2025-2026 Eeveeyear Goals

So this year went pretty well, actually, especially compared to last year and the year before. It helps that, once again, I haven't had to move, and that some of my most intense freelance work has wound down. I hit at least 45% on every goal, which doesn't compare well to the first few years since I started tracking my work this way, but I have a lot more goals now than I did then.  It will come up several times throughout this post, but I really cannot emphasize enough what a difference it made not to have this huge, unending freelance project sucking up all my time. I think the format from last year worked pretty well, so we're gonna cover this in four sections: Core Goals, First Year Goals, Non-Core Goals, and New Goals. We've got a couple more things this year that have been around long enough that I could do graphs, but I'm not entirely sure whether they actually 

Core Goals

These are the goals that pertain directly to books, reading, and writing, since that's what this blog, and my career, are primarily about. The things in this section mostly either consist of or support those activities necessary for me to maintain this blog and make progress towards that whole "published novelist" thing I've been aiming for since adolescence. Fiction writing is still trending up, and seems likely to continue to to do. Books read is still trending down, but there is cause to hope that this will be corrected. 

So as not to bury the lede, this is the best year on record for fiction writing. Which is kind of the most important goal, so we're gonna call that an unqualified success, even though I still have yet to even really get close to where I'd like to be. Aligning the number of pages I try to read and the number of words I try to write really seems to be working here, and so does using a randomization tool to determine which writing projects to work on at any given time, rather than using a bunch of mental energy like, deciding. If I wanted to make decisions more than once a year, I wouldn't be doing all this with the spreadsheet. But actually having time to sit down and do it does make a difference - please assume that's a factor in basically everything this year. 

After two years of only 50 books read, I managed 83 this year, which is also what the target would be for the coming year according to the standard formula, but I'm still not comfortable allowing it below 100, so the actual target will be 119. I've gotten a bit more willing to just drop books if I'm not having a good time with them, even if I can't point to anything in particular they're doing wrong. I've never precisely been one of those "Oh, I always finish books once I start them, I have to" types, but I like to have a reason if I'm not going to finish something, and I've started to occasionally consider "I'm bored and annoyed" a reason. Honestly the high page count target has helped here as well, because like, I trust myself more not to capriciously abandon books when I know it will mean they don't count towards a pretty challenging target. Like I said, I don't like making decisions. 

This somehow isn't actually the worst year on record for rereads, but that says more about how awful I've been about rereading the past few years than it does about any particular triumphs for this year. I suspect this is why, despite keeping mynewreading up appropriately by entwining the target for pages read with the one for fiction word count, I've continued to feel somewhat under-resourced when drafting. I considered tethering rereads similarly, but I think for the time being we're going to take the much simpler route of just doubling what the standard formula says the target ought to be, putting it at 96 rather than either letting it be 48 or just pinning it at 75+1d10 like we did last year. I must note again that we could probably have avoided this entire mess had I just let it be 89 the second year rather than getting cute.

Honestly I think nonfiction writing is still kind of finding its level after the tumultuous circumstances of its introduction, but we did hit one exciting mile marker with it this year - my original nonfiction word count document is so long that Google docs will no longer allow me to add to it, so I was forced to start a second document.

26 blog posts written is a substantial improvement over 17 last year or 16 the year before, so I feel I've kept my word on that even if there's still substantial room for improvement. It's not yet enough that I can return to using the standard formula without letting the target fall below acceptable levels, but maybe I'll be able to in a few years if we keep heading in this direction. 263 and 45.66% is the most blog posts I've read in a year in absolute terms, although as a percentage of the target, it isn't as good as the year the goal was introduced. Honestly I'm starting to wonder why I even bother with the standard formula, since I end up having to drop it for everything important - assuming that there's a relationship between how many blog posts I read and how many I can write seems to have held up (more on this later) so the goal will once again be "pinned" at 593. The Light send there are enough blogs left in this world that are still blogs rather than podcasts. Also, I'm giving real consideration to having a subgoal for non-Series Reread posts, but I've got a whole year to think about that. 

