24 Goals & Habits for 2024

The beginning of a new year can be a turn of events within your life. While this is not a necessary undertaking, it can be a nice way to look at a new year with a fresh start. Challenge yourself. See what you are truly capable of.

Creating personal goals and striving towards healthy habits is something I have started to see a great deal of value in. Resolutions are to be worked on, not expected to be immediate. You have the whole year, trying again, or starting over is not a bad thing. Discipline is key. And not accepting failure as an option, but simply as a growing tool to go at it once more.

While this list may seem daunting, these are all things I truly want to work on for my inner self, skill sets to accomplish and for personal development. No one is perfect, and I am not aiming for perfection. But I would love to come to the end of 2024, look back on this list and say I gave it a shot, if not succeeded and thrived.

1. Work on my marriage by prioritizing alone time and dates. We often lose track of our relationships with our partners when we are overwhelmed by daily tasks, jobs and children. It all becomes so hectic that we lose sight of what started it all in the first place. Our connection and love should be most important. Taking the time to enjoy each others company helps keep that spark alive.
2. Give more compliments. Taking a moment to compliment someone on anything from basic things to acknowledging their achievements, this has become a lost art that I would personally love to bring back to life. Make someone’s day. It doesn’t cost anything and it will make me feel good for doing so.
3. Learn to sew. This is a skill I have tried in my past and gave up on too easily. I am not looking to become a professional seamstress, but to be able to hem mine or my husbands clothing, to patch holes in my kids clothes, or to create simple crafts, I would be on my way to being an even better homemaker.
4. Work on myself. I would love to prioritize self-care, no matter how that may look. Exercise, skincare, reading, whatever it may be. I cannot give my best self to my family if I am not feeling like my best self. Even it is just 10 minutes a day to meditate or wash my hair, that can be my moment to breathe deeply for myself, for my sanity.
5. Deepen my faith. I will not get all glorified and religious on you now, but all I will say is I would love to deepen my faith and not neglect it as I have for far too long now. I may not attend church every single week, but give myself the pleasure of enjoying the word more often.
6. Extend my homemaking skills. Homemaking is more than keeping a clean home and cooking for the family, it is making wholesome meals, the way we care for our children, how and what we teach them and how we cherish our husbands and all they do. It is being the backbone and support of the family. The things that go unnoticed because we do them with grace and gratitude. While I already do a lot of this, I could do so much more and I am aware of it. While it is necessary, I do allow myself too much down time and with another baby coming this year, I need to train myself to use my time more wisely.
7. Budget more and spend less money. This is something we can all value from, literally. When my maternity leave ended and that little bit more of an income stopped for our family, we felt the hit. I took on a part-time job and started a small side hustle to try and make ends meet. While we do not struggle, we can always do better. Saving money should be prioritized, regardless of someone’s situation. There is always a way to re-evaluate your finances and get creative with where to be more frugal.
8. Organize digitally. Between photos and videos on our phones, we tend to neglect them building up in our digital storage. By the time we approach organizing these files, it can be overwhelming and daunting, so we tend to say “I’ll get to it later” and we never do. This can be a huge undertaking, but once it is accomplished, it is that much easier to keep things maintained. My goal, and join me if you wish, is to clear off my phone weekly, and organize monthly.
9. Eat a more wholesome diet. More homemade, less processed, more made from scratch, less sugars, drink more water. All the things we tend to want to do each year, but I would like to stick with it this year. I am aiming for a healthier lifestyle, for myself, but also for my children to witness so they follow suit.
10. Plant a garden from seed. We plant a garden from seed every year, but it is usually my husband who handles this and I water the garden each day as needed. I would love to get my hands dirty this time around and experience the true admiration of my own work as the vegetables flourish and grow and provide our family with nutrients.
11. Read more books. I used to be a non-reader, lacking in any interest in reading. Over the past couple of years, I have discovered my passion for reading, finding books I actually enjoy. Topics and authors I appreciate and look forward to opening the pages to. I would love to expand on this yet again in 2024.
