For a number of reasons, I'm not making an official goals list for 2015. Many of you know that there is one thing that I've really wanted during my time in Milwaukee, and making goals about other things has been one way to put my focus elsewhere. Sometimes these efforts feel like a lot of bs, and I'm trying to avoid that in 2015. However, official or not, I still find myself setting goals. And after a lot of debating, I'm sharing them here. I can't promise that I'm going to make periodic updates throughout the year about them. But here they are.
- Increase my passive income earnings. Remember how this was my big goal in 2014? As in, the one thing that I wanted to accomplish more than anything? The main reason that I quit writing goal updates in 2014 is because this was a big fat fail. The short of it is that I had no idea how to accomplish this while continuing to scale my freelance work and without giving up something else. I also had about half a dozen ideas for increasing passive income without a definitive plan. This is still really new territory for me, but I have a better idea what I'm going to do now. Even a minor increase would be huge at this point so I'm hopeful.
- Finish editing as many 2014 pictures as possible by spring 2015. Last year I got into a pattern of editing a handful of pictures for Instagram, editing another dozen to put together a blog post...and then letting the rest sit. For months. Consequently I have literally thousands of photos in unfinished sets in Lightroom. The first part of this goal is to get through as many sets as possible while the weather is cold and I'm not shooting as much. The second part of this goal is to not let pictures sit so long in the future. I like having a little buffer between shooting and editing because it makes me more critical about picking the best shots, but I need to maintain a healthy buffer and not let my Lightroom library get out of control.
- Not drink alcohol unless I feel like it. I'm sure that this sounds like a ridiculous goal, but the truth is that I've never really liked drinking alcohol. I drink infrequently. It's extremely rare that I ever really want a drink. Consequently I have a low tolerance so it doesn't take much alcohol for me to feel buzzed, and frankly I hate that feeling. Most of the time I drink because I don't want to answer questions about why I'm not drinking or have people pressuring me to drink. And I'm done with it. People can think and say whatever they want.
- Not wear makeup unless I feel like it. I truly resent how women judge other women for not wearing makeup. I also resent how women are judged in general for being less professional or less put together if they don't wear makeup. Nothing should exude more confidence than not wearing makeup. Thankfully I've spent the last three and a half years among people who don't think anything of showing up to a backyard barbecue or book group with little or no makeup. However, I still feel that pressure sometimes, and I'm not going to give into it anymore.
- Spend more time off of the computer. Since I started freelance writing, my number one priority during computer time has been work. My second priority has become editing photos. Over the past few years, I've cut way back on other things that I do online. The more that I cut back, the more that I don't miss it. There is a lot more that I could say about this topic. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of things that I want to spend more time doing that don't involve the computer, like reading and playing the keyboard that I got for Christmas. I'm hoping that the drive to do these things will keep me motivated to get my work done and then get off the computer most days.
If you've been setting goals for 2015, feel free to link up your posts in the comments. I always enjoy reading about goal setting, and I know that others do, too.
