Some 2021 Goals

Thank you to everyone who offered thoughts and guidance on shaping goals for the new year. I had this week off from work, and worked through some ideas on what I wanted and how to put that out there.

I did end up writing goals in several categories, though I won’t share them here as I have in past years. Rather, I’ll do a monthly recap post on how things are going generally.

I will set out a few aspects of the goals here, though.

One of them is to write more. I have some word counts that will work across my various outlets, and hope to write at least a little bit every day – blog, personal, academic, whatever works, as long as I build the habit. I’ve fallen into some shortcuts and poor writing tics over the years as email rather than longform took over my output, and I hope to reverse that. Expect more words in this space in the new year.

Another goal is to read more, and with more intention. In years past I’ve easily read 75-100 books; this year being what it was, my focus was very poor, and I ended shy of 50. I also fell off with tracking my books. I’ll bring myself back into accountability through ways that have worked in the past such as GoodReads. Toward the end of this year, I began reading more and more physical books rather than ebooks, and that helped a great deal with my focus.

I’ll blog a little bit about my reading, probably on Saturdays, especially as some of it will be horse reading, obviously.

Here are some of my reading goals for the year:

• one book in French
• five books about horses
• five books about Vermont
• five books from the “to be read” pile
• one book of poetry
• one play
• five books by authors of color
• three books about museums
• five award nominees (Hugo, Nebula, Dragon, Pulitzer, etc.)
• two books about science
• three classics
• three books about organizing/politics
• three memoirs or biographies

If you add all that up, it ends up with 39 books, so room still for purely personal and fun reading.

Here’s to the new year.