Lessons from 2025

Lesson #1: It’s Not the Planner, It’s You (Okay, Maybe it’s Also the Planner)

I’ve tried to be a planner person my whole life. In High School, my Dad gifted me a Franklin Covey planner, and its utilitarian structure got me through most of college and grad school. Unfortunately, most of its many dedicated slots for appointments and project planning were severely underutilized by a young woman who had very few places to be, and fewer people to “circle back” with. Regardless, it did set me up to be a strict list and long-term goal person; the former I will always be, the latter I failed at with a surprising amount of gusto and many excuses. I swore I did try! I tried BuJoing. I tried the planners with strict daily goals, the kind hundreds of pages long. I tried nothing at all except a stack of sticky notes. Nothing stuck (pun intended).

In 2024, on the day Donald Trump was elected, I decided to try something new instead of stewing in disappointment. I put my historian and archivist hats back on after many years without wear. I didn’t want the headlines or social media trends to define what my life looked like as an average person. I wanted to be like so many young women throughout history, whose journals and diaries were glimpses into uneventful, benign lives just like mine. I wanted to swim in normalcy. I aspired to be an “everyperson”, the Average Joe (or Jane), who isn’t in a history book or a Wikipedia article. I wanted to chronicle my mundane. This decision was a little middle-finger moment to a world run on sharing every moment of your life. But how to do this, when I am notoriously lazy?

After a lunch break spent at the local stationery shops, I found a planner. Finally! A simple, no-fluff, undated planner made for goal-failing folks like me. It’s deceptively simple: long rectangles for each day, just enough to write some to-dos, appointments, and a few sentences more. Its no-date format removed the stress of seeing long gaps between planning sessions, allowing me flexibility. I could start and stop whenever I wished without wasting paper. I no longer had to feel immense guilt at yet another failed attempt at goal-setting.

I got home. Opened the front cover. And realized that starting my planner at the end of the year felt taboo. Rebellious. And in that spark of New Year Resolution rejection, I did something else. Instead of a classic resolution, a list of goals I would never achieve to put neatly in my new planner, I would focus on a word. This word would color the next twelve months, informing how I went about my daily life. So I thought long and hard, and whittled down my faults until I landed on the one thing I am immensely bad at: consistency.

And guess what? Consistent, I was! Every day for a year, I wrote a few words or sentences about my day. Yes, even if I simply wrote “hungover–did nothing” in that day’s box. After a month or two, I was (kind of) transformed! Over time, I became a woman whose day-to-day was chronicled as she liked. The process of consistency was slow, of course, but eventually I began making decisions built on this new foundation. I was published twice. I began exercising more. I started a new hobby that I’ve attended weekly for six months. In various small ways, I also found myself being less lazy. I put away dishes after drying them. I filled up the bird feeder as soon as I saw it empty. I bought dog food a couple of days before it ran out. Completing laundry in a timely manner has yet to be mastered, however.

In November of 2025, I filled out the last rectangle in my 2024-2025 planner. I went out on my lunch break. Same store. Same planner, this time, in black (the previous planner was orange). It felt good to close the old and open the new. I felt no small amount of happiness at filling up a planner for the very first time. Something simple, something with a narrow focus, had changed me for the better.

My word for 2026? Discipline. You’ll have to stick around to see where this one takes me.

Lesson #2: Kill Your Darlings, aka Goals are Actually Important, Ash

As previously stated, goals are Not My Thing. Adamantly, perpetually NOT MY THING. The issue with diving into what you’re bad at (like consistency) is that it reveals more of what you’re bad at. Like, say, goals. So, what does a recently reformed planner do after realizing, begrudgingly, that maybe working consistently towards something is, uh…good for you?

For someone who has to be good at all things all the time, goals are a boogeyman. Sure, there were moments in life I had no choice in completing, like school. Personal goals, however, are a different beast. If I don’t accomplish them in time or to completion, I’m left with a massive feeling of failure. I become bereft, full of self-loathing and hatred. The very word “goal”, when uttered, brings my sense of self to the deepest of pits. I take forever to recover from failure. The solution to these horrid feelings is easy: never set myself up for failure.

