Tag: Small Goals

April Small Goals

April 1, 2018

Writes Like a Girl started this monthly post & has a monthly link up for it on her blog.

Here is a recap of my goals for the month.

1. Catch up with Harry Potter 2&3. Done! I managed to read both books just in time to follow the #harreadpotter schedule and now I’m ready for book 4, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

2. Clean my laptop. Nope, I’m a bad laptop mom.

3. Finish and use my bookish spreadsheet. Kind of. I finished it and I was pretty pleased with the result, but I ended up not updating it (LOL!), I mostly used my journal for that. Not sure if I’ll catch up with it or not.

4. Get a Warsteed in LOTRO. Yes!! I managed to get a nice Warsteed for my little Hobbit, now I just have to finish the training session.

March has been a looong and tiring month, I’ve got some issues with my thesis and they totally put me down, so I’ve spent many days just complaining about myself without taking action. Something I’m not very proud to admit. I hope April is going to be a happier month for me.

April Goals

1. Clean my laptop. This needs to be done!

2. Finish chapter 1 of my thesis. I usually try to keep University stuff private because I don’t like to share too much online, but I really need to get things done this month!

3. Stop caring about my posting frequency on Instagram. This isn’t an actual goal, it’s more a sort of resolution. I started using Instagram a bit differently during the first quarter of the year and, while I’m totally okay with it, I still feel too guilty for not posting sometimes.

4. Be more aware of the apps I use. Call me Bilbo Baggins (the only one who actually reads a full contract), but I’ve recently read this article on how Facebook collects data and I basically freaked out. I already knew most of the stuff mentioned, but I wasn’t aware of all the things and it’s insane! While I can’t give up to Instagram and WhatsApp, I decided to be more mindful with the things I share online, even if I’ve never posted anything private, so I started deleting the Facebook page for my blog, clearing out my About section and leaving some groups I never participated in. Also, I started logging on Facebook from the anonymous tab of my browser no more than once a day, rather than having the password saved in Firefox.

I’m not planning to quit social media, but I’d like to reduce the amount of time spent using them. I’ve recently read so many articles by people who are quitting Facebook and Instagram and I saved so many inspiring quotes, one of them is the following one:

Maybe the fact that I use Facebook to share my blog posts is a tiny tiny reason why others are still using it. It’s like I’m still visiting friends in the smoking area, even though I don’t smoke. Maybe if I quit going entirely, it will help my friends quit, too.

I’ve snapped out of the silly fear that people won’t find me if I’m not there. If they care at all, they’ll find me.

– Derek Sivers

 

These are my four little goals for this month, I’d love to hear from you! What are your goals for April?

March Small Goals

March 5, 2018

Writes Like a Girl started this monthly post & has a monthly link up for it on her blog.

Here is a recap of my goals for the month.

1. Keep a healthy relationship with Twitter. Done! I logged off even from the browser and I let email notifications tell me if there were any mentions or direct messages. If you’d like to know how I’m using social media these days, I’ve written a whole blog post about it here.

2. Reread Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I completely failed this one, but for a good reason. In fact, I’ve discovered the most beautiful fantasy trilogy ever (no, it isn’t LOTR) and I’ve binge read it in just a week.

3. More analog productivity. I managed to check my paper planner almost everyday, however, now that I don’t have classes anymore, I find it easier to put my events on Google Calendar and just use random notepads for tasks. Still analog, so it’s okay.

4. Buy a yoga mat. Nope, but things changed. I decided to not renew my gym subscription for this quarter for several reasons and so I tried the bigger fitness mat I used at the gym for my home yoga practice and it works better than the old one, still not perfect but I decided to save my money for now.

Articles Written in February

How to Spring Cleaning Your Journaling Supplies – I shared some tips on how to declutter and reorganize your stationery over Page Flutter.

March Goals

1. Catch up with Harry Potter 2&3. I’m hoping to be able to reread The Chamber of Secrets and The Prisoner of Azkaban this month.

2. Clean my laptop. I always take my laptop at a nice little techy shop to clean it with compressed air twice a year, the guys that work there are very kind and do an amazing job. However, I’m always so lazy that I kept postponing this task, but I want to complete it this month.

