Mid Year Check In: Taking a Look at My 2021 Goals

It’s the middle of the year friends!! Or well, it was 11 days ago, but it’s close enough to still count.

As the title says, today I will be checking in on my 2021 goals and updating them as necessary. It’s probably going to be very necessary as I’m pretty sure I’m failing in most of my goals quite spectacularly. I’m just amazing like that.

For the most part, the year has been rather meh, though I have reached the milestone of finishing high school (!!) which has possibly been the best part of the year. Other than that, I’ve been doing terribly blogging wise, pretty well reading wise, and we won’t even talk about life wise. I’ll just let my failing goals speak for themselves.

Without further ado, let’s get started!

⇒ Table of Contents:

• I. How I’m Doing With My Goals
• 1. The Books
• 2. The Blog
• 3. The Personal
• II. Goals Update
• III. General 2021 Review
• IV. Wrap-Up

How I’m Doing With My Goals

I always set my goals out sometime at the start of the year, though this year, I set them at the end of March. If you go check out that post, you can see the reasoning behind why I chose each goal and what I hoped to accomplish with it. In this post, I’m only going to talk about how I’ve been doing so far.

The Books:

I only had two reading goals for this year, and I’m doing fantastically with one, and not so well with the other.

• Read 70 books – I’ve read 64 so far, and I have no intention of slowing down, so I’ve already upped my Goodreads challenge to 100 books. Maybe I’ll actually make it this year. I was going to check my average rating, but I don’t know how to find it? Either way, I think I’ve rated most books 3 and up, and don’t have a single 1 star or DNF, so it’s been a very positive reading year.

• Try to read 10 books out of my usual genres – When I made this goal, I had memoirs and nonfiction books in mind, but I’ve only read one memoir. I don’t think contemporary really counts because I did read some of it in years past. But I’ve definitely read a lot more contemporaries this year, so maybe I can count it? Fine fine, I’ll see about actually reading more books out of my comfort zones.

The Blog:

I’m not doing all that great with my blogging goals. I really really could do better.

• Edit and publish all the posts in my drafts – Fail. I currently have 17 posts in my drafts, which is an increase from the 13 I had when I first made this goal. Some of them, I should honestly just trash because I highly doubt I ever will finish them, but I hate deleting stuff, so this goal might not actually be passed.

• Write 10 reviews – So far, I’ve done only one, with another scheduled for July 20th. I know I’m going to do one more sometime in September as it is an ARC, but I cannot guarantee any other reviews. I might actually do three others since I’ve written notes on them with my thoughts, but we’ll see.

• Stay at over 1k views each month – I’ve succeeded at this without even trying, which I guess also means that I didn’t succeed since it just keeps happening. Even with only 4 posts in February, it’s still well over 1k, and my third best month views-wise this year. The whole point of this goal was to make myself write more posts to keep my views up, so I really need to snap out of this year long funk that I’ve been in and actually blog properly.

• Maybe design and host EB on my own? – I don’t think this is going to actually happen, but I am working on it on and off every now and then.

The Personal:

I’ve failed with all of these goals so far. Lol, it’s really such a shame because they are really good goals.

• Exercise – I don’t think I’ve exercised consistently at all this year. Maybe a week has been the longest I’ve kept at it, but then I stop for one reason or another and I lose the motivation. “I’ll do it tomorrow” has become my favorite mental phrase.

• Do something with code – No, I don’t think I’ve really done anything notable with code this year. I’ve made some websites and I started working on a project, but I haven’t finished it yet. And I don’t know if I still will.

• Eat healthier – Hmm. Well I defined this as “drinking more water, [and] eating more vegetables and fruits on a daily basis” which no. I have not being doing that. And as I said, I haven’t been exercising either, so in the health category, I’m not doing well at all.

• Create a productive routine – That was my goal for this summer, and half of summer has already passed and I am no closer to creating a productive routine. I just can’t make myself care enough to work hard and make it a habit. I’m so good at doing things for other people, but I can’t even do these small goals for myself. “I know it’s possible; I just have to have the discipline to accomplish that.” <- March 2021 Rukky was incredibly wise, but July 2021 Rukky definitely does not have that discipline.

Goals Update?

Now that I’ve looked at how I’m doing with my goals, I feel like I should revise them, but at the same time I don’t want to. These are good, simple, solid goals. It’s ridiculous that I can’t make myself do them. I want to do them, I want to be able to accomplish them. But my mentality is annoyingly “I’ll do it tomorrow” so I never do it.

I can’t make myself care enough to do it.

And it’s so. incredibly. annoying.

I don’t think I’m going to change them anymore. They’re perfectly fine as they are, and I just need to stop dilly-dallying and start actually doing them.

Maybe that can be a goal. I need to work on at least one goal out of each category and keep doing it for the rest of year.

If I can’t do that…well, I hope I better do that.

General 2021 Review

For the most part, 2021 has been an okay year for me. Covid has become routine and everything has just become normal at this point. I think it’ll be weirder to go back to the Old Normal, but I still hope that we can do so in the near future. The world is still a dumpster fire, and I really don’t want to think about it too much. It makes me so depressed to hear about all these injustices and the suffering all the time.

Which is so privileged of me because the people who are living through those situations don’t have any choice in the matter. I’m doing what I can to help those who need it, and if you can, you should as well. Even if it’s just a small thing like helping someone in your own community. It’s better to help one person than none at all.

In other news, as I said in the intro, I am out of highschool! *cue confetti and trumpets* It’s going to be interesting to be a university student full time, and I can’t wait to see how my Uni journey plays out. I will probably come to regret that statement two months from now, but I’ll enjoy this excitement while I can.

In my Writing world, I have been okay. I don’t think I’ve really written anything since the fall of last year and maybe early this year, but I’ve done plenty of brainstorming and plotting for two novels that I really want to work on. It’s made me have to start over from what I’d previously started writing, but once I’ve figured out the details for good, it’ll just be a battle of actually writing it. I’d been hoping to focus on that more this summer, but alas, I am my good old self and it didn’t really happen.

And yeah. I think that’s really it.

My mid-year book freakout tag should be coming soon enough and I’m actually excited for that post because I’ll be sharing a lot of the books that I’ve read. So stay tuned for that.

Some questions for you:

• How has the year been for you? Can you believe that we’re already halfway through 2021?
• Have you accomplished any of your goals yet? Do you have any tips for motivation?
• Are there any blog post ideas you’d like to see me do?

Chat with me in the comments below!