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Welcome to Life Between Weekends! We’re here to infuse a little more joy (and, okay, a healthy dose of ridiculousness) into your weekdays, so you can live every day with that, “OMG, it’s Saturdaaaaay!” feeling. We’re serving up a new post every Monday-Wednesday, and on Sundays, our newsletter subscribers will get 10 reasons to look forward to the week ahead. No Monday blues around here.
With that philosophy, what better time to officially launch than right after The Ultimate Day of Fresh Starts, Jan. 1st? You’ve spent the past few days being quizzed on resolutions, debating whether you should bother creating them, wondering if you should ditch them before the ball even drops.
We get it.
That’s why our challenge to you is not to resolve to do anything starting right this second (after all, social psychologist Melissa Burkley, PhD, recommends taking a week or so to “warm up” to your goals, so you can make little changes that make it easier to achieve said ambitions). Instead, take the day to daydream a little and think about the one sentence you’d want to use on Dec. 31st to describe 2015. How do you want this year to go?
2015 was the year I: __________________________________.
From there, we can map out a few simple, actionable goals for the year ahead, from the simple (learn how to say “I love you” in zulu) to the big, hairy and audacious (take a two-month culinary intensive…in France). Last year, we did exactly that. And I (Candace) had the nerve to tape my 2014 bucket list right on the wall next to my bed, so it’d be the first thing I saw when I woke up each morning.
By the end of the year, I’ll be honest: I didn’t move the needle on some projects (sorry, book proposal and anti-gravity cake), but for the majority, I got to savor the delicious joy of crossing them off the list. Plus, there was an added bonus to reviewing the list: As I went through the things I didn’t do, I reevaluated them. Did I simply not have enough free time to do them, or, when it came right down to it, did I not care about them as much as I thought I did?
What other factors kept me from completing those goals? For the antigravity cake, I realized my aversion to scouring New York for all of the obscure products involved in making the cake prevented me from actually constructing a tower of waffles with syrup magically suspended from midair (told you my goals were wonky!). To tackle this in 2015—and you better believe I’m going to!—I needed to acknowledge my own shortcoming (womp womp) and commit to ordering all of the materials from Amazon, so they can be delivered right to my door, no searching and schlepping necessary.
Every failure and missed deadline helps shape this year’s list, which I’m making today, too. And in case you like fill-in-the-blanks as much as I do, we even designed a printable you can fill out and tape up to your own wall, in case you’re feeling wild and crazy like that.
Download the PDF version: 2015 Goals Template
What are five things you want to accomplish by the end of 2015? Let’s hold each other accountable using #2015bucketlist. We’ll share any goals we gather next Wednesday (1/7), along with some ideas for sticking to ’em.
-Candace