So, as I'm recording this, it's the last day of January. I'm hoping that you are listening to this either on the last day of January or perhaps the very beginning of February. And the reason I want this message to get across now is for those of us who made big plans that 2025 was going to be different, we may be a little deflated right now because it feels like the same old thing is happening yet again.
And I want to give you a little encouragement and a little hope and a little new way to think about things if you're feeling stuck or deflated about how your goals might have gone or how your new and improved system or way you were going to handle things this year has come crashing down around you. And that doesn't have to be how it is. Let's dig into the smarter way that is not too late to start. If you're hearing this and you want to jump in today, let's do it.
So if you read the title, you know I'm talking about the difference between aims versus goals. And I first heard this word aims being used by Gretchen Rubin, who I've mentioned many times. She's from the podcast Happier. What I love about it, and as she pointed out, is if you're picturing a goal, we usually think we're going to hit our goal or we're not. It is a yes or no, we made it or we didn't, we succeeded or we failed.
And that is sort of detrimental to those of us who have these all or nothing brains. But in aim, when I hear the word aim, I think of a target, right? You're aiming for the bullseye. But if you hit the ring just outside or the one outside of that or the very edge of the target, it still feels good. We're close and we then figure out how to adjust to get closer and closer to what we were aiming at.
And so I just kind of want to dig into the way I suggest and our group has been practicing with setting these aims for the year and why I feel like this is better. And if you're sitting here and it's February of 2025 and all of your goals have come crashing down, you can start today. I don't care if you're listening to this on February 15th, or maybe you stumble upon this on June 6th, you can still do what our group is doing. And here's why. And here's why it helps us.
So we grabbed a bingo board that I created, but you could grab any bingo board from anywhere and create this. But because it's the year 25, and again, borrowed from Gretchen Rubin, we are doing a 25 for 25. In that, we just wrote a finite one-off, I either did it or I didn't do task in all of the 25 spots. And they can be something as dramatic as painted my bedroom or as small as found a new pair of jeans I love, right? A one-off task that you either complete it or you don't.
Not a, I am going to do five-mile run every day for 2025. Not something that you have to be consistent with. Something you can do at any time. If you are aiming for 25 of these, and at the end of the year, you are on December 1st, and you're like, I just ran across my big go board, and I haven't done any of these things, you literally could still pick it up and go, you know what, I am feeling the urgency, I am feeling the not again grief of the end of the year,
and I'm going to see how many of these I can knock off before Christmas. I'm going to do one a day. And on Christmas day, I will be crossing off the 25th of 25 things. Or you might stumble upon that list and look down and go, huh, I totally forgot about this list. But guess what? I can cross this one off and cross this one off and cross this one off. I didn't even think about the fact that I had written this down at one point, but I did, oh my gosh, I did 17 of these.
Or even I did eight of these. And guess what? I got a bingo. Or I'm one away from a bingo. And I'm going to do that one today. When you have something you're aiming at and you suddenly realize you're getting closer to that center bullseye, you have this little lift. Because let's face it, even in a smaller scale, how many times have we written a grocery list and walked to the store and realized we left the grocery list behind, but in your head, you're trying to remember, I think it did this.
I think it did this. I think it did this. And all of a sudden you get home and you're like, huh, I forgot the most important one, but gosh, I did. I remembered 23 out of the 25 things that were written down on my list. This is amazing. We do these things, Because this is just how we operate. Like this is the way our brains work. And instead of beating ourselves up about it, if we take and focus on aims instead of goals, we can have these lifts.
And on a smaller scale, this is the very beginning of February. I do this at the beginning of every month. I prefer a planner that is just a monthly. I don't use all those days up. I don't like dated things that I feel guilty about because I've turned another page or I've turned another week and I'm like, oh, I'm not using this planner that I spent good money on. I just like to find them. I can find them at Target. I'm sure they're at Walmart.
I'm sure you could find one at Amazon that are literally just the months. And the ones I love have the calendar on it with an extra little side column that is just notes. And in that notes, I always put down what I call my pending list. And if you've never heard me talk about a pending list before, please, please start getting this into your mindset and your vocabulary. What I love about a pending list is at the beginning of every month, I just brain dump.
I get it all out of my head for those of us who have brains who don't know how to prioritize the difference between. Schedule that you know eye doctor appointment that needs to happen or that mammogram that needs to happen for our health and you know buy slippers like we see these things as having the exact same weight so you don't have to worry about prioritizing anything you're just dumping it out of your head and onto the paper.
Then you look back at that last month. I did this pending list in January. And you start going, oh, I did that one. Oh, I did that one. Oh, I partially did that one. Oh, I don't even care about that one anymore. Oops, missed the deadline on that. I guess that wasn't that important. And you start realizing that deciding not to do something is tackling it. I only do pending or tackled.
