2017 Aspirations and Goals

St. Louis Arch on a sunny day

Have you ever felt like you were trying to drink out of a fire hose?

When I started thinking about what my aspirations and goals are for 2017, I began to have that feeling. I realized I was looking at everything I’d like to change and trying to fit it all in one year. I just can’t. I’ve got to eat this elephant one bite at a time. (Please excuse my sort of mixed metaphors) So, I’m going to focus on a few things in four areas of my life: my home, my blog, my person, my spiritual life.

My Home

Original real estate photo featuring an endless sea of orange oak.

This area is the easiest to measure improvement throughout the year. If I can create a more comfortable, efficient home, I will have succeeded. There are plenty of little things I’d like to accomplish. The big goals are:

  1. Replace the old, nasty living room carpet and kitchen flooring with new wood flooring. This is also not a cheap goal. I keep saving money toward this and something comes up. Tell me you can relate.
  2. Paint the kitchen cabinets and reduce the endless sea of orange oak. We’ve owned this house for three years and planned this from the beginning. Why hasn’t this been accomplished yet? Because we’ve done this before in another house and this isn’t a fast and easy job. Frankly, we keep putting it off. No more procrastinating.  2a. I’d like to replace the counter tops too, but that’s probably not a 2017 goal.
  3. Lastly, my husband wants to finish the remodel of the basement. Technically, this is his goal, but I would like it too!

My Blog

I want to find the balance between dreaming big and being satisfied with reality. I need to learn so much about blogging in general (cue the fire hose). So, I guess my goals are:

  1.  Be more adept at blogging skills like editing photos and editing the content errors (yeah, this takes a lot of time).
  2. Learn about building a consistent blog with interesting content. What resonates with readers?
  3. Find a mentor in the blogging world that can help me avoid mistakes.

My Person

I want to keep this simple. My life is too sedentary and I need to move more. I want to walk after work at least 3 times a week.  I want to eat healthier and I made some good progress with this in 2016, but I need to step it up.The holidays have been like quicksand to this goal recently.  I also want to focus on better time management.

My Spiritual Life

This is the area that I really want to focus on this year. While the other areas may add quality to my life, this is the one that really matters the most.  I will be looking for some good devotional books and I want to spend more quiet time in prayer. If you have any suggestions for a good book, please let me know.

Hopefully, I’ll be sharing with you how I’m getting along with these goals throughout the year (and hopefully by next year I’ll be able to report progress in all areas). What are your goals for 2017? Please subscribe to the newsletter on the right side of the post.

Thanks, for reading,

Celeste