As we all know, 2020 was a difficult year for planning and setting goals. In many ways, I was fortunate. Although I did not have a job, my partner made enough money to support both of us. We also had the flexibility and enough foresight to move to a less expensive apartment so we could save on rent.
My goals and priorities for 2020 were almost all related to my graduate program.
How I set my goals
I try to set my personal goals on a yearly and quarterly basis. Then I check in every month and week to reflect on them and aligning my actions with them. My goals are usually all pretty similar and usually fall in to the following categories:
- Personal growth
- Practical
- Health/Wellness
- Professional Development
- Work-Life Balance
This year, I am making them measurable. Instead of saying I want to eat healthier, I am setting a goal of meal planning weekly and sticking to the meal plan.
My 2021 Goals
1. Finish my thesis
I assume this one might be a bit obvious, but I would like to finish my thesis this year. I am supposed to submit my 20,000-30,000 word thesis in May. Meaning I have 5 months to complete this. The word count is not the problem, nor the fieldwork.
Why is this personal growth you may ask? This will be the first semi-major writing project I have ever completed. It is helping me face my fear of writing and finishing a project while also opening doors to different kinds of writing projects.
2. Become fluent in Italian (finally)
I started studying Italian almost a decade ago. I studied two years of Italian in college. Four years and zero Italian later, I met and later married an Italian. We moved to Milan for ten months. Where I bought a book to continue learning. However, it was not until we moved to Belgium that I began to actually use it in preparation for my thesis. Simply put, I am lazy and only want to do the minimum I need to complete what I am after. It is my anthropological opinion that most people have this in common.
But 2021, will finally be the year.
3. Reach a B2 level of Spanish or French
I have studied both French and Spanish but reached the point of being able to hold a conversation. As I become more fluent in Italian, I would like to start learning another language.
French was the first foreign language I ever studied for an extended period of time and in a European context, it is very useful. Assuming we will (be allowed/required) to return to Brussels, French is the most practical language for me to learn.
However, on a personal level and an academic level, I am interested in finally reaching a conversational level of Spanish. I come from a Mexican-American family in Southern California. I grew up listening to conversations that would shift between Spanish and English at any moment even though I never learned it. For my imagined PhD project, I would be working with Latin American communities in the US. For this research, Spanish would not be necessary but it would be beneficial to speak at least conversational Spanish. It would also allow me to interview people in Spanish if they prefer using Spanish to English.
4. Learn more about photography
I am a creative person. I love writing, painting, sculpting, and for a time, I thought I would go to film school. Humans are a very visual species, we rely on or vision for most of the information we use to interpret the world.
In both anthropology and in writing for the web, knowing how to take photos is a valuable skill. There is beauty in capturing moments in the everyday life of the un-staged. Of anything that is not me.
5. Meal Plan weekly with an 80% success rate
For months, Jesse and I have been trying to get in the habit of meal planning and for months we have struggled. As soon as one of us—usually me—gets busy with something else, the plan goes out the window, and we are back to ordering food.
I want us to set and stick to a weekly meal plan with an 80% success rate. There are fifty two weeks in the year and to reach and 80% success rate, we will need to create and stick to 41.6 meal plans, which I can round to 42.
6. Exercise three times a week
During the first lockdown of 2020, we were still in our spacious apartment in Brussels where I had a separate office that doubled as my personal gym. I exercised a lot as a way of breaking up my time spent reading and researching. Exercise was one of my most consistent habits during the first half of 2020.
When we arrived in Italy this summer, I stopped exercising. I blamed the humidity, lack of space, and the time-intensive nature of anthropological fieldwork. Of course, these were excuses.
For 2021, I want to get back into a regular exercise routine. I plan to exercise three times a week, for at least thirty minutes and run at least once a week.
7. Apply for PhDs (and hopefully get in)
PhD programs are very competitive. Getting in on my first try is more of a dream than it is realistic. Also, I have no idea how the pandemic will affect acceptance rates for the 2021-2022 academic year.
Some of the anthropology programs I wanted to apply to were not accepting applicants for the 2021-2022 academic year. Universities might still be doing online education which many people find undesirable. Universities were not requiring GRE scores
- My chances could increase because people are waiting another year to apply due to the uncertainty, fewer options, and a dislike of online learning.
- My chances could decrease because more people are applying since the GRE is waived. Or competition could be more intense since more applicants are applying to fewer programs.
I have one more application to submit this year for US universities. I am also looking into European schools to see if there are any calls that align with my research interests. If I am not accepted this year, I will apply again at the end of the year. So I will spend a lot of time this year finishing up my applications and potentially improving them for next year.
8. Write more
Ann Handley’s book, Everybody Writes, highlights that all of us write, even if we do not identify as writers. We write emails, texts, notes, thoughts, to-do lists. We are regularly writing. Even our social media posts are forms of writing. For years, email writing, some texts, and writing out my thoughts came with anxiety because I feared the way my words could be interpreted by a reader. Being in a master’s program that requires a lot of writing, and I guess being almost thirty, has helped me push through that fear of writing.
I have developed a bit of a writing practice that I hope to stick with:
- Journal daily for twenty minutes,
- Thesis write daily (and when this is over, I will be writing PhD proposals),
- And of course, write and post here every day.
Each of these is measurable in its own right. I implemented each of these at the end of 2020, and these, rather than being new goals, are goals I want to get back into.
9. Manage my time better
This has been a goal I have worked on each year in my twenties. I am obsessive and a workaholic and become easily consumed by projects. When I start a new project, I commit all my time to it at the expense of other areas of my life. For 2021, I will reduce the number of projects I work on at a time and will set time limits for how much time I can spend on a specific task per day. This means I need to use my time more wisely and prioritize my tasks to maintain the quality of my output.
Conclusion
I have a lot of goals, but they are consistent thematic areas I work at in my everyday life. You do not need this many goals. I start by figuring out what is most important to me and small ways I can go about improving in those areas of my life. The most important thing I aim for is to make sure they are realistic. It would be absurd for me to set a goal of going from making no consistent income to making a consistent $40,000 a month. I would give up. I could of course set that as a challenge for myself, but calling it a goal would be setting myself up for failure. Goals, for me, are targets for incremental improvement.