2025 Goals: Personal

Okay, I’m back with my Personal goals. I aimed to come up with 5 for each domain to hopefully total 25. (As a reminder, my domains are Personal, Health/Fitness, Kids/Family, Household, and Other).

1. Read 25 for 25

This came to me when I saw “Read 25 minutes in 2025” is Gretchen Rubin’s public challenge for the year. I haven’t done any of her other recent challenges, but it’s been bothering me that my reading totals keep falling lower… and lower… each year. I went from reading 25+ books/ year in 2020/2021 to completing a total of only SEVEN books this year!!! (*In fairness, I ended up somehow having like 4 books going this fall all at once, so I’m actually going to finish those all up very soon.)

I mean, it’s fine. I obviously do a lot of other things, and there are only so many hours in the day! I am not striving to keep up with the 75+ book a year people. But I think I could at least move the needle a bit. I DO like to read, and there are dozens of books waiting that I’d love to read.

25 minutes initially sounded like kind of a lot, to be honest. But then I realized a couple things. First, I don’t need to read it all at once. Second, I often spend 35+ minutes a day scrolling around on my phone. Third, 25 minutes is actually only 1.7% of the day. NOT actually that much…

I decided that on weekdays I’ll aim for doing what I’m calling the 10-5-10 method.

• 10 minutes in the morning (non-fiction)
• 5 minutes at some point during the day –> This feels very do-able! I envision myself popping water in the basement microwave for tea on a work break (takes 2 min 19 seconds to heat) and reading for 5 minutes while I steep the tea. I wait for the water and need to get up from my desk, anyway.
• 10 minutes in the evening (fiction)

I long ago adopted SHU‘s idea of reading non-fiction in the a.m. and fiction in the p.m., but I just haven’t been consistent with reading anything. Breaking it down into 10-5-10 feels realistic, but like I could make some serious progress!

Reading Sub-Goals:

Under this goal, I also want to:

1. Read Harry Potter before we go to London!! I have never read Harry Potter! I know!!! Crazy, right?

2. Read 2 personal finance books. Money and finances and investing are not really my strong suit. I’m not particularly interested in this topic (at all), but it’s important and I feel like I have a bit of a knowledge gap from what’s ideal for a 41-year-old adult. Reading 2 personal finance books feels like a low-pressure way to educate myself in one of my weaker areas. (Book recs? I keep hearing a lot about Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich.)

How I’ll Track: On my Habits tab in my Time Log spreadsheet. (Main goal is to hit the 25 most days- I don’t really care about the fiction vs non-fiction part. Just recording that for my own “interest”, lol.)

I will track the Harry Potter + Personal Finance goals in my Goals List in Google Tasks:

2. Write 5 past trip blog post recaps.

This is just a fun one. You’ll recall I said I wanted to go back and recap our past (pre-blog) family trips. Why? Because I have no photo albums of these trips, no photo books, and no travel journals. And that makes me sad! Also, since I started this blog in 2020, I have recapped every trip we’ve taken- and I absolutely LOVE them.

I started this little project last year, with a recap from our 2007 honeymoon to Disney World, and I jumped ahead to our 2017 trip to Barcelona. But that’s all I’ve done so far.

Will I be able to remember all the details from 2012? Ha, no. But if you haven’t noticed, I take a lot of photos. And the amazing thing about pictures is that they REALLY jog my memory!! It’s crazy how things come back to me.

Originally I had said I wanted to do like, one of these a week. Haha. Yeah, right. They take a long time! And also involve sorting through old photos and uploading them to the blog.

But I think I could do 5 this year! That feels like a realistic bar.

How I’ll Track: I made a working list in Google Keep of all the years + the trips. I also created a blank list in my Google Tasks goals list, so I can fill in the trip name as I complete this. (And see if I haven’t done any yet by June!)

3. Read 2 books in Spanish, watch 2 movies in Spanish and listen to 5 podcast episodes in Spanish.

Another mostly just fun goal. I speak Spanish regularly, but it’s been 20 years now since I’ve had any formal Spanish training. It’s not my native language, which means it will never be “100%” for me. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Spanish, but most of my current Spanish speaking is very casual, conversational with family and friends. (And primarily always with a Mexican accent and dialect.)

