If you know me much at all, you know I'm a strong believer in having written goals. Not just dreams or ambitions or pie-in-the-sky ideas, but realistic, achievable goals.
At the end of every year, my husband and I sit down and review our goals from the previous year and make out a list of goals for the new year. We try to do this in all areas of our life–from personal to spiritual to vocational.
While we don't always complete all of these goals and some of them we decide to chuck altogether, just discussing where we're at and where we want to go and then writing it down is a very beneficial and motivational exercise in itself. And we've been amazed at how much more we accomplish when we are purposeful in how we live our lives.
As the saying goes, "If you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time." If you aim high, you might not quite make what you aim for, but you'll likely go much farther than you'd go if you aimed at little or nothing at all.
Over the next week, I'll be sharing some of my goals for 2010 with you here, not only so you can get a little peak into my life, but also because also because I've found public accountability to be a highly motivating thing.
To start things off, here are my blogging goals for 2010:
1) Keep God and my family as my first priority. If I manage to do nothing else this year but grow closer to God and spend the bulk of my time loving on my family, it will be a successful year. Everything else pales in comparison to those relationships.
While the computer can be an incredible tool and I love the opportunity I have to blog and interact with many of you, my family is my number one priority. Email, blogging, comments, Twitter, and Facebook all take a backburner to my husband and children.
One change I've made in the last few months is to set up parental controls on my computer so it is only accessible during certain times of the day–for an hour before my children wake up and for a few hours during our afternoon Quiet Time.
These self-imposed boundaries have been a huge help as they keep me accountable to make sure I am only spending a limited amount of time on the computer and am completely focused on meeting the needs of my family when my children are awake and my husband is home.
In the time that I do have set aside for blogging, here is what I want to focus my energies and efforts on:
2) Write more personal posts and share more pictures. While I plan to continue to share lots of great deals and bargains here like usual, I'm going to put forth a much greater effort in 2010 to share personal posts of things I'm learning, insights I'm gleaning, frugal tips and ideas, experiments and failures, and give you a little glimpse into our family's day-to-day lives.
3) Provide diverse content through guest posts. I have some excellent guest posts lined up for 2010 which I'm excited to share with you. My goal is to run one per week and I hope to include a variety of posts from individuals who come from a plethora of backgrounds and financial situations.
4) Foster community. We have some new features lined up for the site redesign we're rolling out in the next month which will encourage more interaction and help to foster more community and forum here. Many of you have asked for this so I'm thrilled to be able to launch these features in the near future.
5) Network with bloggers and encourage and help newer bloggers. A few months ago, a few bloggers and I banded together to create
SavvyBlogging–a website with the mission of helping others make the most of
their blogging efforts. What started as a simple idea for a
get-together, turned into a complete Round Table Dinner and
Discussion and an active Twitter stream packed with helpful tips and
ideas for taking your blog to the next level.
I also will be collaborating with other bloggers on some other exciting projects over the next year and am even jumping way outside of my "comfort zone" to speak at the Relevant Conference in October. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to encourage other bloggers and share a few things I've learned along the way.
Those are a few of my blogging goals for this coming year. Check out others' goals or link up yours here.