January 2021 goal setting: Read, write, exercise – REPEAT!
Happy Saturday! It’s been a full week since 2021 began, so it’s time for a quick goal check-in.
What have I been doing for the past week?
On January 1st I wrote up a list of five goals for the month, two of which I aim to maintain all year. Here are my five monthly goals, with asterisks denoting the year-long items:
- *WRITE* every day, as part of my #OneMillionWords Challenge.
- *EXERCISE* every day, with a goal of 5.5 miles walked daily (part of my virtual journey to Neptune).
- READ Dante’s The Divine Comedy, at a pace of one canto per day, as part of the Chapter-A-Day Challenge.
- COMPLETE my Race Through California 5K.
- READ at least two books for my Reading Women Challenge.
Looking at that fairly large list, I decided to hit my goals hard and got straight to work, racking up 5.3 total miles of walking, reading Canto 1 of Dante’s Inferno, and writing 2,233 words towards my #OneMillionWords goal. I even did a 21-minute writing sprint to celebrate the new year.
It felt good to finally leave 2020 behind and start fresh, and I was full of energy.
So how did I do for the rest of the week?
#OneMillionWords: Weekly word counts
Here’s a breakdown of how many words I wrote this week towards my #OneMillionWords goal:
- Saturday 1/2: 1,018 words
- Sunday 1/3: 827 words
- Monday 1/4: 1,134 words
- Tuesday 1/5: 2,130 words
- Wednesday 1/6: 567 words
- Thursday 1/7: 315 words written + 5,791 words edited
- Friday 1/8: 600 words
That’s a grand total of 14,615 words!
I would’ve liked to have completed more work on my projects, but as you may have noticed there’s been a bit of political upheaval happening here in US, to put it mildly. I think most of us have been distracted this week, living through an attempted coup and its aftermath.
Plans for next week
As we’ve come to the weekend, I plan to write and edit more words, log my mileage for my Race Through California 5K, and keep working on cleaning up my office space (an end-of-the-year project that includes cleaning off my virtual and physical desktops, as well as getting rid of a ton of paper clutter that’s been piling up in here and needs to go into the recycling).
My word count goal for next week is to add another 20K to my total, so I’m aiming for roughly 34,615 words written or edited.
And since I am motivated by shiny objects and merit badges, I’ve decided to start handing out badges to myself at every 10K mark towards my first 100,000 words, so this week I have earned the first of those, the Pencil Pusher Badge of Achievement!
If you have also written at least 10,000 words this week, please feel free to swipe a copy of this badge and affix it to your website, social media, or anywhere else that makes you happy.
How was your week?
Thanks for coming along with me on this goals check-in, as I find accountability to be a helpful tool. Even if that’s just posting my word counts on my own website, it keeps me motivated to press onward. If this helps you, too, please consider sharing your goals and achievements in the comments below!