3. Finish and use my bookish spreadsheet. I tried multiple times to use Goodreads on a regular basis, but it’s frustrating to not be able to add the correct edition of the books I read most of the time because they are ebooks or in Italian, also I don’t like the rating system there. I’m using it only for reviews these days and I thought to just keep a running list of my readings on a notebook, but the truth is that my phone is always with me, not that notebook. I tried to use Trello, but I’m not completely happy with it so I decided to try a spreadsheet. Learning to properly use Excel is one of those things I keep postponing and I hate myself for that, but all the reading templates I’ve found are super complicated and full of stats I don’t care about so I’m currently DIYing my spreadsheet and I’m improvising a little bit due to my lack of knowledge. However, I’m pretty proud of it. LOL.

4. Get a Warsteed in LOTRO. This is totally random, I know! 😀 I’ve been so close to getting a Warsteed for my character, but the quest chain is very difficult and I keep dying so my goal is to level up and then try again in order to get that horse by the end of the month. #worstplayerever

 

These are my four little goals for this month, I’d love to hear from you! What are your goals for March?

February Small Goals

February 5, 2018

Writes Like a Girl started this monthly post & has a monthly link up for it on her blog.

I can’t believe we’re one step closer to Spring (which means pollen allergy to me)! January has been a weird month for me because I mostly spent it at home sick or studying, I can’t wait to pass my last exam now. I’m so ready to go to the cinema, visit a museum or go for a shopping afternoon with my mom.

Here is a recap of my goals for the month.

1. Watch more movies and only 1 TV series at a time. Yes, I did it! I have to say that being sick for almost 2 weeks helped me a lot to achieve this goal (LOL). After watching season 3 of Grantchester, I watched all the three seasons of Broadchurch, which was the perfect show since each season had 8 episodes and it was already finished, so nothing more to wait for. Now I’m looking for a new TV series to start in February. Here is a list of the movies I watched (most of them have been a rewatch):

  • National Lampoon’s Vacation
  • Vacation (2015)
  • The Hangover
  • Alexander
  • Warcraft
  • Death on the Nile (1978)
  • Jurassic World
  • Cutthroat Island
  • Miss Congeniality
  • Practical Magic
  • Wonder Woman

Not too bad for a girl who used to watch one movie a month, if lucky, and all the rest was all TV series! I’m not going to track the movies I watch anymore, but I’ll keep trying to stick with this new habit.

2. Journal daily. Done! Both on the Journey app and my diary.

3. Reduce my time on Instagram. I managed to stick with my rule to not check Instagram before noon and some days I almost forgot it until 5 or 6 pm!

4. Wear more makeup. I didn’t actually achieve this goal because I spent so much time at home, technically it wasn’t my fault!

5. Visit more blogs and leave more comments. I did it, but I can improve this.

Articles Written in January

December Favorites – things I enjoyed during December, on the Travelling Geek Show blog.

Tips and Tricks to Start a Reading Journal in 2018 – I’m pretty proud of my monthly post for Page Flutters since I love journaling and books and all that in between. 🙂

App Review: PDF Converter – a nice collaboration I’ve been able to do. I thought about posting it here on the blog as well, but it was a review so I decided to publish it on Medium instead.

How to Keep an Accomplishment Journal and Feel More Productive with Journey – this month I also managed to guest post for my friend Francesco on his blog Keep Productive and I highly recommend you to check out this app, it’s free and actually improved my life!

February Goals

1. Keep a healthy relationship with Twitter. I’m planning to share how I’m using social media in 2018 in an upcoming blog post. However, I decided to go back tweeting but I’m done with scheduling and social media management apps, I only use TweetDeck from my laptop because it helps me to filter my feed. But I don’t have the app on my phone anymore.

2. Reread Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. February is for book 2 of the saga according to the #HarreadPotter schedule and I can’t wait to finish the book to rewatch the movie since it’s my favorite in the whole series!

3. More analog productivity. I decided to go back to a paper planner for 2018, I still keep my long-term plans on Trello and my events on Google Calendar, but I want to use my cute Molang diary more and I want to establish again the habit to check it first thing in the morning.

4. Buy a yoga mat. I’ve been practicing yoga since the end of Summer thanks to the amazing videos on the Yoga With Adriene channel and I’m LOVING it. Now that I finally understood what it feels good to me, I want to go ahead and invest some money in a mat because the one I use it is for fitness and I keep sliding, which is not good because it prevents me to assume the correct posture. By the way, any advice on a good and affordable yoga mat without?

 

These are my four little goals for this month, I’d love to hear from you! What are your goals for February?

