My 2020 Goals

As I enter my 44th trip around this planet it has put me in an interesting place to be able to look back and reflect on who I am. I’m a competitor, but mostly with myself. I strive to do better than I’ve ever done before with everything I decide to do. I push myself to be better than I was last decade, last year, and even last week. I love to challenge myself to be the best me that I can be.

When I started thinking about my goals for 2020, I do separate them a little, some goals are work, and some, many are for my personal blog (you are here) and what I enjoy doing as a hobby. For work, those are safely bestowed upon my management chain, and I have a lot of work in the next year to get done. For my personal blog, I’m happy to put some of those down here and see how well I do over the next year to achieve those goals.

Goal: To achieve more success in the Smut Marathon

Last year was my first year entering the Smut Marathon (https://smut.rebelsnotes.com/) and I would love to lie and say I killed it, but the reality is I was knocked out in the first couple of weeks. It wasn’t a complete loss, I had a good time and the pressure of writing under a deadline kicked some stuff off in me for later on in the year. It also helped me as I had some long form essays at work (i.e. employee reviews) that had to be done over the summer. This year, I’d like to make it much further in the competition. As noted above, this is a competition with myself as much (or more) than a competition with the other 119 competitors. Good luck to all that enter.

Goal: Personal Fitness

This one, I’m already putting in the groundwork on. I’d like to lose another 40 pounds this year, over the course of the year. I bought a Peloton (somehow I think I’m going to work this into some fiction in the near future). I’ve been doing the thirty minute rides very consistently and loving them, getting ready to start tackling the 45 minute rides every day. We’ll see how that goes. 

I’ve been doing this for most of the month of December, getting myself ready to push myself harder. Each time I finish a ride, I try to be at least a few points better on the output than the previous ride. For those that have these bikes, they know what I’m talking about.

Goal: New Hosting Provider

I actually achieved this one over the weekend. I spent a lot of time on Friday and Saturday switching mynaughtyideas over from WordPress.com to bluehost and so far I am very happy with it. Sadly, I seem to have had a slow weekend and no one has come to visit. So, I’m hoping that as DNS servers around the world update, my site will be frequented a little more. I’m not sweating this too much, as a few friends have confirmed that they can see the site and that it is up and running. I was really digging the new colors and themes, so I’m hopeful that everyone else will as well. 

That being said, if you see any issues, please let me know so that I can fix them. Thank you.

Goal: Blog Posts

I have two parts to this particular goal. The first one is the number of posts. I’d like to publish 2 posts a week. The second part is consistency, I’d like to publish on both Wednesday and Saturday every week like I did through most of the month of December. When I was trying 3 times per week in November, I found that to be just a little too much with a full time job, family, and a desire to do anything else once in a while. I’d also like to get about a month ahead on the posts so that there is always new content going out every week, even when I do take a vacation, need to attend a funeral, do performance reviews for my team, etc.

This is going to be my biggest challenge because I like to write a post, then spend two days editing it, then post it, watch it post, sit there and enjoy the comments for a day, and then start the next post. It’s treating this as a much more serious hobby this year.

Goal: Writing

All of this is leading up to a much larger goal. This year I want to make some decisions about whether I write well enough to attempt to make a little money at it. I had debated posting some things to Medium, and maybe posting some books to Kindle Unlimited. I’d actually like to write a short novel or maybe some long stories that would just be the anthology of my site. I haven’t completely defined and refined this goal yet.

This also means that I will be writing many, many more multi-part blog posts and trying to post them in chapters so that they are easy to read. I’m looking forward to this challenge as one of the more difficult things I’ve ever attempted.

Goal: Have Fun

For me, this is my primary non-work hobby. Other than it takes place in front of my computer, it has very few connections to my day job. This means I’m going to do it while I’m having fun. Even trying to be a little more serious about it, I still want to do it because it’s fun and it allows me to get my voice, and my mind, out there. I love every minute of it. 

As I’ve said a few times, to those that enjoy what I write, I appreciate you so much. You’ll never know how much happiness you bring me. This past week I had a funeral to attend out of the blue (it’s why I’ve been quiet) and I got a few comments in email, twitter, etc that made me smile when I read them (some might even have had some other reactions). 

I wish you all a great day, a Happy New Year, and may your 2020 be the perfect vision of what you want it to be.

Image by Annalise Batista from Pixabay

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Of course it’s Wicked Wednesday, and of course I’m going to contribute to a prompt that basically challenges me to spill my goals out onto a post. http://wickedwednesday.rebelsnotes.com/2019/12/prompt-396/ everyone should share, see you all soon.