I decided I’d like to challenge myself to keep learning and experiencing Spanish in a variety of ways. You know, the whole “if you don’t use it, you lose it” thing. Spanish literature, and even movies and podcasts, will inevitably present different vocabulary and spoken accents, etc., which will just challenge my brain more.

How I’ll Track: I have a box on my Habit Tracker for “Spanish”, but will list specifics in my Tasks list:

4. Order 2 fun piano books + learn new pieces.

I haven’t bought any new music in years. I mostly play my old classical stuff, and I have a variety of great Christmas books that I love.

But I have pretty limited other “fun” music! I’d love to get a few books with really nice arrangements of some classic rock or pop or show tunes, etc. and expand my repertoire.

How I’ll Track: My Google Tasks list. Will fill in the book titles once I get them! I am not setting a particular “play X times per week” or anything goals. I think the main goal is to research and order some good books. Once I have them, I think the rest will take care of itself.

5. Average 3 hours/day with my phone in Focus mode in the Forest app.

I know I’ve mentioned the Forest app before, but I’m kind of obsessed with it right now. 🤣

This goal is my current solution to “be on my phone less”. I’m not feeling drawn to drastically cut out all social media or throw my phone away or anything. I mostly just want to make sure I have some big chunks of my day where I’m not looking at my phone at all. I want some PHONE-FREE SPACE. It’s good for my sanity.

Quick refresher: The Forest app is a free app where you plant a virtual “tree” (you pick the type from the Forest library) when you start a Focus session for a set amount of time (can be 10 minutes to 3 hours). Your phone then goes into a “downtime” mode for the duration. IF you “quit” (i.e. override it to access the apps), your tree dies. So, your little virtual forest will have a brown, withered up tree in it. haha.

It can also play white noise (rain, night forest, thunder, waves) during your Focus session, if you want (or it can be silent). (I LOVE this feature.)

I first started using this app intermittently a year or more ago for deep work blocks (usually 30 minutes at a time). I picked it back up again more recently and have found it SO effective! The act of opening the app, selecting a tree to plant + setting how many minutes I’ll focus for is a really powerful cue. The rain sound it plays has also become a big mental cue.

I also realized that I can use this ANY time, not just for work! I can “plant a tree” for an hour in the evening if I just want to stay off my phone and focus on my family. I have also been planting a tree during my workouts. (I had gotten into the annoying habit of doing too much scrolling in between sets. I much prefer to just put my phone away during my workouts and have that whole hour just be for me. *I can still access my workout app. You can set which apps you want access to during the downtime.)

So, my goal for 2025 is to total at LEAST 3 hours a day with my phone in Focus mode. That’s a low bar, I think. But it means that of my ~16 waking hours, at least 3 of them will be completely phone free.

The app, of course, is also kind of “gamified”, which is just… silly but fun. You earn virtual coins for every tree you plant. You can then unlock different, more exciting trees (or different white noise options) by purchasing them with your coins. lol. They also run daily streak challenges for bonus coins, etc. Again, silly, but it’s free and fun and weirdly motivating.

I committed to the 3-hour thing on 1/1. (But only did 2 hours on Friday 1/3- was just in a lot of meetings so my phone wasn’t an issue and I kind of forgot. Oh well.)

How I’ll Track: I added a row on my daily Time Log/ Journal page to record my app totals.

To remind myself throughout the day, I also added it to my Daily Habits Google Tasks list:

*I get a little self-conscious when I explain my tracking methods, because I feel like it sounds so “over-kill”, but I swear, I basically have 2 spots this all goes: my Google Tasks list and my Time Log/ Habit Tracker spreadsheet. Recording all this stuff takes maybe 1.5 minutes a day, at a stretch. I SWEAR it’s not as complicated as I’m making it sound. And it’s all so easily accessible right on my phone or computer (which I’m on all day anyway and I have the tab open constantly…).

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Okay, there you have my deep dive on my Personal goals section! Hope that was fun for some of you to read. 🙂 Will be back with Health/Fitness this week!

Daily Gratitude:

I am grateful for heat, because it’s COLD here this weekend. Not a fan anytime it’s <15 degrees or so, because it’s really too cold to comfortably or even safely walk Charlie, with negative wind chills…