coffeecat

March Goals

Spring is just around the corner and it's finally the first of March. It's still pretty chilly outside; I've been misled by looking out window and preparing for a walk in warm sunshine only to be frozen by the wind chill. But with the turn of the month and slow turn of the season, brings out new goals to set and hopefully accomplish a few!

So far this year in 2024, I have 3 categories for my goals: Fitness, Skills/Hobbies, and Finances, and under each main goal is action items or subtasks for those main areas. For the months of January and February, I mainly just documented my goals in Apple Notes and in my daily planner. I've also done this for March but decided to share my goals here as this also aligns with one of my goals for this month!

Goal One: Fitness

The actions items under my fitness goal remain relatively the same month to month. In January/February, I was trying to go to the gym for weightlifting 4x a week but that turned out to be quite exhausting. I was starting to feel the winter blues and it was so much driving. My office has a free gym but it's roughly a 25-30 minute drive and 4 days a week was creating a lot of unnecessary time waste. So for this month, I plan on scaling back to 3 days a week in the gym for weightlifting but then prioritizing other forms of movement at home on my off days.

I also do calorie cycling, I eat at a ~500 calorie deficit for majority of the month (4 weeks) and then eat at maintenance for one week. Highly recommend. It helps give not only your mind a break from constant calorie counting but your body as well. If you continuously eat at a deficit, that will eventually become your maintenance intake and you plateau if you're trying to lose any significant amount of weight. The maintenance week gives you a break and allows your metabolism to rebound.

Goal Two: Skills/Hobbies

For the month of January, I challenged myself to draw something everyday. I managed to do that for the entire month with only missing about 3 days (and I totally count that as a major success!). For the month of February, I challenged myself to use my camera every day, whether it was taking pictures or filming video using my canon camera or my phone. Then later on, I tried filming something from start to finish and tried editing it in iMovie, so I also counted video editing for my daily goal. I was also successful with this, only missing 2 days during the whole month. I also attempted to stack my daily drawing in February along side the daily camera usage. I was less consistent with drawing in February, missing 5 days, but that wasn't the main focus and I'm still proud to have kept that habit up (never missing more than two days in a row).

Now for March, I plan on focusing on writing every day. I also want to stack my drawing and filming/editing daily habits in March, but I'm not too worried if I miss days, as long as I keep coming back to it and don't miss too many days in a row. For writing, I want to focus more on creative writing but also want to write more for my little bear blog too! That's why to kick off my writing goal, I decided to write about my March goals on my blog. I plan to only count blog writing or creative writing towards my goal, not including any personal journaling since I count that as it's own habit and it serves a totally different purpose.

Goal Three: Finances

The finance goal also remains pretty much the same so far, month to month. In January, I attempted a few "no spend" days and manually tracked every purchase I made. I want to get better about spending money and knowing exactly where my money is going. I don't believe I have the worst money habits but 2023 was an expensive year for sure. I've also been inspired by many people who are participating in a "no buy" or "low buy" year. I'm not quite there yet but it's something I would like to work towards and just get out of the habit of buying so much shit all the time. For me, it's for environmental reasons and just feeling like we own too much stuff/have too much stuff in our house with little to no purpose.

At this moment in time, I don't plan on going through exact numbers of my budget, but I've recently read a book called, You Need a Budget, that helped me think more specific about my money goals and what I really want my money to do for me.

Also, still need to finish filing my taxes, woo.

Thanks for reading