12. Stop filling the silence with noise. I grew up, like most of us through the 90’s, being raised by TV. Not actually, lets be real, but the TV was always on in our household. I do not want this for my children and we do control the amount of screen time we let our son enjoy. Even playing constant music in the home creates a discomfort in the quiet when it should be appreciated. I would like to try and work on this even more, for both myself and to teach my kids that the quiet is okay from time to time.
13. Limit scrolling. We are all guilty of it, the mindless scrolling on our phones through social media and websites. As I encourage reading, reading eBooks on our phones just looks like more scrolling time. I do not want my children to grow up bearing witness to their parents being glued to their digital devices. I want to be mindful of this, limit it and give more of my undivided attention towards my children and their needs and imaginations.
14. Complain less. It comes out so easily, biting our tongues is the harder part. Rough days, politics, the news, traffic, the weather, bad behaviour, all kinds of reasons to complain. I would rather put my focus on appreciating the more simple things in life than giving so much energy to things that anger me and steal my thunder.
15. Be more social. I am so guilty of becoming that person who says “we should get together” and then get too busy in the mundane to actually go through with it. We get so caught up in our own lives, our kids, our responsibilities, that we neglect our social lives. Thankfully I have an incredible roster of understanding and just as busy friends, but I am going to make a solid effort to expose myself to socializing more this coming year.
16. Be in pictures more. As a mom, I am usually capturing the pictures of my son, or my husband with my son, lacking in being in the photos. We often make excuses to not be in photos if we aren’t exactly feeling the best about how we look. But I want my children to have photos to look back on with fond memories and not question if Mommy was there. When you lose someone you love, you want to have all the pictures to go along with your memories. I don’t want my kids to lack this treasure in the future.
17. Skin care. I am pretty good about my morning and evening skin care routines, but I want to be sure to stick with it when I have a toddler and a newborn to tend to. It can be grouped in with my “Me Time”.
18. Tame my tongue. I heard this phrase from a YouTuber I follow and it struck me hard. I would love to try to control my reactions. We all lose our patience, but it is within our reactions that others have to see. If we control this and control our words, our tone or even our facial expressions, we can gain better responses. We don’t want to instill fear into our children, or come across as mean to our partners. Our words are so powerful, we need to use them wisely.
19. Work on my posture. I really took notice to this when I was breastfeeding my first born. The backaches I experienced was atrocious. And when you catch yourself in the mirror, well, it ain’t pretty! Sitting up tall, having good posture, shows confidence, power, a gracefulness. I want all of that, and more! And less backaches would be lovely too.
20. Learn to crochet. What can I say, I am in my Grandma core era. I would love to learn to make practical things like hats and mittens, blankets and tea towels. These can double as gifts if I get any good and be less costly for my family’s finances.
21. Stick to a schedule. This comes with some flexibility, as kids and life tend to have other plans. But I thrive under structure. It gives me more purpose to each day. It keeps me organized. This doesn’t have to be by the minute, that would be too stressful. But blocks of time where I know what to expect, where even my children can learn to expect certain activities, this can benefit the whole family. From meal planning, to a cleaning schedule, even with doing preschool at home, all can feel less crazy if we have a reasonable schedule and routine.
22. Become fluid in yoga. I gain so much from doing yoga and I wish I did it more. So I intend to do that. Yoga helps with my stress levels, my mental health, my flexibility and healing my muscles and joints. The way I see it, it can’t hurt, and I would love to get better at it.
23. Incorporate meditation into my day to day. I feel so much more calm after a simple 5 minute meditation. I would love to make this a habit I stick to daily. Again, falling into the “Me Time” category, everyone around me would benefit from a calmer, more focused mother and wife.
24. Adapt new hobbies. While previously mentioned with sewing and crochet, I would love to learn to quilt, maybe knit. I would love to start painting again too, focused on watercolor painting. It is so beautiful and loosely freeing where nothing has to look perfect. As mothers, we tend to lose sight of our hobbies or the skills we want to develop because we “don’t have the time”. Making the time is important and a key to our sanity.

There you have it, my list of 24 personal goals and healthy habits I aim to achieve in 2024. What are some goals and habits you’re after in the new year? Nothing should be off the table, don’t ever limit yourself. While my list may seem like a lot, again, I have an entire year to at least try. That’s all we can do, is try. The options are endless. We owe it to ourselves to give it a shot. Strive for excellence, never perfection.

Melanie xoxox