I don't really do "New Year's Resolutions" so much as just set goals for what I want to do. (I've mentioned before that I realize it's a semantic difference, but still also a real one, I think.) I think I'm softening it even further this time by not even calling them goals; I'm calling them "intentions," lol. This what I intend for 2025.

(And yes, I also do know that the changing of the year is an arbitrary divide, and there's no actual magical change from December 31 of one year to January 01 of the next that necessitates that being the time for change or new habits/goals/etc. However, psychological and cultural influences are real! I will take advantage of them!)

I am not wildly hopeful about 2025, largely because I can foresee this being the start of a miserable, dangerous, disastrous four years (at minimum.) Pushing myself toward productivity, or even just focusing on little minutiae feels kind of pointless to an extent. I saw a post on tumblr (by tumblr user gideonisms) to the effect of resolutions not being about whether you actually keep to them or not; it's about them being a promise to yourself that you're still going to try something new.
In my case, I'm not really attempting anything terribly new, but setting my intentions is a promise to myself that I'm still going to try to make my own life (and sometimes the lives of those around me, hopefully) better. No matter what the landscape of 2025 brings, and no matter how hopeless it feels... I am going to live my life, and I will do my best, for as long as I can, to survive and to do better.

Habit tracking has continued to be useful to me. I enjoy my particular blend of a bullet journal/habit tracker and brief "what I did today" entries. It's been nice to be able to refer back and figure out what date something happened on (because I am chronically terrible at judging or remembering the passage of time.) The only longer-term thing I tracked last year was my reading, which I was happy to have succeeded at last year! I did not, for a second year in a row, use the monthly calendar pages that I'd painstakingly drawn out, so I ditched those for this year. Still planning on keeping track of my reading, and the same twelve habits I've been tracking.

Split again into the categories that I track:

Work (self-explanatory; days I go to work)

• Maintain my improved call rate, or increase it further if I can.

Household Maintenance (cooking, cleaning, bill-paying, appointments, general "adulting")

• Try again to do the weekly cleaning/organizing tasks. Our space is so small, we really need to be as efficient as possible with it. Plus, the clutter is overwhelming.

Physical Activity (self-explanatory)

• Move more, and ideally find some form of movement that I don't hate.
• For types of movement I know I do enjoy: hike more once we're back to warmer weather; attend occasional club nights.

Write 500/1000+ Words (typically first-draft fiction, but can also be "topic-focused" posts here or reviews or things like that. A bit vibes-based on whether I think something "counts.")

• Write 75000 words for the year. (I have declared this goal in both getyourwordsout and inkingitout.) I waffled between 75k and bumping up to the 150k goal, but then remembered that I'd picked 75k last year so that I would be able to balance my time doing other things as well, and I would like to stick to that.
• Continue my plans for progressing on multiple works at once.

Write on 2nd+ Drafts (still measured in 500/1000+ word increments, but for any sort of "rewriting" that I'm doing. Still counts toward total word counts.)

• Complete at least one multi-chapter work. (Ideally something I can post, but I'll be happy even if it's something I'm not ready to share.)

Meta Work (a sort of amorphous category. Mostly all the "non-writing" bits of writing, like research or planning, but also the types of life-admin that don't really qualify as household-related.)

• Download more of the media I want to keep copies of. (Maybe related: possibly try to acquire more physical media like CDs and DVDs of things that I enjoy and are available that way.)
• Better organize my tagging and bookmarks.
• Wrangle my email inboxes. (It came up chatting with someone here, and I then realized my situation was way more dire than I thought! I had over 22000 unread emails in just the "promotions" tab! It's now down to 16000, but there's a long way to go.)

Personal Writing (mostly journalling via Dreamwidth, but could also be paper and pen)

• Continue posting to DW regularly.

Other Creative Things (non-writing creativity, like art, photography, etc.)

• Take advantage of the chance to do artistic things. If we go on more hikes, take more pictures, that kind of thing.

Reading

• Read 25 books (anything novel or novella length. Hopefully at a bit more even pace this year than last.)

Attention to Media (times when I focus on movies/TV/podcasts/music/etc., rather than having it be background noise)

• Be deliberate about watching things I want to see.
• Find a way to carve out time to listen to podcasts again.

Video Games (playing them alone or with someone)

• Let myself play them when I want to.

Social Interaction (online or in person, but active rather than passive)

• Participate in DW comms.
• Participate in at least a couple discord servers.
• Maintain at least a vague presence on tumblr and Bluesky (including occasionally sharing my own posts).
• Spend fairly regular time with Taylor.

20 intentions, which is a few more than usual. The ones I'm probably least certain of are the ones in the "social" category. I don't have an overabundance of unused free time, so I don't know how feasible it is for me to devote more of it to socializing in various spaces... but I also think it's going to only get more important to have some form of social connection. So we'll see if I can figure it out!