Open Thread: Summer Goals

We're sharing ours and want to hear yours!

At risk of being total parodies of ourselves, one of our favorite things about summer is having slightly more time and energy to devote to setting personal goals.

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Maybe it's the fact that there's all that extra daylight to motivate you to get shit done! Or maybe it's just that the idea of having three months of unstructured free time to reset never really leaves you.

So today, we thought we'd share our summer goals and then invite you to share yours too. We'll do another post on July 20 to see how everyone's goals are going (yours included!), and then do another post on August 20 and September 20.

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Rachel: I've been trying to read more books, and my June goal is to read for 60 minutes every Saturday. When my goal was more open-ended and I could do it anytime, I sort of did it...never? But the hour every Saturday has been really calming (turns out, reading a real book makes me feel better than being on Instagram!!!) and it helps me get stuck in a book enough to want to read it throughout the rest of the week too.

Gyan: My summer goal is just to be a better friend. I live in New York now but spent all my previous adult years of my life in Sydney, where almost all of my closest friends still live. I caught up with a few earlier this month in Bali for a friend's wedding and, as is the case whenever anyone catches up with old friends, was reminded just how damn lucky I am to have such wonderful people in my life. We said our goodbyes, I took a long flight back to the US, and on my way decided that for the next three months I was going to try and be the best friend I can be. This means more regular check-ins, some surprise gifts sent in the post for special occasion, and never cancelling a FaceTime date. My friends mean so much to me, I want to make them more of a priority in my every day life.

Terri: After years of having the New York Times crossword app languishing three swipes over on my phone's home screen, I finally gave in and paid for the — honestly reasonable — $39.99 yearly subscription, with the goal of 1) doing a crossword every day, and 2) eventually being able to complete the Sunday puzzle on my own. And it's seriously been one of the better decisions I've made recently! I love having something to do on my phone that isn't Instagram/Facebook/scrolling through texts/doing other things that make my anxiety worse and that also makes me feel a little smarter. I've already learned three different synonyms for "off-white"! Try as I might, I can't totally stay off of my phone before I go to bed, so working on a crossword is a nice, happy medium. Plus, the app makes it so easy to see how many in a row you've done and how long it took to do them, which means I have an accessible and satisfying feeling of accomplishment every time I open it. I'm not quite at the point where I can finish a Sunday yet, but even if that doesn't happen for a year (or more), I'm proud of myself for keeping up this very fun habit.

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Anna: My goal is actually sticking to a before-bed routine that Future Me will thank me for. For someone who is always writing about the importance of taking care of yourself, I can be AWFUL at taking my own advice — I am basically the queen of having good self-care intentions but not following through. If I’m being completely honest, one thing that I’ve learned about myself is that I need to literally schedule parts of my life ahead of time, because otherwise, I make decisions based on my mood or my own laziness instead of what I really want. So, this summer, I am going to make an honest-to-god checklist of things I want to do before bed and I’m going to try to stick with it. Otherwise, my lizard brain will keep convincing me in the heat of the moment that all this self-care stuff is too much effort and I’m much better off watching Netflix. I’ll put my routine in the comments once I’ve finalized it — I’m a Virgo, so I need to tinker with it for at least a few days of trial and error — and I definitely want to see your before-bed routines for more inspiration too, so please share!

Tom: I don't know about you, but all I do on Facebook is mute people who don't know the difference between "lose" and "loose" and look at "On This Day" memories that make me wish I were still in college, when I had enough energy to go out on Wednesdays and Obama was president. So! Rather than waste time scrolling through a website that stresses me out AND steals my personal data, I'm going to use this next month to finally experiment with deactivating my account. Plus, Facebook in summer tends to be the worst, because people share even more photos of their life — beach trips, rooftops, pools — that probably aren't anywhere near as fun as they seem. Cancel it. I'm deleting my account. I want to know how it feels to disconnect. Here goes nothing.

That's all we got! Now it's your turn — tell us your goals in the comments, and be sure to come back in a month to share updates/new goals/etc.