January Small Goals + My Word for 2018

January 1, 2018

Happy 2018!!! I can’t believe the New Year is here. I’m already in that post-Christmas sadness that is going to stay with me pretty much until March (or August) and it’s crazy since we also celebrate Epiphany on January 6th here in Italy, so all the decorations are still on, Christmas movies are still on TV and things like that. When I was a child, I knew there was another present to open and other treats to eat, but now that I’m older I can only hope for a good movie on TV.

December has been an incredibly good month this year. Not having University classes to attend, I just did some trips to the library to gather material for my thesis and, for once, I spent December 23rd at home helping my mom. I don’t miss school at all!

Here is a recap of my goals for the month.

1. Avoid procrastination before the Holidays. I don’t feel like I’ve been productive as much as I wanted, some days it was basically impossible to concentrate on my thesis research for me. I could do better.

2. Exercize daily. Done! *pats her shoulder*

3. Choose a word for 2018. More on that in a moment.

4. Spend less time on social media. Done!!! I still can’t believe it, but I’ve been able to take 48h completely off from Instagram. It has been my very first social media detox (I basically use only Instagram these days, LOL) and it felt so good! At first, I started constantly wanting to check it, but I had hidden the app in my app drawer (I love Android for this feature!) and it helped a lot because it wasn’t in front of me all the time. Then, I started forgetting it completely at the point that I didn’t even want to check it back on December 27th! During this break, I realized that I never felt the need to take a detox when Instagram was just, well, Instagram. But now with private messages, Stories, sponsored stuff (I’m looking at you Garden Escapes!) and the ability to follow hashtags, it’s incredibly cluttered, like Twitter. I always followed only the people I really cared to see updates from, not to be rude, but I wanted to be sure to interact with them, leave comments and be a good friend. Now, even if I still follow few people, my time spent using the app has increased because of all those features. I don’t care about the Stories of every single person I follow, but there is no way to avoid them once I start watching them, I can skip them, but they still pop up in front of me.

Articles Written in December

Since I write for other websites as well, I thought it would be nice to share my posts here in these monthly recaps as a sort of newsletter.

November Favorites – My friend Lily and I shared our favorite things from the past month on Travelling Geek Show.

How to Start a Seriously Awesome 2018 Journal – This month’s blog post for Page Flutter was all about starting a journal for 2018. I shared my tips and tricks on how and what to journal and where to start!

My goals for January

1. Watch more movies and only 1 TV series at a time. Since last November, when I finally got Netflix, I got so excited that I started watching tons and tons of TV series, doing little progress since I watched one or two episodes per week of each. I was so excited to finally be able to watch what I liked (TV doesn’t interest me at all), that I’ve lost track of what I started and I basically stopped watching movies, also because my attention span decreased a lot during the years, but I want to change that because movies are what I will remember along the years, not random short episodes. So my goal for January is to watch more movies and to pick only 1 TV series at a time, preferably with a small number of seasons and episodes (The Crown was the only TV show I watched in December and was perfect!), so I can fully appreciate it without feeling the need to binge-watch it.

2. Journal daily. I’ve always been tempted by journaling apps, but I love the feeling of pen and paper when it comes to jotting down my thoughts. However, not being able to print my photos to add to my journaling has always been a pain for me. Luckily, I discovered a beautiful (free) app called Journey and my plan is to use it as a daily recap log, it won’t replace my ramblings on paper, it will be a sort of a photo-a-day project just for myself. I was thinking about doing it on a private Instagram account, but this app is much better. It syncs with Google Drive, you can export your entries in different formats and, most importantly, it isn’t a social media.

3. Reduce my time on Instagram. I will continue with my December goal, it went so well that I’m excited to unplug more this month!

4. Wear more makeup. If you’ve read my previous blog post, you’ll already know that one of the things that I regret the most in 2017 is being too lazy for makeup. I already ordered a new mascara to replace my expired one, so I hope to be in the right direction.

5. Visit more blogs and leave more comments. This can also be translated with: being a blogger again. Instagram is cool, but I’m not an influencer, I’m a blogger and I’ve been that for more than a decade now. In 2017, I’ve been more than once close to shutting down this blog because I couldn’t find the enthusiasm anymore. Maybe I just needed a break.

One Little Word

The amazing Ali Edwards introduced me to this project and I’ve been choosing a word to guide me through the years since 2015. You can find all my previous posts about that here.

