How I Chose My 2024 Goals With Notion

(Almost) every year, I take the time to review the past year and this helps me set new goals for the year ahead.

Since I'm making a change from being a UX copywriter towards making Notion templates and eventually becoming a consultant, it only made sense that this is how I would do my review this year.

So here's how I reviewed the year that's gone by, and how I planned 2024, with Notion.

There are many ways a person could divide up their life in different areas. I chose to use the core areas that Danielle Laporte defines as part of her Desire Map process. These are the areas I focus on:

The areas I choose to focus on are the same as the ones define in the Desire Map by Danielle Laporte. I've used this system for more than 10 years now.

For each one of those areas, I take the time to write down what I'm grateful for, why I'm grateful for these things. As part of finding things I'm grateful for, I'll also look at my calendar and my photos to remember events I might have forgotten about and I also the adventures we've been on.

This is an example from a quick brainstorm for the Livelihood + Lifestyle area.

When it comes to challenges, I also write about things that are not working as well as I'd like to and why it is that they make me feel that way. The areas I'm not as satisfied with are usually things I need to let go of, or to decide to make a big change in the year ahead to change my situation. I don't spend a lot of time on that section as I find unless I have a desire to make a change, it's just reliving bad memories or stewing in regret and that's not the kind of energy I want to bring into a new year.

At this point of the review process, I usually close up these space and keep them simmering in the back of my mind for a few hours, or a few days. During that time, I start writing down words of the feelings I want to cultivate for the year ahead.

When I'm ready, I have a look at all the feelings I've noted and try to pair them down to a select few which will inform what kind of projects I want to take on, the type of practices I want to put in place (or keep, or eliminate from last year). That way, when I start to write down new goals, I ask myself if they will help me feel this way.

These are my words for 2024.

Afterwards, it's time to brainstorm ideas for things I want to do, experience and have that will help me feel this way. And to make this work with the way I've set up my goals, projects and to do list in Notion. I have set myself a mix of "value-based goals" meaning, goals that relate more to how I want to feel, and I also have "smart goals" which are more easy to measure and track.

These are a few of my value-based goals. They are the most closely related to the "theme words" I have chosen for my year.

This is a glimpse into the measurable goals and specific activities that will help me get what I want out of this upcoming year.

The last step of the process is simply to get started on these projects. This year, I'm also going to use a completely different approach in terms of choosing what to work on. I'm limiting the number of goals I am focusing on, and I'm choosing less than a handful of "big projects" and anything else I decide to take has to support these.

This new approach to prioritising my work comes from the book Work Clean by Dan Charnas, which I'm only just about to finish. Soon, I'll explain what the book is about, what I'm learning from it, and how I plan to apply it to the work that I do.