I was making goals for 2020 when I realised that most of what I want to achieve belong to two keywords: consume and create. To elaborate a little more, it would be “consume thoughtfully” and “create intentionally”.

Okay, I should probably elaborate a lot more but first:

Why I’m focusing on keywords instead of goals

While goals can be helpful (e.g. read 100 books, write 2 stories at least 50,000 words, etc), they don’t often connect to one another. It’s also hard for me to put numbers on goals – I’ve had “read 100 books” as my Goodreads Challenge for the past few years because I couldn’t think of any other number and I knew I could hit 100. It’s not challenging, to say the least.

But I think keywords would be different. If I need to change a goal or prioritise something else, I could make a decision based on whether it fits my keywords for the year. And if I see myself veering off-course, it’s easier to argue to myself to drop it (I should learn to be less stubborn about things but until then…)

In short, I’m planning to use keywords as the direction for how I want 2020 to go. It’s not about hitting certain numbers or producing certain results (although I do hope to do concrete, trackable things as well) but it’s about adjusting my mindset and habits to something that I can and will want to sustain.

Now, about those keywords:

Consume Thoughtfully

I was listening to an episode on the cost of fashion, which led me to think about how I’m spending. For most of this year, my spending has mostly been focused on tracking and on the numbers. But I haven’t been thinking about whether I’ve been spending thoughtfully. I like to talk about supporting indie authors, local businesses, etc but because I’m not consciously looking for them, I’m not actually buying. Talk is cheap so it’s time to put my money where my mouth is.

For 2020, I’d like to consume more from independent authors (something that I’ve been slowly starting as I buy ebooks from Amazon – I am awfully resistant to buying ebooks for some reason) and from small local shops. I’ll be taking a leaf from flyeetelfly who seems to know all about small businesses.

As for less consumption – I don’t really buy much clothes but I’d still like to be thoughtful about the clothes I buy. I’m going to make an effort to no longer look for the cheapest option, but for the best option – secondhand or sustainable/ethically-production fashion. No lie, I love Uniqlo so I probably can’t make a clean break (especially for basics) but hopefully this marks a start of a new buying habit. And of course, everything I buy has to be things I wear.

Finally, but probably most importantly, books. The only change I’m planning to make for the coming year is to try to read more Japanese books. It’s pretty hard for me to read them, and there’s even less incentive because I don’t review them either, but I do need to practice my Japanese. It helps that I’ve got a stack of Japanese books on gender and history to go through so there’s no excuse for me not to read more Japanese.

I’m also going to challenge myself to read ‘harder’ books aka more literary books, which is not my preferred genre. This is mostly because all the SEA books that I see tend to be literary fiction and I want to read more of that.

Create Intentionally

Now we’re on to the second half of the equation: creation. I’ve not been writing much fiction – all my energy has been on blogging, which is mostly book and tea reviews. I’ve got some pretty nice momentum from NaNoWriMo, so I’d like to continue this. I will be aiming to prioritise writing – it will mean that I have less time for blogposts, but I want to have more stories ready for editors, and then, the world.

As for blogposts, I am ready to blog a little less frequently, perhaps even less than five posts a week, but I want my posts to be more than just reviews. Apart from taking time to write more fiction, I want to take more time from the regular review-writing time to write non-review posts. It’s still going to be about tea and books, but it’s going to be more in-depth. For example, if I read a series of non-fiction books on the same thing, I want to take some time to synthesise all the information: what did I learn, what did I agree with, what questions came up as I read book X that I didn’t have when I read book Y earlier? Reviews have great in helping me to remember and process what I read, but I think these sort of posts (meta-reviews?) will help me to further understand what I’m trying to learn.

I don’t want to just limit creating stuff to fiction – I want to make more food in 2020. It can be baking, it can be the Japanese dishes that I learnt, it can be new dishes I want to try, but basically I want to cook more. I miss cooking and I need to use the cookbooks that I’ve bought.

Conclusion

These are my tentative plans for 2020. The details are definitely subject to change, but the overarching directions are not. I’m not sure if I should do a mid-year check-in, or just check-in at the end of the year, but I will eventually update on how using keywords instead of goals to drive my actions for the year goes.