And the reason I call it tackled is because choosing not to do something, choosing that's not a priority, choosing January wasn't the month to do that, but it's worth me writing it down again in February. All of those things are ways that we can see how our brain sort of self-sorts. We're just not recognizing it. I did a lot of unnecessary tasks as a way of procrastinating, but they still got done. I did a lot of important tasks that I didn't even remember were on my list, but guess what?
They had to be done, and I actually am doing things that have to be done. I'm just not realizing it or giving myself credit for it. So I literally, right before pushing record, looked at my January list, which happened to have 30 things on it. And I did 24 of them. I didn't look at it once. I didn't pick it up once. I wrote it down at the beginning of the month. And then I started living my life. But looking back and realizing I did 24 of them.
Now, when I say did them, let's reuse my own vocabulary. I tackled them. Three of them were completely crossed off. Like, why did I even write that down? That wasn't even important. I have no interest in doing that anymore. But it gave me brain space because I got it out of my brain at the beginning of the month. And it helped me to realize that's not even important. And why I thought it was important. And why I thought I wanted to do it.
But I tackled it by deciding not doing it was the thing to do. That counts towards my 24 out of the 30. Okay. Three of them are still in an ongoing status. So the way I do it is I give myself a check for if I did it, I cross through it if it's no longer important to me. And I put this little squiggle, I borrowed that from the creator of the bullet journal for meaning it's in progress. This is something I actually have done something towards.
And now it's back in my head as important as I'm writing down my February dump. There are things that are completely blank. I haven't checked them off or crossed them out because I'm still evaluating, you know what, actually, I think that's important. Let me write that on February and it starts new. It feels fresh. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is if you're listening to this, please don't be defeated.
Please give yourself some grace to say, okay, that system I was trying is not right for me. And the bonus of deciding to pick up today and start today is planners are on some steep discount right now because they're trying to get rid of them. Ignore January. Tear it out if you want to. I don't care. Start today on that little column or you don't have to go buy a planner.
Just pick up a notebook and write down all those things that are swirling around in your head that you're afraid you're going to forget. Or go gather the 16, 27, 48 post-it notes. Backs of receipts, scribbles on envelopes, because I know you, because that's what I do, gather them all together and dump them into one long line on this list and throw all those little pieces paper away, because that's going to feel really good too. And then C, say, okay, these are all these things that are pendants.
These are all things I'm aiming for. I don't have to hit all of them. Let's see how many I can tackle. And if you want the bingo board and you're interested in that whole aspect and you want some people to lean into for some accountability and some encouragement, I have my free podcast group. You get there by going to bit.ly bit.ly slash joylovinghomecommunity.
You can jump in there with us. Or if you want some more accountability where we're doing active body doubling Zoom calls every week, that membership is closing tonight, but it is $10 a month. You can join anytime, cancel anytime, and you get there by going to joylovinghome.com slash membership. I would love to see you in there. I would love to see you with us tackling these things and seeing every week a way to check in with each other where we're like,
okay, am I working towards this pending list? Am I attempting to tackle things? Am I getting my aim sharper and sharper towards what my actual goal was? But it's okay that I'm just aiming. And it's funny, I was recording with an interview with Dana K. White of A Slob Comes Clean yesterday, and I'm so excited that podcast is coming out next week. So stay tuned for that. But we were talking about one of the greatest gifts she's given in her books,
in her podcasts, in her YouTube videos. And if you've not experienced her, please go look her up. She gives this clarification or this knowledge or this boost to those of us who have brains like ours that, an understanding that it has nothing to do with intelligence. It has nothing to do with capabilities. Part of why we struggle with our homes is because we function well, even in the chaos.
There are people who can't function in the chaos, and so they keep their home in order as a way to be able to function. They keep their home in order so that they can think about other things and can focus on other things. We have this crazy ability to focus in spite of all the things that are going around us. It doesn't give us permission to not keep trying. It doesn't mean we don't care. And we want our house to be in better order. But we're still functioning. We're still highly intelligent.
We're still focused on laser focus sometimes on some other different priorities and projects and exciting things to our very creative brains. But we're highly functioning in the midst of all of it. And just to have somebody let you know, like, we don't think you're broken. It's a very special kind of brain that can have these two things happening at once. And I don't know, so I hope you'll tune in for that. She's got a new book coming out and we talk a lot about that.
And that's kind of fun because it's still in line with all of the things to do with our homes, but she talks about a whole new aspect of it in her new book. So be on the lookout for that next week. Anyway, I'll wrap up here because this one got long, but just wanting to give you some light and some encouragement that if you feel already it's February tomorrow and you've let yourself down again, don't feel that way.
Pick up today. Start today. think of these aims as a new way to start and it doesn't mean you're going to break it tomorrow you've got all year to pick these up all month to pick these up and realize you're actually accomplishing all these tasks until next time continue to choose joy.