2019 Goals

Happy (almost) New Year, friends!

I know I said it in almost every single wrap-up/TBR post this year, but I literally can’t believe how quickly this year flew and now its New Years Eve?! I’ve had such a great year this year and can’t wait to see what 2019 is going to bring. One of my favourite things to do to bring in the New Year is share my goals with you all in an effort to feel somewhat prepared for the coming year.

As 2018 was my first proper year of blogging, I thought it would be cool to see how I did with my 2018 goals before sharing my goals for 2019!

line break

🕓 Go my own way: I feel like I mostly achieved this? This year I made more of an effort to read the books I wanted to, rather than feeling pressured to read the most popular books that month. I still feel a bit of pressure to keep up with popular YA books but I think I definitely made progress with this

🕓 Read 50 books: SMASHED IT. I met my goal half way through the year, upped it to 75, and ended up reading 82 books!

🕓 Beat the Backlist: FAIL! I did read a lot of books which weren’t new releases but they were recent discoveries rather than my own backlisted books…

🕓 Balancing ARCs, backlist, and new releases: Mostly fail. I did read a lot of ARCs and new releases but obviously failed on the backlist aspect of this…

🕓 Treat myself to more books and book related products: Yes! I definitely treated myself more this year. I think I bought about 51 books this year and also got 2 Fairyloot boxes. As someone who always feels guilty about buying things for myself this is a pretty huge thing!

🕓 Make more friends in the book blogging community: YES!!! I met so many wonderful people this year and cemented some firm friendships. I posted a little 2018 friendships post which you can check out to find out more about my friendships from this year ❤

🕓 Themed Reads: I think I did about 7/12 themed reads this month

🕓 Limit Diversity Tick Boxing: In 2017, I felt that I was forcing myself to read particular books for a certain type of rep but that it wasn’t making my reading habits more diverse. I read A LOT of diverse books in 2018 which I tended to pick up of my own volition and made my reading more diverse all around.

🕓 Be more adventurous with books: Kind of, I did discover some great new books that were quite under the radar, but found I still focused a lot on popular releases.

🕓 Continue using the library: Yep, that’s partly why I’m behind so much on my own backlist books because the library thoroughly swallowed me whole this year!

line break

2018 was my first full year as a book blogger and I feel like I made some pretty good progress. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I would like to achieve in 2019 and am super excited to start working towards these new goals

 

2019 Reading Goals

🎆 Read 75 books: This year I managed 82 books which was 32 more than my original Goodreads Challenge goal so I’m setting my firm goal at 75, and my stretch goal at 100.

🎆 Don’t stop reading series!: I have the worst habit of really enjoying the first book in a series but then feeling too guilty about binging the rest of the series for fear of “ignoring my other books”. And we all know how that story ends…

🎆 Read books as soon as/soon after I get them: Along similar lines of series, when I buy books I end up putting them aside “for now” because I feel a sense of obligation to my other books but then end up not ever getting round to them? YALC was in July and I have only read 2/16 books I bought…

🎆 Read more graphic novels: I love graphic novels and there’s a lot that I’ve been meaning to read (The Wicked and the Divine, Moonstruck, the rest of Saga, the list goes on…) but I often feel guilty about the price of graphic novels and end up not buying them. I would like to buy some in 2019!

🎆 Keep up with ARCs: I’m so thankful to receive so many fantastic ARCs but like many other book bloggers find its so easy to quickly get behind on them. I’ve been using Kaleena’s fantastic spreadsheet to keep better track of my ARCs and setting myself actual due dates which will hopefully help me keep on top

🎆 More buddy reads: I did my first book blog buddy read with Ashley just before Christmas which was so much fun. I’d love to do more buddy reads with reading friends ❤

 

2019 Blogging Goals

🌌 Review books a maximum of 1-2 weeks after I finish them: Reviewing in 2018 started off pretty well but I got so bad at reviewing over the last few months. I stopped writing reviews immediately after finishing and by the time I got round to writing the review, I had read a lot of other books in between meaning I would forget a lot of important stuff

🌌 Quartely/tri-monthly check in’s: I’m taking part in a lot of challenges this year and I feel like part of succeeding in them will be down to keeping a careful track of my progress throughout the year. I’ve planned to do regular blog check ins to share my progress with you all (and remind myself what I’m doing!)

🌌 Continue bloghopping: I did not know what bloghopping was until half way through this year and have only done it a few times, but every time I do I find some excellent blogs and I want to continue my blog discoveries next year

🌌 Hosting/taking part in more events: The book blogosphere runs some amazing events and I want to take part in more of them! I loved taking part (however briefly) in the sci-fi month activities, meeting other participants and supporting each others blogs

 

2019 Personal Goals 

☄️ Get onto a PhD: This one is kind of in my control but also kind of not but I want to work as hard as I can to secure a PhD studentship at my university for next year

☄️ MORE VIDEO GAMES: I want to play more video games, especially multi-player games! If you want to buddy up and play some games together then let me know

☄️ Increase my fitness: I used to be a lot fitter but thanks to depression + fibromyalgia flare ups I’ve spend a less time doing physical exercise. Not only does this make me feel pretty crappy but it also increases my pain. I’m planning to hit the gym for the next 3-4 months and work my way up to park runs

☄️ Write more articles: I loved writing my articles for POMEmag and Sidequest this year, and want to write a lot more next year. I’m super excited about contributing more to Sidequest as one of their contributor and am looking forward to seeing what other opportunities 2019 might bring

line break

Those are my goals for 2019 and it’s now only 2 hours 45 minutes until the New Year! I’m sending you all the best vibes for your 2019’s and am looking forward to seeing all of your posts ❤

Image result for new year gif


EST. 2015 (1)

 

GOODREADS / TWITTER / INSTAGRAM / AMAZON / PATREON

25 thoughts on “2019 Goals

  1. Congrats on reaching most of your goals!!

    Hah, I feel you on not reading books immediately – I just put them on my shelf and then forget about them because I already have a TBR planned out.

