My 2018 Goals

Let’s talk goals!

Personal goals

2017 was obviously a big year personally. I spent most of the year pregnant, which we found out in early January 2017. E joined the family in September, and the fall just flew by! We also traveled a bit, making it to Italy and the west coast, as well as NYC and Cape Cod, and some other places in New England.

For this year’s goals, I decided to try out my goals for the first few weeks to see which ones I wanted to keep for the rest of the year. Here we go:

#1 Find a workout routine that I like and that works for my schedule.
I started BBG on Monday and am forcing myself to do it for 2 weeks straight to see if I like it or not. This isn’t exactly easy when I’m still waking up every 2-3 hours to feed the baby through the night, but I need to get healthy!

#2 Drink more water. (Specifically, drink half of my body weight in ounces of water each day.)
I’m notoriously bad at drinking water during the day, so I’m excited to do this! I’m finding that I crave less in carbs and sweets when I am drinking more water, which is a nice side effect.

#3 Wake up earlier.
It’s easy to hit the alarm and go back to bed, especially on the days that I’m not heading into the office. But recently I woke up early on a few different occasions, and I got so much done! So I’m keeping to getting up by 7am each day, getting straight into the shower, and starting my day.

#4 Lose the rest of the baby weight.
Along with finding a workout routine I like to be healthier, I want to finish dropping the baby weight. I still have about 15 pounds to go! (So jealous of all the moms who are all, “I gained 25 lbs!” because guuuurl I gained 60. I didn’t mean to, it just happened!)

Blog goals

2017 was a successful blog year for me in terms of numbers. I stepped back and did more planning (though not as much as I wanted to do). When I looked at the year as a whole versus 2016 last week, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I’m so proud of where the year ended up! Just a few things I saw…

+ I DOUBLED my site visits from 2016 to 2017
+ The number of new visitors to my site more than doubled
+ My bounce rate decreased (aka the people who land on my site and then just leave)
+ I started an email that goes out every morning that there’s a new post! (You can sign up in the sidebar under “Subscribe” if you want to get these emails)

For this year’s goals I’m focusing on learning:

#1 Show my style.
I’ve been hesitant to show more of what I wear on the everyday because I’m typically very casual, and I worry that it’s not interesting to people. But then I realized that half of the bloggers I follow only wear casual outfits!

#2 Get better with photography.
Part of this is upgrading the DSLR camera I have, and the other part is just getting better. I want to take a photography course and get to know my camera better.

#3 Experiment with video.
I’ve never had a YouTube channel, but I have so much fun with InstaStories that I’m toying with the idea of going into video/vlogs. I’m going to start by experimenting with putting together videos from some of our travels, and we’ll see where it goes from there! The first one I want to do is from our Zion hiking trip, because we have some really cool videos. Same with Cinque Terre!

#4 Create more of a community.
I love getting feedback from readers (you guys!). It helps me create better content and have more fun with this little space on the web. In order to do this, I’m going to be asking for your help in creating a conversation. When I write a new post, I’m going to ask you for your feedback or opinion on something. I’m also going to be posting more on my Facebook page, so make sure you’re following there! And, of course, I would love for you to engage with me on Instagram. I feel like you’ll get to see more of my daily life over on Instagram, like when I felt like I was losing it the day E refused to sleep all day.

So tell me – what are your goals for 2018?