how i set my 2024 goals

welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj, an 18 y/o always up to something in social good x tech.

this publication is a place for me to reflect on productivity, health and tech, and drop unique opportunities in the space right to your inbox daily. if you’re new here, sign up to tune in! 💌 

btw, feel free to reply with topic ideas you want me to write about for future posts.

onto today’s topic: how i set my 2024 goals ✏️ 

i mentioned before that i think new years resolutions are a pretty ineffective. that is, when done alone. i took a slightly different approach to my goal-setting this year, and it came in 3 steps:

1) reflecting on 2023 💭 

yes, the new year is for setting high ambitions, but it’s also about improving upon the areas i wasn’t the most happy with from 2023. last year, i didn’t take the time to reflect on how 2022 went so my 2023 goals weren’t really rooted in my previous learnings. this time, i reflected on my wins, my losses, my areas of improvements, and areas i want to double-down on. you can see most of my reflection here.

2) envisioning myself in one year 🗓️ 

before i wrote down any 2024 goals, i wrote a super long paragraph describing what i want my life to look like in a year: what i’ll be feeling, what habits i’ll still be practicing and what i would have accomplished by then. this is more commonly known as vision boarding, except i didn’t do the whole scrapbooking thing on pinterest. 🎨 putting this life i see for myself helped put things into perspective — i’m not just working on different parts of my goals separately, but building myself up wholly. writing out my vision is important to crafting a cohesive narrative for my life.

3) working backwards to fill buckets 🪣 

now that i had this vision in front of me, i worked backwards to pinpoint different areas of my life that i wanted to focus on. in other words, i formed different categories, or buckets, for my goals. in 2023, i had 4 buckets for my goals: professional, personal, health, school. when i was thinking about the best version of myself by next year, i noticed that being more intentional practicing certain values was brought up frequently. 🧘‍♀️ i decided to make this more concrete and added an overarching bucket of “self-improvement for my character” in my 2024 manifesto page on notion, including goals like practicing vulnerability and generosity. i was contemplating creating even more buckets, but ended up sticking to my original 4 to ensure focus. i did, however, end up making a web for the subcategories within each bucket:

• professional → projects, events, content creation

• personal → relationships, travel, finances

• health → fitness, diet, habits

• school → grades, clubs/extracurriculars, research

i felt like there wasn’t really much grounding me to my goals or any sort of vision in 2023, which is why i have taken a lot more time to reflect on what i want to bring with me to my end of year 2024 checkpoint.📍 

how are you setting your goals?

daily opportunity + resource drops 🔍️