread. Funny enough, even though I hated it so much, once I would start writing, I could often find myself writing far longer papers than required. I would reach a flow state and the words came easily to me. Outside of this, I’ve always enjoyed writing songs, but have often found myself to go through phases. I can write a lot of songs one month, but then go through a 6-month drought where I can’t write a single lyric.

The motivation behind this goal is to break that drought. I love songwriting and would really like to make it something I can do more regularly (more on this later). Additionally, I would really like to start sharing some of my life and the things I learn online. I think that blogging is the best application for this, which is why you’re reading this today. Since I started my other blog, Taco Tandem, I find that I can enjoy writing a lot, given the right context. And although I haven’t written much for this blog yet, I’ve really enjoyed the posts I have made.

The Writing Habit

The habit I would like to build is daily writing. I believe will improve my ability to express my thoughts and stories. I also believe that the more regularly I can do this, the more I will enjoy the hobby. A few years back I read the book Writing Better Lyrics by Pat Patterson. It’s an incredible book that provides a great tool call Object Writing. Object writing is a writing exercise where you’re given a random word and you write for 10 minutes straight, stopping immediately when the timer rings. During this time, you are allowed to take your writing any direction, but are encouraged to tap into the seven senses: sound, smell, touch, taste, sight, kinetic, and internal/organic. I will use this exercise combined with writing for this blog to help me build this habit.

💰 Investing

Habit: Watch + Understand Stock Markets and Invest Regularly
Goal: Invest a large portion of income in 401k, Roth IRA, or index funds

Money is a weird topic for me. Though I don’t remember being taught this, the subject always has seemed a bit taboo to discuss. However, over this past year I’ve been working to educate myself better on saving and investing. I’ve never been one for budgeting or making a financial plan, but I have always leaned towards being conservative with spending while saving as much as possible.

At the job I started in 2020, they offered a 401(k) match up to 5%, so I decided to take full advantage of it, since it is basically free money for saving that. Since that time I have been keeping up with a 401(k) as well as investing in a Roth IRA. I made these choices somewhat blindly, but afterwards starting to research more about investing. This was the first time I took the time to watch markets and learn about movement. It has been a weird time to get involved in investing, given the chaotic behavior of the market since the start of the pandemic.

The Investing Habit

This year, I would like to build a better habit of watching the markets and studying their behavior better. My goal isn’t necessarily to try to time anything to buy stocks, but just to build more intuition about the market’s behavior. I also want to build a habit of investing regularly. I’m fairly new to investing, so I believe index funds are the safest way to put money in and leave it for the future. My 401(k) and Roth IRA contributions come out at every paycheck, but I am manually investing every quarter. I believe this will let me get involved in the market, but also try to take advantage of small dips in a fund, on any given week. This might be foolish to try to time it, but for the most part, I’m planning on putting the same amount in 4 times this year.

The goal is pretty vague here, but I would like to invest a very large portion of what I make into savings. Right now, I’m set to invest around 20% and am undecided about how to save the remaining amount. As I learn more, I’ll be sharing my plans here on this blog, so stay tuned. 😉

🎙 Music

Habit: Build a daily habit of object writing and practice new music weekly
Goal 1: Publish original songs on Spotify/Amazon Music
Goal 2: Continue uploading cover songs on my YouTube channel

As I mentioned before, last year I started regularly uploading cover songs to my YouTube channel. I have found the process of arranging music and recording songs to be extremely rewarding. While making each song, I usually run into a few new issues that inspire new ideas. I enjoy the process of making music as well as the videography required to put together the songs. Each song required several camera angles, so I can get lost in the edit for quite a while.

I would like to rebuild the habit of uploading cover songs to that channel. Although I don’t expect that I’ll be able to release songs weekly, as my channel banner promises, it’s something I want to carve out time to accomplish. I would also like to record my own music to publish to streaming platforms like Spotify & Amazon Music.

The Music Habit

The hard thing about these habits is that it seems impossible for me to put a time on how long it takes to finish a song. Sometimes I can knock out the instrumentation in a few short hours, whereas other times it takes a few evenings. Then recording and editing the video can also vary greatly in timing. This makes it hard to set any specific goals, so I’m focusing on just making it regular. As a rough idea, I would like to put out about an album’s length of original songs over the course of the year (though I will release them all as singles). So hopefully 9-12 songs will be out on streaming services along with a collection of new covers on YouTube.

🍀 Wish Me Luck

So, that’s the plan! It’s hard to judge at this point what I’m going to be able to accomplish, but I’m hoping that by writing it down and publishing it, it’ll give me a kick to keep going on all of these. If you have any strategies, book recommendations, or encouragement, I’d love to hear it in the comments below! Wish me luck! 🤞