That’s how I’ve lived most of my adult life. I’ve had things I’ve tried and enjoyed and kept up with, like writing. But something happened in November when I was about to finish my planner. I sat at my dining room table, staring at my work-in-progress novel, A Filthy Hunger. I’d been more consistent with my writing, yes. But I realized writing the book felt more and more like a battle. A hill I kept running up, to slide back down for a month or two before finding the inspiration to really put in the work once again. And it hit me like a lightning strike–I had to kill my darlings.

(If you’re not familiar, the phrase is one I heard from Stephen King, though I can’t confirm its origin. I don’t even read Stephen King, by the way; he just gets interviewed a lot. The concept boils down to the act of cutting things from your work that you love, or have an attachment to, for the betterment of the piece as a whole. It could be a sentence. A chapter. A character.)

In the aftermath of this Major Realization, I realized that I’d trudged down the same path for so long, I’d lost the forest for the trees. After a few phone calls and an impromptu Come to Jesus moment about the decision with my partner, the way was clear: I had to whittle three points of view down to one.

I can’t tell you how genuinely distraught I was. I was about to cut my favorite character and the POV I thought would make this debut novel fresh and frightening. While this discovery quickly turned into something inspiring–while working on editing the current chapters, I see I’ve improved immensely in the last year–it also illuminated a glaring fault: I hadn’t actually finished anything. 

Actually, that’s not true. I finished and published a short story and a poem in two separate anthologies. Let me rephrase: I sucked at finishing those things. I had months to write a short story. I procrastinated so hard that I left it until the very last minute. I’m happy with it, I love it, truly. But I know for a fact that if I had the self-discipline to work on it consistently (see what I’m doing here?), then the final result may have been even better. As for the poem, it was half-crafted years ago, the second half finished one bored afternoon. I’m thankful those at Wee Sparrow Poetry Press had no insight into my artistic process. What if I’d done the work over time, and instead of three poems submitted on a whim, I had dozens more to send to multiple presses? What if two successes could have been three? Four? What if finishing wasn’t the goal (eek!), but rather how I arrived at completion of that goal (eek again!)?

Turns out there are good reasons people create and maintain goals, and I, ever stubborn, had to learn that on my own. It’s one thing to be told to have goals. It’s another thing altogether to work at something for a year, only to realize you were utilizing one half of a whole. Having a planner and working on consistency–while important to my overall growth–could only take me so far. Something else has to bolster the efficacy of consistency, to bulwark my artistic practice. 

And here, we have arrived at why killing your darlings is important, but not as important as having goals–and dammit, I hate to even type those words. But…I have to have at least one, don’t I? Don’t get me wrong, I’m keeping my Word of the Year–so far, this seems to do great things for Ash, the Hater of Goals. I just don’t want to waste twelve months before having another important Eureka! moment. 

Sorry, I won’t be telling you this goal. I know, I know, I’m sure you were dying to hear what it is. Unfortunately, I’ve found that if I say something I’d like to do out loud, I’m less likely to follow through. However, I do hope to tell you about it once it’s achieved. 

Lessons #3: None of this Works if I Don’t Put Down My Phone

Seriously, put the phone down. I got Opal, an app that gamifies limiting your screen time. I went from spending 7 hours a day (I can hear your gasps of shock) to an average of 3.5 hours a day. I’m on a 116-day streak, with hopes to bring that number down even more–some weeks are better than others. After downloading Opal and getting those pesky weekly reports, I realized I was much more productive in the weeks when the daily number was lower. Is it cringe that I need an app to limit my apps? Yeah, it is. Small victories, okay?

Look, I’m chronically online. Thank 2008 tumblr for really sinking its hooks into me during the most formative years of my life. Yet none of the aforementioned lessons would have been learned if I hadn’t worked on putting that stupid rectangle down. You’ll miss the latest TikTok trend, sure. You may even miss someone’s important life moment. Say good riddance to the former, and make the latter a wakeup call: we should be more active in our personal connections with friends and family. Hell, I’m writing this blog for that exact reason, so that people can keep up with me without needing to refresh their algorithm. 

I’ve yapped long enough. Let 2026 be filled with more lessons. Talk soon!

A.M.