New Year’s Goal-Setting Redux

Planning for the Next 365 Days

Welcome to your final Shelf Life of 2022 (and mine). It’s not going to be an exciting one. The last Shelf Life of the year never is.

This is the article I write each year (third year running!) during which I recap how I did with my reading and writing goals in the year ending and talk about my goals for the year to come. Before I get into those specifics, though, I want to talk about some cool things I learned about goals this year (plus a refresher on some cool things I already knew about goals). So I’m going to talk about those things, and then about my apocalypse skill, and then about the specifics.

Something neat I’ve learned from my day job is that just because you set a goal during goal-setting season doesn’t mean you have to keep that goal until next goal-reckoning season. Priorities change, and that’s normal. It’s actually not reasonable to expect that no priorities anywhere in your life will shift at all for a whole year. 

I’ve also learned, there, that the right number of goals to set is a number that you probably won’t achieve all of them but will definitely achieve some of them. If you achieve all your goals in a given time period, you probably could have set more goals and accomplished more. So as a rule I try to set more goals than I actually intend on completing, and then at the end of the year or at the appointed goal-reckoning time, whenever that is, I see how I did. If I accomplished everything on my list I can feel proud of that but it also probably means I did not challenge myself enough.

This is the first place I’ve worked that has this mindset. Everywhere else I’ve worked it was like you have to meet all your goals or your review is not good or you don’t get your bonus or whatever. As a result, everyone in those companies was careful to set modest and easily achievable goals and nobody pushed for anything ambitious. What I’ve learned from this is, if you exist in an environment where failure is not a viable option (where failure is considered unacceptable or is punished) then you exist in a poor environment for growth and one where you are unlikely to be challenged. People don’t try new or hard things in environments where they stand to lose if they fail. 

All this to say, I didn’t complete all my 2022 goals and that’s okay. I actually had to shift some priorities midyear and focus more on health and fitness due to some chronic illness issues and that left less time for learning and creative goals and other stuff.

In 2022 I planned to read 24 books and I only read 17—one of those 17 I liked enough I read it twice—and I’m like halfway through another so that may be done by the end of the year. We can call it 19. This year I finally got around to reading Gideon the Ninth which had been on my to-read list for several years; that is the book I liked enough to read twice. I also read its two sequels and will certainly read the fourth (and final) installment in 2023, even if I read nothing else. Of the non-Locked Tomb books I read this year, my favorites were Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree and Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

I also have another three books on the backburner, that I started reading but did not finish and still intend to finish.

Also in 2022 I set a goal to write 12 short stories but I did not quite manage that and wrote only six, which is still a lot more than in 2021 so I’m pretty happy about that. One of those short stories was “Assistance,” which was published in The Quiet Reader in March.

In 2023 obviously I want to read more, write more, improve my health (physical, mental, financial), and do great work at my day job. To stay on track I am setting up some SMART goals but I learned something else cool about SMART goals in 2022 that I am going to put to work so I’ll talk a bit about that.

I think everyone knows what I mean by SMART goals because I have talked about this before but I’ll recap. A SMART goal is one that is:

• Specific;

• Measurable;

• Achievable; 

• Relevant; and

• Time-limited.

So if I said, “I will work on my apocalypse skill in 2023” that goals is not SMART. Specifically, it’s not specific enough. I could successfully achieve this goal on January 1 by working on my apocalypse skill for 10 minutes. Boom, done. But obviously that’s not what I mean. A SMART version would be to say, for example, “By the end of 2023 I will have used my apocalypse skill to produce 10 usable items.” This is specific (contains a success condition), measurable (10 items), achievable, relevant (society could collapse any time), and time-limited (by end of 2023).

What I’ve practiced this year is setting SMART goals that don’t necessarily contain an end condition. They still contain a success condition—I will have been successful with my goal when this condition is achieved—but they need not contain an output or an end state. For instance, this version of the goal is SMART but produces no output: “By the end of 2023 I will have spent 200 hours practicing my apocalypse skill.” 