I only finished one song translation this year, and that pretty early on, and I still managed to straight up exceed my fanfiction writing goal by 3, so I don't think we need a new category for those after all. The goal's only going up by 1, from 8 to 9, but I think this might be the first time since I started doing all this record keeping that my target for something has organically gone up just because I did such a good job. Most of the time even when I exceed the numbers from the previous year, the goal is still dragged down by some abysmal failure or other. I did start counting each subsequent chapter of fics I caught up on before they were finished as an additional fic, partway through the year, which somewhat accounts for my having exceeded this goal, but I should emphasize that some of this is the result of deliberately reading more fanfiction, because I'm writing and releasing more fanfiction, so reading and commenting is part of being a good community member. This target has also gone up modestly as a result of my just doing it a lot. 

I did not do well on reading short fiction, and the target slipped by another 5 short stories. I'm hoping this one can be fixed by trying harder, but if trying harder doesn't work it'll be getting doubled next year.

It looks like I spent more time reading this year, but it honestly may well be that I just did a better job of accurately counting reading time. I continue to be really bad about this. Writing time came in pretty high again, which I think is probably accurate to the amount of writing I did, what with a three year high on blog posts and a record high on fiction word count.  

First Year Goals

My patience for using the print button turns out to be pretty damn high. I could do math and make some kind of claim about the relationship between reading nonfiction and writing nonfiction, but so far no tidy, obvious ratio has presented itself, so for the time being we're going to let this goal do as it will according to the standard formula. Also, I read a lot more nonfiction in the course of a year than I thought. A little bit of this was books, but honestly most of those nearly 5000 pages was, so far as I can recall, just reading blog posts. The target for this year is probably too high, but since this is almost exclusively a derived stat, I'm not too worried about weirdness while it finds its level. 

The cleaning goal was not actually set high enough for what I need from it, as I was able to keep cleaning on track with everything else without actually getting any better about the laundry or at all on top of the things I need to organize. Since failures in this area have consequences in real life, I'm gonna just manually set it higher this year, rather than see what trying harder can accomplish. Cleaning time actually looks okay. It's also likely that both these goals were undercounted a little.  

Non-Core Goals 

I was worried that TTRPG Words had gone down every year since I added it, but for the first time since it's introduction, it actually went up this year, although not enough to stop the average, and consequently the target, from falling a little. The difference isn't huge, so we're just going to go with it for the time being, and reevaluate if it goes down again next year. Elements is in a similar spot - the goal is gonna go down a little, but not very much. It's mostly just how bad last year was, and I don't mind letting that take another year to get back on track, as long as back on track is the direction it's headed. Something went wrong with that metaphor. 

For the programming stuff, I did pivot, heavily, into romhacking. This has the dual advantages of occasionally being fun, producing tangible results that look cool within a timeframe I can tolerate, and being supported by a small and responsive community of other people who are, by definition, hobbyists, so there's less of this weird tech bro, startup kind of culture, even if programmers, as a group, continue to be kind of mean. To that end, I'm adding a target for programming tasks, because after a while, adding new guys to the Pokedex or whatever doesn't build any new skills, but you still have to do it for the game to get done. I strongly suspect programming time got at least a little undercounted this year, so since it's a time goal and the drop wasn't dramatic, I'm not gonna interfere with it, especially when I'm adding another thing that will work off of the same timer.  

Orbs and Video Game Time both got a substantial late boost from the release of Hollow Knight: Silksong, while basically every other goal likely took a commensurate hit. Silksong is great, by the way, you should play it. You should also play Hollow Knight but you're not gonna be much more confused if you play Silksong first. These games are Soulslikes, as well as Metroidvanias, so they're confusing by nature and also hard on purpose. At some point I should write a blog post about Soulslikes, games that are hard on purpose, and Bloodborne in particular. 

We're doing the "double the standard formula" thing for the goal formerly known as Duolingo too, and changing the name to Language Learning since I'm using Mango now but like, who the hell knows what will happen with that anymore. Podcasts too, because I know I'm godawful at actually listening to them but that doesn't mean I don't want to. 

