Goals for 2024
Similar to my recent Year in Review post, I want to start each year with another very personal one: sharing my goals for 2024. It's a great way for me to look back at the end of the year and see how much I achieved, but I also hope to inspire people with my goals or even find likeminded people which will join me on the journey or exchange experiences.
Science shows that people who set goals and track progress towards them are way more likely to actually achieve them and grow.
When reflecting and setting goals, I use a system with a total of 27 areas covering every essential aspect of life. It's based on the wheel of life, but with some changes and a full additional layer on top.
Note: If you're interested in my process of setting goals while avoiding pitfalls and how I track my progress, please reach out to me and I might write a full article upon demand!
For simplicity, I combined all of them into six big categories: business, finance, health, personal development, relationship and writing. I will go through each of them and briefly explain my goals and the reasoning behind them.
Business
Next to further growing my reach and content, I am working on a couple of projects that I want to launch throughout 2024.
- Launch Beyond Macho: Beyond Macho is a platform and source of educational material tailored especially towards people that identify as male. It focuses on masculinity, including sexual and cultural education. Not the typical toxic alpha male bullshit you occasionally encounter.
- Launch Vocapal: Vocapal is a language learning app that I've been working on for a while and it aims to couple nicely with Duolingo. At its core it focuses on vocabulary, but more features including games and AI integrations are planned.
- Build Breath-App: I launched a very simple breathing app last year and want to continue exploring breathing techniques by launching an official app using React Native.
- Offer Coaching Workshops: Together with a good friend of mine, we plan to design specialised workshops targeted at business leaders covering a wide variety of topics from team culture, productivity and leadership to company culture, employee training and communication.
- Grow My Blog: Last but not least, I want to grow my blog and increase its reach to 2.000 monthly visitors. There's another goal further down that will play a crucial role in this one.
Personal Development
Besides my business goals, I also want to continue investing time, money and effort into my personal development. As a freelancer, my knowledge, experience and skills are my primary capital for business success. Next to my goals, I also actively work on my anxiety and emotions, primarily anger.
- Read 24 books: Reading two books per month is an ambitious goal for me, but I have quite some carry-over books from 2023 that I'm just about to finish. I also want to read more fiction and comforting books.
- Pass 2 Exams: Every semester I'd like to attend a new lecture in philosophy and pass the exam respectively. In most cases, this means sending in a paper.
- Reach B1 Fluency in French: I picked up French again after learning it for six years in school. Reaching B1 fluency would help me navigate France without having to fallback to English. Putting it to a test, I already got the French version of the first Harry Potter book for christmas.
- Finish Double Bass Textbook #2: Improving my double bass technique skills is an ongoing effort to reach orchestra mastery one day. My long-term goal is to play and record the Bach Cello Suites on double bass.
- Complete 3 30-day Challenges: Lastly, I came up with three challenges each going for 30 days with at least 30 minutes daily practice. Precisely, meditation, writing and mobility training.
Finance
If you've read my Year in Review post, you might remember that I bought some land to construct a house. To do that, getting the finance aspect right is crucial and thus I have three goals to help me with that.
- Increase Revenue 25%: I want to increase my total revenue by 25% with freelance work, passive income and coaching workshops. Note that we're talking about revenue here, not net income.
- Save 20%: In line with a revenue increase, I want to save at least 20% of that to ensure good conditions when applying for a loan.
- Passive Income: Finally, I want to grow my passive income. I'm not entirely sure where I want to land in the end, but around 500 € would be nice.
Health
I achieved quite some health milestones last year, including quitting alcohol and cigarettes. This years goals are mostly follow-ups and continuations of my already established routines.
- Lose 2 Kilograms: After losing almost 10 kg over the past two years, I want to get rid of just 2 more to reach a final BMI of 22. Basically where I've been before the pandemic, before I stopped running due to my aneurysm diagnosis.
- Heal Gut Microbiome: I've been having irritable colon issues such as cramps, acid reflux and nutrition malabsorption for a very long time and just recently got a SIBO diagnosis. I want to get rid of that and maintain a healthy gut microbiome while slowly increasing my tolerance to certain foods again.
- Increase VO2Max: I want to further increase my VO2Max up to 52 with a mix of running, internal training and body weight exercises.
- Lower Biological Age: While hard to measure accurately, my goal is to lower my biological age by 3 years landing at 34 for now. Ultimately, I want to align my biological age with my chronological age.
- Produce Own Food: Last but not least, while I tried two dozens of new recipes last year, I want to focus on producing my own food now. Things like kefir, tempeh or balsamico vinegar.
Apart from those measurable goals, I want to continue my meditation and workout routines and stay away from alcohol and cigarettes respectively.
Relationship
It took me until 2023 to finally realise that relationships only thrive with continuous effort. This is true for both romantic and casual relationships, but this year I focus most of my goals on my marriage.
- Have 12 ABC-Dates: My sister first inspired the idea of ABC dates. The idea is pretty simple. Traverse the alphabet and have a date for each letter. We decided to have one each month and alternate the planning. January will start with an art night!
- Go On 3 Trips: We love to travel together and one thing we haven't done enough since the pandemic. We might do some weekend trips to bigger metropoles and explore culture, art and food.
- Go To 8 Concerts: As a musician, going to concerts was always high up on my agenda. There's no better way to experience music than life performances. I want to go to 8 concerts in total with a mix of indie, rock, jazz and classical music.
- Learn Advanced Tango: Ever since starting to dance last year, I was fascinated by the elegance and intimacy of Tango Argentino. Our plan is to visit a workshop to refine our technique and learn new, more advanced moves.
Writing
Last but not least, I dedicate a full category to writing. Besides technical writing and blogging, I'm an aspiring fantasy novelist working on a new young adult trilogy.
- Write 12 Articles: I want to double the amount of articles I've written last year. The goal is to publish at least one every month. I'm trying to cover self-management, team culture, web engineering and artificial intelligence.
- Finish Book #1: When I started my adventure into writing a novel, I wasn't expecting it to be such a huge endeavour. Yet, after almost 3 years of planning, learning and writing, I finally want to finish the first draft for my debut novel. Stay tuned to hear more about Moa's journey to finding a place where she belongs!
Conclusion
I'm super excited for whatever happens this year to say the least. While 24 goals might sound very ambitious for just one year - after all that's 2 goals each month - I'm more than confident that I'm going to achieve at least 90% of those. Not all of them require enormous effort and some are already baked into my daily routine.
How about you? Do you set goals? If so, what are your goals for 2024?