When I first started choosing a word for the upcoming year, the idea was to replace the traditional slew of “New Year’s Resolutions” with a guiding principle for the year ahead. In the past, I’ve chosen words like Pray and Flourish and it’s really cool to look back on what I’ve written and see how those words have applied to our past.

This year, I want to choose a word, but with a tangible list or guide of specific things I’d like to see myself – or our family as a whole – accomplish over the next year. As you scroll through these words, my hope is that it’ll inspire you to do two things:

1. Choose a word of your own for 2020 and
2. Be compelled to follow along with me this year as I/we try to live this post out!

I think what will help me stick to the words in this post is revisiting it often and periodically giving you updates on how it’s going – so keep an eye out for (quarterly?) revisits either here or (probably) on Instagram! J

My Word for 2020

I’ve been thinking about my 2020 word of the year for months now and over the past few weeks, one word keeps pushing itself to the front of my mind.

I think towards the end of every year we all get a little lazy and a little loose with our habits going into the holidays. I know, for me, we indulged in food and drink, I slacked off on my fitness routine, we let Fischer partake in a little too much screen time and just no longer had a clear or healthy vision of what we wanted our everyday lives to look like. Going into the new year, like most, I want that all to change – but not just temporarily. I want to spend 2020 really building a foundation of healthy habits and changing our lifestyle in some fundamental ways.

So, the word I’ve chosen for the start of this new decade is improve. And I’m going to walk you through all the things I have on my mind to improve this year. Ready? Goals-related brain dump in 3, 2, 1..

10 Areas I Want to Improve in This Year

1. Family Time

We are fortunate enough to have the opportunity for a lot of family time in this stage of life, so my hopes are not necessarily for more, but for better quality. I want the time we have together during any given day to be spent not only together, but present. One main area I can think of to improve upon this is during meal time – namely, dinner time. Up until now, Fischer has always had his own meal time. He’d eat at 5:30 and then we’d do his bedtime routine before G and I sat down for our own dinner around 7:30. No more of that. We’ve already begun changing this. I’m now starting to cook dinner at 5 and we’ll sit down to eat together by 6. I also love that we’ve started eating dinner as a family at our dining room table. Normally, meals have pretty much all been at our kitchen island – which is great for breakfast and lunch, but there’s something about sitting down ‘at the table’ together that just encourages quality time I think!

2. Relationships

This will be a big one for me this year. For whatever reason, I’ve never been good about this and I really want to work on it in 2020! We live 7 hours away from my family and friends that I grew up with but still love so much! We didn’t travel back to my hometown at all last year, so I plan to schedule at least 2 or 3 trips back and weekly phone calls or texts!

3. Diet

We haven’t paid much attention to our diet in terms of nutrition, calories, energy, etc. For the most part, I’d say our diet is fairly natural-based. We don’t do a lot of processed foods or anything like that, but this year I’d like to put forth more effort and focus into eating in a way that will fuel and nurture our bodies. Our plan is to try the Keto diet in January and see if that’s something we can see ourselves doing long term. I’ve heard great things about its fat burning capabilities – yes, but our main draw to it is energy based. G and I both could use a boost in that category, so we’ll see how it goes – and I’ll keep y’all updated!

We also plan to focus more on Fischer’s diet. I’ve slacked lately on trying to broaden his horizons in terms of food. It’s such a struggle to get him to eat anything that isn’t bread-based so I gave in and stopped trying very hard to get him to try new things. That’s all stopping now. Not only will he be offered the same foods we’re eating, but I’ll be incorporating a Toddler Tasting tray at least once per day to jumpstart his exposure to different things and I’m hoping all of us eating together more often will help him learn that he can/should be eating the same things mommy and daddy are eating. I have to say, I’m looking forward to no longer making two different meals at dinner time!

4. Exercise

When I wrote this post back in September, I was doing so well with my fitness routine. But lately that has been put on the wayside with the hustle of the holidays and my poor work/life balance. I’ll talk about my routine in a minute, but I do plan to incorporate early morning runs or workouts and even head to the gym for a cycle class or weightlifting throughout the week.

5. Finances

We’ve been a little lax with our budget lately, but we’ve already taken some steps to ensure we get back on track this year. Part of that includes weekly spend tracking, monthly reviews and making frugal daily choices.

6. Self Care

This is something I’ve been so bad about. I’ll be taking the one night a week G is consistently out of the house for small group to focus on time for myself. I plan on putting work of any sort away for the evening, maybe pouring a glass of wine, drawing a bath, doing my nails or just sitting down with a book. It’s funny how I know spending quality time for me is so good in so many ways, yet I hardly ever let myself take the time to do it. I plan to change that this year!

7. Personal Development

I want to make personal development part of my habits and routine this year. Part of that is aiming to read one book a month, building 20-30 minutes of journal and Bible reading into my morning routine and taking the time to learn something new that will benefit me and/or my business on a regular basis. Let’s face it – with all the free content out there, there’s no reason not to be bettering yourself constantly!

8. Business

Of course, this may be a given, but I felt it important to include on this list. 2019 was so big in terms of my business growth (I improved my blog traffic almost 800% from 2018!!!) and I don’t want that momentum to end. I have so much planned for AF Blog in 2020 and I can’t wait to see what sort of amazing things are in store for this upcoming year!

9. Routine

I’ll be making some changes to my everyday routine in order to work smarter not harder, spend more quality time with Fischer during the day and still have time for all the things I mentioned above. Stay tuned, I promise I’ll go into more detail on this soon!

10. Home

There are so many projects around our home (mainly décor-wise) that I want to tend to this year. Since we moved into this house in March, it’s felt like we’ve been go-go-go in terms of home improvement, but now that those types of projects have slowed down, I want to focus more on making it feel more like ‘home’ – if that makes sense! I actually have a blog post planned where I’ll show you the different areas in our home that I want to focus on and detail what exactly I’m envisioning so – again – stay tuned!

What do you guys think? Do you want to follow along specifically on any of these aspects of improvement? Do you have your own goals laid out for 2020? I’d love to hear in the comments below!