June is here, and we’ve made it halfway through 2020 already. This has felt like both the shortest and longest half of a year ever at the same time, and it’s definitely been one of the strangest.
Circumstances these past few months have been unlike anything we could have imagined back in January, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who completely let their New Year’s resolutions and goals slide for a while. However, we set those goals for ourselves as a form of self-care and to bring about positive change, so I believe it’s good to go back to them as soon as we feel able. I’ve personally picked them back up and if you feel ready, I’d like to encourage you to do the same.
Goal-setting is no good without review, and I say the six month mark is a great moment to take a step back and asses the state of your New Year’s resolutions. How are you doing on the goals you had set? Have you achieved some of them yet, or taken steps towards achieving them? Any habit shifts you wanted for yourself, have you implemented them and have they stuck?
If you find you’re not where you’d hoped to be by this time, and your goals are still relevant, try to find out what you need to do to achieve them by the end of the year. If the goals are specific, put a time schedule to them and plan the steps you need to take in your calendar. Actively set aside time to work on your goals.
If you set resolutions at the start of the year, now’s a great time to remember why you wanted to make changes, and try to find that motivation again. There’s still plenty of time to make it work!
How Am I Doing?
For my own goals and resolutions, I’ve had varying degrees of success. Let’s take a closer look at how I’m doing so far.
Phone Use
My biggest priority for the year was to curb my phone/social media addiction and start using technology more intentionally. I wanted to bring my screen time down dramatically, and revert my phone back into a useful tool rather than an accessible distraction.
I did really well there for a while, until the pandemic hit. One of our ratties got really sick around the same time and those two events were just too much for me to handle. I don’t think my screen time has ever been as high as those first few weeks in March- I desperately craved a constant stream of news updates, opinions and fellowship and as I felt paralized, scrolling through my phone seemed like the only way I could distract myself.
I now find myself having gone back to my pre-pandemic ways, where I’m not as glued to my phone as I was those first weeks, but am definitely using it much more than I need to. The way I’d like to go about this goal from now on is to set some rules for myself. I think the following are a good place to start:
- Not using my phone in bed (morning or evening)
- Leaving my phone in another room during work hours (not including breaks)
- Not using my phone while I’m also doing something else (scrolling through social media while watching TV is one of my worst habits)
Once I’ve implemented and made a habit of these rules, I can see if there’s anything I’d like to add to bring my phone and social media use down even more. When you’re trying to make a change that’s hard for you, like this one is for me, it’s important not to discourage yourself by being too strict and setting yourself up for failure. Slow and steady wins the race!
A More Positive Mindset
This year, I wanted to focus on taking life a bit more lightly and looking on the bright side of things. I tend to be weighed down by emotions that can be a tad out of proportion to my situation, and I’d really like to change that. As I’m sure you can imagine, this is another one I was doing much better on before the pandemic and ill rattie. However, I’m not exactly sure why, but I feel like I would’ve handled the whole thing much worse a few years back.
This is a hard goal to specify and set up a game plan for, other than to keep reminding myself of it regularly. So I do. At times it’ll be useful, at other times it won’t, but any step towards a more positive mindset is a good one in my book.
Tidy Up
Now here’s one that actually got a boost! My goal is to put things away right after I finish using them, so that the house is always tidy. Since we’ve been spending so much time at home and I’m quite affected by my surroundings, I’ve really made this a priority. I’m now super diligent about cleaning up after myself right away, and doing a final sweep around the house before bed so that we always wake up to a tidy home. All that’s left to do here is keep it up and hope it becomes so ingrained in me I’ll no longer have to think about it.
Shift To Second Hand
In 2020 I wanted to shift my shopping habits more towards second hand, which includes both buying secondhand rather than new, and selling my own unwanted possessions. I did successfully go though my first Instagram closet sale at the beginning of the year, where I was able to sell the majority of clothing items I had decided to part ways with in my winter declutter. The secondhand shopping has proven a bit more challenging so far though, as it’s very hard to make second hand purchases while social distancing. Besides the fact that I’ve barely bought anything at all, that is. I hope I’ll get more opportunities to explore this in the second half of the year!
Get Ahead On Content By Two Weeks
One thing I struggle with in my life is to find a good work routine in terms of content production. I have a creative job which requires me to come up with new ideas on a schedule, and that is something I struggle with as one can’t really put a timer on creativity. Sometimes I simply can’t come up with any good ideas for days or even weeks on end, and as my deadlines near in those situations, it creates a lot of stress and pressure which could be avoided if I always had some material I could upload in those times.
My goal for this year was to always be ahead on my upload schedule by at least two weeks. I carried this goal over from last year when I wasn’t able to hit it, and it’s proving to be very difficult again this year. I’ve been suffering from creative block, in more and less intense waves, for over a year now and coming up with two weeks’ worth of content ideas at once so that I can get that head start seems to be a major challenge for me. I’ve been ahead by at least a week for the majority of the year, which is already much better than working last-minute, but I’m not nearly where I want to be yet. I really hope I’ll be able to resolve this soon, as it’s a huge one for me.
Buy A House
My last goal for this year was to look into getting a mortgage and potentially buying a house. We’re currently renting a small apartment in Amsterdam which is ridiculously expensive, and it’s time for us to move into a home with a bit more space. However, in light of current events, we’ve decided to postpone this dream until 2021. This doesn’t seem like the best time to buy a house, and we haven’t been able to take some of the steps necessary in order to start the property purchasing process, for obvious reasons.
I have been learning a lot about personal finance though, and am making some pretty big steps in that area of my life. It’s a subject that never really sparked my interest before, but that has changed a lot over the course of the past six months and I now find myself reading personal finance blogs and books on the weekends, haha! I’m picking up on some very valuable information that I’m sure will help me a lot int he house hunting as well as other stages in my adult life.
So, how are you doing? Are you keeping up with your goals and resultions, or will you use this opportunity to try again?
