Checking In With My Best Self Goals

I just listened to the newest episode of Aminatou Sow and ann friedman’s podcast Call Your Girlfriend, which includes a number of Billf0ld-friendly topics including the poverty calculator we discussed earlier this week and the recent study showing that when women enter formerly male-dominated professions, the pay drops.

Episode 44: Comfort Hoodie | Call Your Girlfriend on acast

Also, Millennials are apparently the most anxious generation in history, which you can add to the list of other “most [NEGATIVE DESCRIPTOR] in history” Millennial thinkpieces—or you can just listen to one of 2015’s most popular pop songs:

(I’m very aware that I just linked to two pieces called “Stressed Out” and “Comfort Hoodie.” As we go, so goes what we create.)

But I don’t want to think about any of that right now. Instead, I want to focus on what Friedman and Sow asked each other at the beginning of the episode: We’re almost through First Quarter 2016. How are we doing on our goals?

Setting aside the whole idea of living in an insecure and stressful world and combating that stress by treating our lives like businesses that consistently work on improving their best practices—just picking that whole idea up and putting it on the shelf next to the comfort hoodie—you might remember that I set myself a number of Best Self goals at the beginning of the year and told myself I would take them seriously.

My Best Self in 2016: A Totally Achievable List of Goals

The goals, in order:

1. Figure out the social media promotion thing
2. Stop speculating and start asking
3. Get out of debt
4. Get a three-month emergency fund and $5,500 in a Roth IRA
5. Spend more hours of the day not staring at screens
6. Spend more time with my people
7. Create something brilliant
8. Earn at least $59,317.66 in 2016 while working reasonable hours

Numbers 3, 4, and 8 won’t fulfill until later in the year, although I’m on target for each of them. The “reasonable hours” thing varies; I’ll have two weeks of a manageable workload followed by one week where I work nearly all waking hours. A lot of that isn’t driven by me, so I think I have to roll with it.

Number 5 is no longer a goal. Number 1 was solved by me turning my social media channels into fully professional channels, instead of trying to balance the professional and the personal. Since I am also spending more time with my friends (number 6), using social media to share personal information feels less important.

Number 7… I feel like my writing has improved considerably even in the past three months, and there are pieces of my novel The Biographies of Ordinary People that I’m really proud of. I will not go so far as to say I have created something brilliant. I’d rather keep working.

That leaves us with Number 2, “stop speculating and start asking,” which is the goal that I’ve most taken to heart, and the goal that I think has most improved the way in which I interact with the world. I’m still not perfect—to borrow a metaphor, it’s easier to write thinkpieces than it is to write ask pieces, and making the time to do the work is hard and sometimes (as you might remember from my recent Chipotle piece) I still speculate when I could, you know, ask someone.

But it’s on my mind constantly, which probably means it’s a worthwhile goal.

I’ve given y’all a bunch of topics to discuss, from goals to stress to women in the workplace, so I’ll leave the rest of this as an Open Thread and let you all discuss what’s on your mind this Friday.

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