It is no secret that I love goal setting. From setting monthly goals, to my overall yearly goals/guideposts, to longer-term goal setting like 101 in 1001, I absolutely love the way goal setting helps me prioritize both long- and short-term, and especially in this season of wedding planning, I don’t know how I’d get it all done without the structure of intentional goal setting.
While my monthly goals are usually very practical, I love setting long-term goals that are essentially more like bucket list items than to-do lists. Since 2015, I have been working on a 101 in 1001 goals list, where you attempt to complete 101 goals in 1001 days. I blogged my list here. My 1001st day was June 1, 2018, and so even though I didn’t accomplish everything on my list, it’s time to turn the page and start a new long-term goal setting chapter!
Partway through my 1001 days, I noticed on a few blogs I read a trend of doing a number of goals based on a specific age. One common one was 60 Before 30. This could work with any age, i.e., 100 before 50, 80 before 80, etc. To me, this isn’t about being scared of turning a certain age—I have no qualms at all about turning 30, when I do—but instead it’s about defining a set of ages in your life and dreaming about all they could hold. I have almost exactly three years until I turn 30 (minus a couple of weeks), and so this set is just a little longer than my 1001 days, which seems perfect to accomplish and experience some big things, and make some little-but-important things happen too. In my list you will see a mix of mundane and over-the-top, but that’s real life. A lot of my list is relationship, family, health, and travel-related. I have a few items that I prefer not to put on the Internet, either because they involve a surprise I’d love to pull off, a personal health-related topic, or the “story” of the goal isn’t fully mine to tell. For those, I just wrote “personal” and the general topic it is.
My way of keeping my list organized is I have each goal written on a page of a journal (pictured at the top of this post). As I go through the list (not necessarily in order), I write a short journal entry about it, and I can also tape tickets or other mementos of goals I’ve completed right in the journal. I did this for my 101 in 1001 list, and I love that it’s a tangible thing I can keep forever, even though that list is now over. I will also plan on blogging various 60 before 30 goals as I complete them!
With that introduction out of the way, here’s my 60 Before 30 list:
1. Marry Grace Baldridge
2. Go on a honeymoon
3. Legally change my last name to Baldridge
4. Build an emergency fund of 6 months’ living expenses with Grace
5. Start a collection of Christmas decorations
6. Increase planned/intentional charitable giving
7. Host a baby shower or a bridal shower
8. Switch to all natural beauty, cleaning, and laundry products
9. Personal (career)
10. Get first Christmas tree of my own (for my first married Christmas)
11. Personal (spiritual)
12. Go somewhere wild/exotic/remote (some initial ideas are Bora Bora, Antarctica, or Kenya)
13. Personal (family)
14. Personal (spiritual)
15. Make a beautiful heirloom-quality wedding album
16. Make a beautiful heirloom-quality album of pictures from our Alaska road trip
17. Make a beautiful heirloom-quality album of pictures from our honeymoon
18. Make the outdoor spaces of our house special
19. Make an awesome and welcoming guest room
20. Combine all finances with Grace and have both our names on all bank and credit accounts
21. Personal (surprising someone)
22. Celebrate my mom’s graduation from divinity school
23. Celebrate my sister’s graduation from college
24. Go back to Elon with Grace (maybe for her cousin’s graduation, or for homecoming?)
25. Visit D.C. to see two of my best friends and my grandmother, who all live there
26. Do a month-long contentment/spending freeze challenge
27. Celebrate our first and second wedding anniversaries
28. Find a dentist in LA
29. Personal (health)
30. Send out our first ever Christmas cards (as the Baldridges!)
31. Personal (career)
32. Personal (career)
33. Go a week without social media
34. Be able to say, at least at some point, that I’m in great physical shape
35. Go back to Grace’s hometown in Belgium
36. Fix our closet and hallway lights
37. Give a speech at a wedding or rehearsal dinner
38. Have my blog featured somewhere
39. Personal (surprising someone)
40. Personal (health)
41. Blog every detail of wedding planning and the day itself
42. Personal (surprising someone)
43. Upgrade/change up my car when my lease expires in 2019
44. Replace our foundation mattress (we just got it, but it’s from IKEA and not good…)
45. Offer to help a friend with some aspect of their wedding: hand-addressing invitations like I did mine, serving as an informal day-of coordinator, passing down my collected wedding décor items, etc.
46. Personal (misc.)
47. Personal (gift/surprising someone)
48. Start a tradition with Grace of having tea in the evenings
49. Take a trip with both dogs (instead of boarding Bean like we’ve been doing while he’s a puppy)
50. Take Grace to my parents’ place on the Chesapeake Bay
51. Hang art or photos over our bed
52. Introduce Grace to my grandmother (finally!)
53. Have 10+ baby books in my collection (Grace and I started a tradition after we got engaged of collecting baby books on special trips we take . . . it might sound crazy, but I love the idea of having an amazing collection of books from special places for our babies if we’re lucky enough to have them one day)
54. Swim (actually swim) in the ocean 10+ times
55. Visit Ojai at least once a year
56. Have a dinner party using our beautiful new kitchen wares we’ve gotten as wedding gifts
57. Get orthotics/generally get my flat feet assessed by a professional (I truly have the flattest feet on earth—like the palm of a hand—and I need to be more proactive about the health problems my lack of arches will cause me as I get older)
58. Go skiing with Grace (and stick to the bunny slopes because of the knee issues we both have!)
59. See Carly Rae Jepson live with Grace
60. Have professional photos taken of Grace and me each year of our marriage
Have you ever set monthly or long-term goals? I would love to hear about them!
Thanks for reading. Xoxo