What I mean by “apocalypse skill” is a skill that will be valuable after the apocalypse (which is also an end condition, come to think of it). I am an editor by trade today, in the “before times.” After society collapses and I’m wandering the wilderness, should I come upon a nascent civilization and ask to be allowed to join and share their resources, they will ask me: “Well what kind of skills do you have?” 

You can’t just rock up to the Thunderdome and say, “Well I was a professional, board-certified editor in the before times, so if you let me join your new civilization I can make sure everyone speaks correctly with good grammar.” They will simply shoot you.

Nor can you say, “Well I was an executive at a nonprofit in the before times and I have excellent leadership skills, so if you let me join your new civilization I could help you run things around here.” They will shoot you even faster.

Everyone should have some kind of skill that would be useful in the post apocalypse. Mine is sewing, so I would say, “Well I make and repair clothes and other fiber goods like hats, scarves, and blankets. I can sew by hand and I know how to operate a sewing machine that doesn’t use electricity, if you can find me one.” That’s a valuable skill. They might not shoot me and eat my corpse.

Not being shot and devoured is a perennial, every-year kind of goal. I recommend you spend some time before ringing in the new year thinking about what skill you will bring to the Thunderdome. Everyone should have one.

Alongside working on my apocalypse skill, I’ve set a number of other goals in the same five broad categories I always have (learning, finance, writing, professional, health). I have fewer this year since last year I had too many. I am doing something new that is kind of fun that I will show you in a sec.

As far as word-related goals, in 2023 I hope to read 30 books. I realize that is ambitious given I didn’t even make it to 20 in 2022. Top titles on my to-read list for 2023 are Alecto the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire, and Witchmark by CL Polk. CL Polk and Seanan McGuire are right at the tippy-top of my list of authors I haven’t read yet but want to. I also have a number of nonfiction titles on my list, and I want to read more books on writing craft so I can review them here. 

I have a subgoal to read more novellas and more short stories. A good start would be reading my monthly Clarkesworld since I subscribe anyway.

In 2023 I also plan to write six short stories, which seems achievable since I did that in 2022. And to publish one short story, which again feels very achievable because I did it in 2022. And to write one longform work, which feels like a bear to think about because I haven’t done that in several years; but when I did it last it wasn’t such a big deal at the time so maybe this will be fine. I guess we’ll see.

The other neat thing that is one of my goals this year is to build and maintain a handful of simple, small daily habits. I have chosen 12, which sounds like a lot, but those 12 are made up of things I already do often, most days, or even every day already. So I made this cute, color-coded tracker that hopefully will be fun to use and keep me engaged with using it. I blurred out the actual habits because they contain some health-related info but you get the idea. Each day the habit is done, I fill the box with the related color. I chose 12 habits because that’s how many highlighters I had. For more on habit tracking, you can review Little Habit Tracker That Could.

What I don’t include in my goals is anything Shelf Life related, because Shelf Life is part of my routine and I don’t put routine things in my goals. It’s just part of what I do all the time. I wouldn’t put “go to work” as a goal or “sleep every day” because I do those things as a matter of course, like writing Shelf Life. Each year at this time I ask myself whether I should dial it back to one day a week but it’s not a burden yet and I still have lots of topics in the hopper so right now there’s no need.

Not that you asked but my favorite posts this year were these. If you missed them, these are the ones I recommend catching up on.

• Manage Your Ego

• Till You Make It

• The Toddler Technique

• Study and Experience

• Stupid Rules Deserve to Be Broken

In 2022 I wrote a whopping 103 Shelf Lifes—one fewer than 2021’s 104, due to how the calendar shook out—for a total of (approximately) 213,521 in 2022 (about as long as Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky) and 539,390 life to date (a little longer than Les Miserables by Victor Hugo).

I’m sure all of us can agree that if we had read Crime and Punishment this year instead of 103 separate Shelf Lifes, we would be in a much better place right now and so would the world. But: Do you really want the world to be in a better place? Or do you want a chance to let your apocalypse skill shine?

That’s what I thought.

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