The Honeymoon is Over: Time to Focus

How are you all doing with your New Year’s Resolutions? What’s on your list? To get fitter? To stop smoking? Have a great holiday? Change your career? (I can highly recommend!).

Did you write them down, or for the more tech savvy of you pop it into your ‘Notes’ on your iphone? That’s what I’d usually do too or just say them out loud to friends over a glass of wine.

But this year, I’ve gone somewhat ‘intense’ in my plans – and the result is shown in the photo below. Yes – that’s 11 sheets of A4 paper (some double sided) with my goals for 2019 and in addition HOW I’m going to achieve them. For the past two days I’ve listed my goals and put timelines against them all…

Don’t discount me as being completely abnormal. I promise I’m not but; I feel that the lovely honeymoon period is over; I achieved what I set out to achieve in 2018 and this year I need to sustain it – which means I need to work. And to be clear I WANT to work – I left to pursue a career in wine and I owe it to myself to keep pursuing it.

At the start of 2018 my friend Lee bought me a book called the ‘Inspire Now’ Journal – it was brilliant for focusing my thoughts and actions for leaving for France. So I bought a new one for this year.

Inspire Now Journal

It encourages you to look at your long and short term goals and then how you achieve them on a daily basis. But it’s not just about work it’s about balance in your life. So whilst I won’t bore you with the ‘how’ (there are a crazy number of tasks!) I thought I’d openly share my goals / resolutions because by saying them out loud I feel like I’m holding myself to account.

The book talks to different categories; I’m not allowed to share photos of the inside of the book (copyright and all that) but hoping the categories aren’t too secret to share (will soon find out as I’m tagging them on Twitter!)

Career and Finance: To earn the amount of money I need to live and enjoy life by working with companies that hold the same or similar values to me.

Personal Development and Learning: To retain everything I have learned whilst also learning more about wine. (This is a great one – basically involves lots of wine tasting – quite a few booked already – and reading wine books – got to be some perks in goal setting!)

Family and Social: It’s a two parter this one…

I need to start dating again. Yikes – I’ve just said it out loud. So if you know me well or have worked out my personality by this blog and know of a like minded male please pop him my way :0) (PS: he must obviously like wine and dogs! Oh and I don’t do online dating…)

I want to spend quality time with my nearest and dearest wherever they are in the country or the world.

Health and Wellness: To lose a stone and half by the end of May and retain it (none of those ‘you don’t need to’ messages – I’m not after an ego boost, I just need to lose weight!)

Spiritual. Now. I’m not particularly spiritual so I’ve also added ‘Time Out’ to this category and the goal is ‘to make each moment count through work and relaxation and to never be bored’.

And finally – Physical Environment. It’s a tactical one but I want to have my garden looking amazing or at least starting its journey to becoming amazing. And I figure it will be quite therapeutic too.

So that’s it in a nutshell. They sound quite simple or vague maybe – but not in my head! Clearly you don’t plan for spontaneity (an oxymoron if there ever was one) but despite everything I want to achieve, and the crazy amount of tasks I’ve set myself to achieve them there is still plenty of time to just go ‘yes I’ll do that’ or ‘I’ll go there’ just off the cuff – I’m not turning to a rigid time watcher!

I’d love you to share your goals with me; keep each other honest and all that. Wishing you all lots of luck!