Reflecting on 2023 and Setting New Goals for 2024 with a New Planner

This is it! In less than a month, we are kissing 2023 goodbye and stepping into 2024 with a renewed sense of purpose, new goals and for those who really do them, resolutions (I don't I prefer goals). Like every Decembers, I find myself reflecting on the year that was so that I can map my future and the new year ahead. This year, I used the last trimester of 2023 to focus on self growth and tie loose ends on what I really want to leave behind as the clock strike midnight on December 31st and what I will carry over the treshold. We all have some emotional baggage, fears, concerns and patterns we are all better off leaving at the door and I found that making space to assess that has been a great idea so far. 2023 has been an interesting year over here, with its own special sets of challenges and hurdles I quite frankly am really glad to leave. I spent quality time with my mom in January, but it's also the year we lost our cat, and my mother in law. We got to see our daughter performing the lead in a Snow White ballet production, and our car sustained a bit of damage in an accident (the humans were all fine). There were a lot of unforeseen expenses and several of the goals I had never quite happened. I also saw my best friend move away to another continent. This year was the first year I used a conventional planner over a bullet journal, because I realised in 2022 that I didn't have the time or energy to make BuJo spreads from scratch anymore. I outgrew the BuJo, and I don't regret it one bit. What I do sort of kind of regret though is falling to the pressure of 4 pages to set goals in my 2023 planner and filled them all to the max. I kind of knew then I was setting myself for a tad bit of disappointment, and this is something I am correcting in 2024.

All this year I have been using this undated planner, but in an overzealous elan and this compulsive need to not waste any pages. I did fill them all in the first half of the year. All the goals, all the trackers...everything! The result? Lots of the goals weren't clear enough, and it ended up sounding, more like a wish list than an actual goal list. No human being should ever set a bucket list, a vision board, and goals across 6 categories followed by a 2 page spread of things you are comfortable and not comfortable with...before the year even started. Never mind the 3 pages each month to fill with bedtime and morning routines, trackers, mantras, to-do lists, and then weekly to-do lists, and at the end a goal review page!!!!! As much as I enjoyed having weekly spreads all printed already and using it as a planner. I really do think half that planner was over-kill. I think by June, I gave up on most of the trackers and log pages because I could feel the pressure and burn out. Beside that's when the year started to really feel loaded. So in 2024, I will use Alicia Souza's 2024 Wiro planner. It has less goals pages already, and now rich of my wisdom, I will not put pressure on myself to fill all the pages I don't really need like the "meal planning" ones.

Setting just one big goal in 2024

Rich of this year's experience, I decided to just set ONE main goal for the whole year and work on the steps to get there throughout the year, bit by bit. That goal will be to take the step into art licensing, and approach companies to license my designs by the year's end. In a way, it's a continuation of what I DID achieve this year : building a portfolio of collections I believe it will be a lot easier if I focus on that one target, and make it happen by taking actionable steps toward it, rather than dilute myself in a million other personal and professional goals like I did this year. Rich of my experience, and writing months recap in the planner and in all past journals, I KNOW that there are two months where I'm inevitably going to be low energy : March and August. So I already put a disclaimer in the new planner about taking those months easy and not pushing myself. After all, the ultimate purpose of planners and journals is to help you navigate your future better.

Like every year, I always feel excited with a new journal or planner. It starts blank, full of possibilities and promises, and as the year unfurls, this book become a witness to your story and growth. So which team will you be on in 2024? Team bullet journal or team conventional planner?