    Other than my reading challenges, my only reading goal is to request fewer ARCs and only if I REALLY want them, because they caused me a lot of stress in 2018. :/

    Wait what’s bloghopping?

    Woo, PhD!! Good luck with that 😀 I’m doing my Masters right now and they are Hard.

    Happy New Year!!

    Liked by 1 person

  2. Your 2018 looked really good and your 2019 looks even better! I love your goals, good luck for the new year! 💕💕

    Also, extra good luck with your PhD, that’s such a wonderful goal and I hope you’re successful! 😍

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Great goals you have! I also do that thing where you pick up the first in a new series and love it, but the next book I pick out is the first book in a completely different series… it’s so silly I could slap myself sometimes. I also have this goal. Need to finish these series I started and loved!
    Good Luck with getting the PhD studentship! What is it in?
    Happy New Year and happy reading for 2019!

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Thank you! Happy new year to you too! I remember starting off last year with a big list of series I wanted to finish, I didn’t finish any but read even more first books in other series!! It’s such an easy trap to fall into haha

      It’s a PhD in Anthropology looking at the influence that video games have on players 😀

      Liked by 1 person

  4. Congrats on completing so many of your 2018 goals, that’s awesome! And best of luck with all your 2019 goals! Happy new year, I hope it’s a magical one ❤️

    Liked by 1 person

  5. Happy New Year, friend! I think you chose some really great goals for 2019 and I hope you get around to everything you’ve planned 🙂 I have a really big problem of reading books right after I’ve bought them as well, so maybe I will copy that from you haha

    Liked by 1 person

  6. Looks like you had a pretty good year making most of your goals! Good luck with all your goals in 2019!

    Also, the diversity thing–thats never a hard goal for me either but I do track it because I like to see how my reading is, as an average reader and it’s always really interesting to see what I felt like I read vs what I actually read….anywho. I definitely read books I want to read too, forcing yourself to read anything is just asking to go into a reading slump lol.

    Happy new year!

    Like

  7. That’s so amazing that you smashed your reading challenge and was able to read so many books! I love meeting so many new friends in the blogging community. I am definitely happy that you and I became such great friends. I increased my reading challenge this year as well since I was able to read a lot more than I originally set it too. Don’t stop reading series is something I definitely hope that I can actually do this year, because I have so many not finished and every time I do start a finish, it gets sent to the pile of unfinished series UGHH. Never ending cycle. One year I tried not to buy any books unless I knew I was going to read it within a month time period, but of course that failed. I have a bad habit of buying books and then putting them on the shelf or in a corner and forgetting about them for awhile. Good luck with all of your goals for this year! 😀

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Ahh thanks and happy new year ❤ I think out of everything series is one of the main things I want to work on, I got the Mortal Instruments series for my birthday in APRIL LAST YEAR. Immediately read the first book, liked it, wanted to read the second book but talked myself out of it and almost a year later I haven't picked them back up!

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I’m going to really test myself this year with this series stuff, because a lot of the books I chose to read for this year for a challenge I’m doing are series starters (AHHHH), so we’ll see what happens. Hopefully you can finally finish some of your unread series this year. I read The Mortal Instruments series, but honestly after the 4th book I started to get really bored with the series and felt it dragged on so much. Overall it’s a good series though, especially the first four books.

        Like

  8. Can I just say how I bought 23 books at YALC and have read absolutely NONE OF THEM? I only realized this just now after checking my July haul post.. I’m.. feeling so guilty right now.. Yikes..

    I love all your goals though! And I truly hope you manage to tick them off. It’s always so easy to forget about them throughout the year and then.. at the end of it you’re like “Riiiight.. I wanted to do THAT as well..” [Or at least, that happens to me all the time.]

    I’m not really setting myself a whole lot of goals this year. Only reading-wise there are some things I want to do but apart from that? I’m simply going to see where life – and the little one – takes me. 2019 is way too filled with question marks to even try and set myself goals. Which is weird since I love challenging myself and now I have to be all relaxed about not doing just that, haha.

    Anyway! I’m blabbering.
    I hope you had amazing holidays and the year started off great for you. ❤

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s
https://redrocketpanda.wordpress.com/2018/12/31/2019-goals-and-a-happy-new-year/
redrocketpanda.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-49
248777
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5O3NYZAPOA2MU5IET5K4OLU6SFKZQCWB
<urn:uuid:847b06e1-ae7c-409d-ba18-f9fbad5bc409>
2022-12-01T16:03:34Z
192.0.78.12
text/html
sha1:T23XD23RSPL7BMPUK2KWAVVFBBEHHQ22
<urn:uuid:78abb444-f65f-44f2-b0f8-ec224fdfff02>
https://redrocketpanda.wordpress.com/2018/12/31/2019-goals-and-a-happy-new-year/
response
<urn:uuid:7e8937f0-7f99-43f3-be1d-bc033231b3c9>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-49
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November/December 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-16
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/