2015 – immerse
2016 – less
2017 – magic
2018 – slow

I chose slow for 2018, inspired by the slow reading movement. I want to stop scrolling and start reading this year (can we create a T-shirt with that motto??). I want to spend less time comparing myself to others and more time to be productive. I want to stop feeling like I’m in a race to read as many books as I can and I want to actually finish my TBR folder on my Kindle before getting new books (by the way, I joined the #theunreadshelfproject2018 on Bookstagram, you can follow my adventures here). I want to slow down in general and actually enjoy the moment, being more present with my eyes away from a screen.

Here is the plan, let’s hope I’ll be able to stick with it!

 

Do you have any goals, words, resolutions for 2018?

December Small Goals + End of the Year Reflections

December 4, 2017

After enjoying for months all the posts about monthly goals that Kay and Kristin have written, I finally decided to give it a go and why not starting in December? I discovered that the “Small Goals” series is actually a link up by Nicole of Writes Like a Girl!

So here are my small goals for December.

Avoid procrastination before the Holidays. I have a thesis to write and research to do and when the calendar is set on December my inner clock says CHRISTMAS and so the only things I want to do is to watch Christmas movies on Netflix. But the truth is that I have so much work to do that I should definitely avoid distraction and procrastination and stay productive at least until December 23rd.

Exercize daily. My body is currently a wreck at the moment and my osteopath gave me 3 simple exercises to do every single day, they are not very time-consuming. I want to be sure to actually do them every day even during the holidays, so I’ve set up reminders on my phone.

Choose a word for 2018. I stopped setting goals for the new year because I never achieved them and they weren’t actionable, so I decided to pick a word and let it guide me. This project was inspired by the One Little Word class by Ali Edwards and my word for 2017 was MAGIC. I wanted to reconnect myself with my fandoms and my passions because I’ve put them aside when I started learning about blogging and biz and all the marketing you can find online.

Spend less time on social media. Meaning Instagram since all the other social media platforms are automated now (my Facebook page and Twitter, while I completely abandoned Pinterest for now). I’d like to check it only a couple of times a day (or not at all during the various Christmas parties) and use my phone to take photos rather than scroll a feed of other people’s lives.

And now the boring part: my end of the year reflections (you can skip it if you want). 🙂

2017 has been a great year for me. I finished all my exams at University, I participated to my very first Instagram workshop, I’ve met in person another Instagram friend, I collaborated with other bloggers, I became a contributor to Page Flutter and I also moved my blog to WordPress.

I was so excited to have some extra money to upgrade my plan and map my domain, in order to have a more professional presence here. I was seeing a bright new future for my blog and I was so happy of that that I even announced it to my parents (I never share internet stuff with them). But things started changing just a few months after.

First of all, I discovered that the price of my plan has increased and I’ll have to pay a lot more next year, only to have my domain mapped, and I’m pretty sure that I won’t be able to afford it, if a miracle won’t happen in the meantime, this also means that I’ll have tons of broken links around the internet that I won’t be able to fix, especially on Pinterest. I also noticed that comments started decreasing and decreasing here on the blog after moving to WordPress, not sure why since my posts are still visible on Feedly and Bloglovin’. I don’t care about numbers anymore, so I don’t even know how many followers, page views, readers I have at this point, but comments were what kept me going, this way it’s almost like talking to myself, which is good, but I already do it all the time in my journal. 😀 Please don’t take it like I’m begging for comments or things like that. It’s just a general consideration and my curiosity makes me wonder why it happened (I love studying marketing strategies!).

But not everything that happened was negative, I also managed to do some incredibly fulfilling collaborations with other bloggers and, the excitement I got doing that, made me question whether I still want to run my blog or not. The answer is: I don’t know. I hope to find it out during 2018 and, in the meantime, I’ll keep blogging and I’ll try to stick with my small goals.

One of the reasons why I kept writing here, even if when I didn’t feel inspired or encouraged, was to keep improving my English, to keep forcing myself to write in a language that it isn’t mine and to have a sort of portfolio for my articles. But now I contribute to other blogs (Page Flutter, Travelling Geek Show, Middle Earth News) and I have all my “useful” posts on Medium, I write lengthy captions on Instagram and I chat every day with English-speaking people on WhatsApp. In short, I have to find other reasons to keep running this blog. I love to contribute to other blogs and I love to remble in my diary. So 2018 is going to be the year of discovery, I guess.

Let’s see what the future will bring us.