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With my 2023 goals and favorites officially in the books, here are my 2024 goals (and how you can help!)

Goal #1: Make blogging a habit 📝

Though I failed to properly blog about my travel adventures from the past year, I’ve got a lot of half-finished travel drafts lying around that I’d like to finish this year.

Topics I’m planning to cover:

• My personal pack list (includes advice on the do’s and don’t’s of travel packing)
• WiFi Tribe vs. Hacker Paradise (vs. Outsite) pt. 2 (my #1 most-requested topic)
• Travel reports for each country I went to (highlights, challenges, and recommendations)
• My rookie mistakes (what I learned from one full year of nomading)

The exact habit I’d like to build is to spend a minimum of 15 minutes per day working on blog content.

How you can help

Please let me know if you read these posts (and what you enjoy most about them!)! It feels lonely in here sometimes, with most of my comments being spam. Send me post topic ideas! Send me your blog (if you have one) so we can be blog buddies! Any and all encouragement, even if it’s just “I read xyz post” is welcome.

Goal #2: Cultivate a creative mindset 🎨

Lately I’ve been feeling a void of creative energy and activities in my life, which bothers me. However, I wasn’t settled enough in 2023 to have time to meaningfully spend doing creative stuff.

This goal is vague on purpose: I don’t want to restrict myself to focusing on one specific activity, since that’s not how creativity tends to work. So the goal is just to do creative activities on a regular basis.

What are “creative activities”? For me, this includes:

• 🎶 Making music (record covers, work on original songs, maybe learn an instrument)
• 📝 Creative writing (outline stories I’ve had in my head for years, write new ones)
• 🎨 Painting, drawing, or crafting with my hands in some way
• 💅🏻 Doing DIY manicures (continuing my 2023 practice)
• 🧙🏻‍♀️ Putting together cosplays or fantasy fashion outfits
• 🪄 Anything else I get into this year! (maybe a new hobby is on the horizon?)

My general metric is to spend 2-3.5 hours per week on creative endeavors. I’m not being too strict about it, however.

How you can help

I’m asking all my friends about their creative hobbies and if they’d want to do something creative together (manicure nights, pottery classes, etc.) You can support me by sharing what sparks you creatively, and letting me know if you wanna work on something creative together!

Goal #3: Maintain long-distance relationships 💕

Anyone who knows me knows how bad I am at replying to messages (sorry). I was especially awful at this while traveling last year, which unfortunately lead to some hurt feelings and strained friendships.

Traveling throughout last year prompted me to think deeply about intentional community – how the people we keep around us tend to reflect (and influence) our values, beliefs, and habits. Upon returning home, I resolved to be more thoughtful about my personal community, which includes local friends as well as long-distance ones.

With this in mind, I’m aiming to review and reply to DMs where the other person replied most recently on a daily basis. This doesn’t mean I reply to all unread DMs at once, so please do not take it personally if you don’t get a 24 hour response.

I’m also trying out different formats – namely, voice notes. I’ve always been a text-based person; I don’t like the way I look on video, and I’m averse to talking on the phone if I can help it, though voice notes seem to hit a perfect middle ground where I can convey (and hear) more emotion while still being async.

How you can help

If you’d ever like to try out voice notes with me, feel free to send one my way 🙂 I aim to keep mine under a minute long, and request you do the same, out of respect for each others’ time.

Better late than never

With everything else going on in my life (wedding planning, some career stuff I’ll post about soon), I decided to only have these goals. The smaller number helps me feel energized but not overwhelmed.

I took my time posting because it was a challenge for me to whittle myself to just three. I’m still flip flopping on having a language or a fitness goal, though I think I’ve officially ruled those out for now.

That’s it – I’m looking forward to sharing my progress at the start of 2025. Ideally by that time, I’ll have published a wealth of new blog posts about other things to fulfill my blogging goal 📝

P.S: I’m experimenting with different design elements for this blog, including creating a custom, y2k-retro header. If you can recognize the font, I’ll buy you a coffee the next time we meet.