📚 New Year, New Projects! My 2026 Personal Goals

*This blog post is adapted from the YouTube video I made talking about my 2026 personal goals. You can watch it here.*

The New Year always awakens a new fire of motivation in me to reevaluate what went right and what went astray in the year prior and see how I can set myself up for success for the upcoming year. It always brings a fresh feeling, a desire for a change. After careful deliberation, I’ve decided which goals and projects will be my focus during 2026.

2026 feels like a really big year for me. I’ll be turning 30, and a few of these goals are from projects I’ve already begun, or I’ve had floating in my mind for some time, that I have yet to complete. 
Below I’ll be talking about what these goals are, the steps I’m going to be taking to complete them, and what challenges I’m facing with each of them.

So my first goal is to finish drafting the historical fiction novel that I’ve been working on. This is definitely the biggest project of all of the goals that I’m setting out to complete. 

I’ve been dabbling with writing for quite some time now, with multiple different book projects, and none of them have ever seen completion. Part of this is because I’m fully a plotter. I’ve attempted partially plotting books and then pantsing the rest of them, but ultimately I deal with commitment issues: I have all these ideas in my brain that I haven’t really fully fleshed out, so I often don’t want to commit to one particular one until I feel like I’ve thought through all of my options (an unreasonable goal, I know).

But this project feels really different. It’s the first book that I had a very clear idea of where I was going with it. Usually I have a good sense of the beginning and the end, while the middle is kind of really murky, which is where I start faltering in my planning. But it was different for this book, which was exciting. So I spent the last few months to finish outlining it to prepare to write for this year. 

I’ve set myself the goal of completing one scene a week, which seems like a small goal,  perhaps, but I haven’t had a consistent writing schedule since I was in school. I’m giving myself an easy start, and then I can always go up from there. 

For my second goal, I really missed the structure of learning that I had while I was in school. So when I learned about the personal curriculum trend last year, I knew that I really wanted to try that in 2026. I’ve decided to set myself “semesters” of learning. These I’ve planned out for my first semester to read research related to the period of history that I’m writing on for my book. I’ve done bits of research for very specific things as I was outlining, but I’ve not had a full, comprehensive understanding of the time period. So that’s what I’ve done with planning out my personal curriculum for the beginning of this year.

I’d like to do a separate post breaking down all of the texts that I’ll be reading—and fiction books as well—related to the time period. My book is set in the mid-1600s in New England, so I’ll be learning a lot about the New England Puritans and the different Native American tribes that lived in that area at that time, along with their internal and external conflicts.

I’m very excited about this goal, and it leaves me space to continue pursuing more related research if I want to. More than likely, however, I’ll be ready to move on to a new semester of learning later in the year. 

Check out my blog post breaking down my entire personal curriculum course for the beginning of 2026 here!

Towards the end of 2025 I realized that I had lost motivation for exercising, which really affects my mood, my energy, and my motivation to do other things. So I decided to join a gym! For the past couple months or so I’ve been regularly going three or four times a week, incorporating weights along with cardio. So far, I’ve really noticed how much it positively affects me overall, both physically and mentally. So for this year I just want to continue putting my physical and mental health at the top of my priorities.

In addition, I not only want to incorporate a consistence gym routine, but now that it’s snowy season, I want to take as much opportunity as I can to snowboard, one of my favorite sports.

My last goal is to take the JLPT, or the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, at the N3 level at the end of 2026. I lived and worked in Japan four years right after undergrad, teaching English. I didn’t know any Japanese before I moved there, and I’m really proud of how far I’ve come in the language. 

Languages have always been really difficult for me. I’ve studied quite a few throughout school and into college, but of the second languages I’ve learned, this is the one that has stuck the most. Probably because it’s the one I have most studied regularly and frequently. It also helps that I was immersed in it due to living in Japan for all that time. 

I took N4 a few years ago, but haven’t really set myself this next goal. (It feels quite daunting.) But I think that the overwhelm I feel is very much due to the fact that I haven’t set myself a study schedule, either. So one of my goals for 2026, besides taking the test, is to stick to a regular study schedule. 

Hopefully by breaking these goals down into smaller, more manageable steps I can more easily achieve them. There’s something really satisfying about writing them down on a to-do list and then crossing them off. I like to keep a weekly planner to keep myself focused and on track with my goals, and then I like to look back as well to see how far I’ve come. There’s a great sense of progress and accomplishment in this habit that I want make use of for my personal motivation.

If you’re interested in any of these topics, between writing, or research, or language study, check back in on my blog or YouTube for more!
Let me know what your 2026 goals are in the comments below, and how you plan to achieve them, or if you have any tips or tricks for getting those big projects completed.

Wishing you all the luck in reaching your goals and pursuing your dreams in 2026!

~ A.K. Aspen 🌟