2017 Resolutions & Goals

Hello everyone! Here are my major resolutions and goals for 2017.

---

I will just briefly mention a couple of non-reading/blogging goals:

1. I’m going to do my homework earlier as in not last minute. I tried to implement this at the end of last year, but failed because once you get behind things stack up and it doesn’t work out. Now that I have no homework left unfinished it is the perfect time to try and go for this one.
2. I’m going to write consistently throughout the year (not just a lot one month and nothing the next).
3. I’m going to spend more time with my family and not just at Christmas time when I spend hours with them. My immediate family is very close by and I need to make the most of that whilst I can because in a couple of years that will no longer be the case!
4. I’m going to try and keep my room tidy more often (I don’t expect it to be tidy all the time, but putting a little bit away each day is my goal, so that it doesn’t ever get too messy).

---

Now for the reading goals:

1. I have set my Goodreads goal at 120 books. Considering I read 187 books in 2016, I think this is quite reasonable considering that I will have less holiday and my final GCSE year beginning. It also gives me some more freedom to read longer books. Reading 120 books in a year means reading 33.333% of a book each day, or reading one book every three days, which I can definitely manage if you space it out over the year!
2. I also have two major yearly TBRs to complete- the 2017 Challenge and the Books I Want To Reread, so my second goal is to fully complete both of those lists.
3. I want to finish reading books before starting new ones. I already begun this a bit at the very end of 2016 where I managed to finish two books I had been reading for quite awhile. I sort of broke this rule today as I wanted to finally have one book on my Goodreads Challenge (the 0 was making me miserable) but I am thinking of it less of a rule and more of a guideline. For example, I may start a book before finishing the two books I am currently reading, but when I finish that book I go back to the ones I had already started rather than beginning a new book. I also plan on keeping the number of books I am reading at a time to 3 including school books.
4. In 2016 I pre-ordered some books which I still haven’t read (even if they came out at the beginning of the year). This year I plan on reading every book I pre-order, or it wasn’t worth pre-ordering. This is slightly more lax for kindle books, but hopefully I can keep it up with those as well.
5. I also want to get my TBR under control a bit. However, if I count it simply in numbers it encourages me to read lots of short books. So, I want to prevent my TBR from increasing beyond the 91 books it is currently at. I also want to get the size of it down to 1.5 brown shelves (one of my bookshelves) and 1 page on my Kindle. That way, whilst it is still a number of books on my Kindle, it is at least the magnitude of the TBR rather than the number that is the primary focus for my TBR. If I had to guess, I would say that getting my TBR down to this point would be reducing its size by a full shelf if not more.

---

I also have a few blogging goals! I’m trying to keep all sections of my goals under 5 so that I don’t overwhelm myself and just forget about them like I did last year. Unfortunately, this section got upped to 6 last minute, but that’s okay.

1. Mark half stars down. Last year, if I ever thought a book was 3.5 or 4.5 or something like that, I would round up on Goodreads, although I would state the actual rating in my review. However, as I want to review more strictly, but am happy with how lax I am at giving out stars, I am going to round down instead of up this year so that I continue giving stars as I have been, but they register more harshly in averages, so as to show more accurately in my own statistics which books I loved.
2. I want to schedule more posts and with that I also want to post at least 3 times a week, which is easier said than done.
3. I want to do more discussions and reviews as well: and not just reviews of review copies, but of others books as well.
4. Along with reviewing comes a couple of things. Not only do I want to do more reviews, but I want to make them more about Goodreads and less about my blog. That being said, I will definitely still post reviews on my blog, but I may do so more often on Goodreads. I also want to find a way to make reviews more engaging and interesting and (inspired by Katerina on Goodreads) hopefully enjoy writing them more!
5. Finally, a goal inspired by Fadwa @Word Wonders: I want to remember to blog hop and be a more active member in the community continuously rather than spiking and then fading into the background again. I want to balance the areas of my life and rather than bemoaning that I have no easy YouTube videos to plough through without leaving a comment, actually go and visit the blogs I followed, because I followed them for a reason!
6. Okay, so I added this a bit later, but it is an important one so it’s going on the end here: I am making my TBRs truly the books I need to read and then reading anything else on top of that. This way, the TBRs will be smaller and I will actually be able to achieve them. This will also help with finishing current reads as I mentioned I wanted to already.

---

What are your goals? Do you set any? Please link your own posts down below as I love reading them: they are some of my favourite posts! Happy reading, Keira x.

• Allgemein