Last year, in January, I wrote down fifteen goals for the year 2020. I rarely write down personal goals, much less an entire years worth of them. To be honest, I actually forgot about the goals once the pandemic hit, meaning I never went back to review them. I just wrote them down once and let them be.
I reviewed those goals in December and noticed I had completed seven of them! And the goals I hadn’t completed I was still working on them, trying to improve.
I’m not going to list my specific goals in this blog post but the overall idea was to pay off debt and increase my online reselling businesses by buying adding more inventory and increasing sales. When I reviewed the list, it turns out we paid off each targeted debt and I was able to buy a large collection of inventory to help stock my online stores which increased sales to the exact number I set as a goal.
There were a few goals that were lacking and most of those were exercise and diet. I always set high expectations in these categories which means I usually don’t meet those goals.
So I made a point to set more goals for 2021. I’ll update the list throughout January and maybe even February if needed. I’m not too stressed about when I log the goal, I just want them noted somewhere. It feels as if just writing them down once increases the change they will be completed rather than thinking to myself “that would be a good goal for next year” and never getting around to logging it somewhere.
So what’s on deck for 2021? More of the same really. I’m excited to have paid off all of our credit card debt in 2020 but we’re left with two larger loans, one we had to take out to repair a shower leak in our home and the other is my wife’s grad school student loan. If we stay on course this year, we can have both paid off by May 2022 which would feel awesome.
I want to continue to increase my online sales because this helped us pay off a lot of debt in 2020. I sell mostly music (records and CDs) on eBay and Discogs. I really focused on building a Discogs store in 2020 and my gross sales there were over $3,000. I currently have over 300 items listed and I’d like to keep that number above 500 most of 2021. It’s at that limit where I start to see consistent weekly sales. I’d also like to keep building an eBay store but I’m considering adding some other items that aren’t related to music that would be easy to store and sell. I haven’t identified those items just yet, but if most of my music items are in Discogs, I need to beef up the eBay store with something else.
Some of the other goals include blogging here more, reading more books and spending less time on social media. I noticed I was getting annoyed with people’s social media posts near the end of 2020 and that’s usually a sign that I need to sign off and find something more productive to do with my time.
I’m glad that I wrote down those goals in 2020 and did the same for 2021. Even if I don’t check them frequently, the goals seem to complete themselves just by existing in concrete form.
Aaron Hartley 