Over the last few years, I’ve let things sort of stack up on top of me. It’s been easy to say, f– this, who cares if this gets done, I’ll do it later; and then just read or watch TV or scroll Tiktok or take naps. Every month in my bullet journal, I have a list of tasks or goals that I want to get done that month. Many of them were originally created months earlier, sometimes years earlier. I’m not doing a good job at evaluating priorities, and the more things pile up, the more I procrastinate. I find it really easy to deal with pileups by just deciding that none of the things matter anymore – like culling a bunch of unread books if my TBR gets too high – and now I’m in a situation where almost everything on my list is either something I can’t or don’t want to cull.

Now that my life is moving in a new direction, I want to actively work to move forward, and part of that work is to whittle down the amount of baggage I’m carrying. So these goals will be focused in two areas: an area where I’m growing and want to continue to grow, and getting all the rest of the Stuff off my plate.

Photography

This is obviously the place where I’m growing. Over the next year, I would like to continue to improve and carve out a steady place for this in my life. These goals are designed to help.

• Continue to hold monthly group practice photo shoots as long as I have the volunteers and availability to do this.

• Drop my daily photo record-keeping, and focus instead on intentional weekly projects. For the last three years, I’ve kept up a daily photo journal, and I’ve found this can be both wonderful and frustrating. It’s too easy to just snap a phone pic of whatever happens to be around in order to get a daily pic, you know? So I want to be more deliberate in 2023. Each week, I want to take a prompt or subject to focus on. I have a few different sources to pull from, including 52 Frames weekly prompts and some photo prompt cards a friend gave me for Christmas in 2021. (Hey! It’s kinda like a Get Off My Plate goal, only better!)

• And because no part of my life hasn’t suffered from procrastination syndrome, I also want to focus on these specific types of shots that were originally listed under last year’s goals:

• sunrise but not from home – on location, either urban or wild
• movement photo with central focal point (example: focus on feet while on a swing, so the background moves but the feet remain in focus)
• astrophotography, particularly of stars, taken with long exposure
• urban night photography with long exposure to capture light-streaks from cars
• focus on stationary object while background moves

Get Off My Plate

Not everything on the following list is unpleasant or a chore. They’re just things that were meant to happen long before now, and I haven’t made the time or room for them. (Or, like when it comes to our 20th anniversary vacation that was originally meant to be in May 2020, circumstances caused many, many delays.) My one-word for 2023 is RELEASE, and this is the part of goal-making that surrounds it: to release the baggage and lighten the load, to better enable walking forward.

• Watch or cull the following movies, some of which have been on my list for well over a year:

• Luca
• Encanto
• The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
• Jurassic World

• See these specific doctors that I’m long overdue for:

• ob/gyn
• dermatologist
• dentist

• Read/cull all of my 2023 book priorities (34) **Note: This is much higher than normal for me, but I don’t mind because only 13 are already published. The remaining 21 are 2023 releases.

• Finally take our Alaskan cruise to celebrate our 20th anniversary (Dec 2019) – scheduled for May 2023

• Try 10 new-to-me products, companies, or events
Note: This may not seem like a “get off my plate” goal but I have a long-running list of locations, products, etc that I’ve wanted to try for ages. The caveat of this goal is that only hanging items are allowed to count toward it, unless none remain.

• Finish getting off Facebook

• Print a monthly photo book

• Fully clean out the garage (including items to sell)

• Finish my 2022 backlog of yoga videos, without any pressure to continue on with 2023 new releases (4)

• Use up the rest of my wax melts (21)

Optional

The following are more “get off my plate” goals, but either depend on circumstance or other folks or the right finances to complete, so they’re optional.

• Paint portions of the house: living room, entryway, hallway, my room

• Finish front and back yards

• Complete 5+ goals from my 50×50 list – or perhaps cull the goal list altogether, if need be

• Catch up and then cull my current massage membership

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You may notice that I haven’t included any major health or fitness goals this year. I don’t have plans to try to eat more produce, walk a certain number of miles, add more strength training, lose a certain amount of weight, etc. My work with my doctors on managing my conditions and medications will continue, and I’m going to let that unfold as organically as possible. I don’t want to add further weight to the gigantic amount of baggage I’m already carrying. This is the year of unpacking the boxes and doing the stuff that already needed to be done, not a year for planning new stuff to do.