I honestly expected the amount of TV I watched to be higher this year, relative to prior years, given that I did a fair amount of TV watching while I had Covid back in January. It's possible this got undercounted a little, but I'm not too fussed about it. The actual goal here isn't shifting much from last year, and the goal for Movies is shifting at all, so I guess they're finding their balance, the way things are supposed to. The YoutTube target is going down, substantially if not dramatically - this is partly due to changes in the way I've handled reading blog posts over the past couple of years, but if it continues slipping I may have to pin it for a while, as part of the idea here is to get through the backlog of channels not yet on my RSS feed, and I can't do that if the goal is low enough to be met with only the RSS feed itself. Television rewatch also went up organically, which is probably also Covid related. I feel like I need to get more structured about when I rewatch what, but that's still in the planning stages, so watch this space. 

I thought that how badly I did on walking this year was mostly attributable to, y'know, the Covid again, both in the extended confinement and taking it easy after so I didn't do myself further harm, but apparently the goal was straight up set incorrectly. It was set at 761km, when it ought to ave been 1132km, and I honestly don't know what went wrong there. 

I appear to have no record, anywhere, of how many SCP articles I actually read in 2023-2024, although based on my 2024-2025 target it must have been in the neighborhood of 40. That's what we're going with for the purposes of setting this year's target, anyway, although this is another one that I'm vaguely considering pinning, even though it's non-core, if it slips much further than it already has. I appear not to have a tracker set up for it anymore. On the other hand, I do still have a tracker set up for handwritten pages, even though we got rid of that, so the former can pretty smoothly replace the latter this coming year. I am making an explicit note here that I did 40 this past year, since in the absence of a tracker I don't have any visual record of that either. 

Music ran into a new problem this year when Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist started throwing AI slop at me, so now I'm mostly working through the catalog's of artists I already like but haven't listened to like, comprehensively. That and the steep drop that so many goals experience upon hitting their third year are the bases on which I'm keeping this goal around for now, but honestly it's still on thin ice. 

Sewing time went down because I didn't spent as much time playing tabletop games, basically, and while there was originally some notion of doing it while I listened to audiobooks etc, in practice that hasn't mostly been what happened. Repairs is holding steady for the time being, because I started darning a lot of little holes in my socks, which just doesn't take that long. Both goals are in line for either pinning or doubling if this coming year isn't as productive as I want it to be, but I'm gonna give it another year to see how Trying Harder goes. 

The TCGO stuff has also really started to find its level, with this coming year's time goal being virtually identical to the past year's, despite some pretty broad fluctuation in the records. This is probably somewhat undercounted, and I do want to get better about that, but not so much that I'm gonna try and correct the targeting right now. New Cards is going up a fair bit, but that's largely due to changes in how I play, not how much I play. 

New Goals

So the big new thing here is that Admin is getting dropped, which is why we didn't talk about it earlier. And by "dropped", I mean split into 7 separate categories, several of which are getting the same initial target that Admin would have had this year if we weren't breaking it up. The new goals are:

• Sorting: Putting stuff were it goes. This includes organizing files on my computer and making some kind of sense of the things I tagged for later on Tumblr. Sometimes includes just going "y'know what, no, I don't need to keep this". 
• Sifting: Sorting through big piles of things I mostly don't need to keep, determining any that I do need, doing something with those. Includes dealing with emails. 
• Listing: Making and adding to lists, whether they're static lists for randomizers and the like or dynamic lists like my TBR. 
• Updating: maintaining the trackers and read list here, a couple other projects that we'll talk about if they go anywhere. 
• Data entry: Copying information from one place to another, without doing a lot more to it than maybe applying an Excel formula. If I do have to do more that's probably listing. 
• Transcription: This is technically a new word count goal, and covers trying to make searchable transcripts for things that don't have them, write down all the quotes and lore in Eternal pursuant to making a lore wiki, etc. 
• Correspondence: Getting back to people, reaching out to people, filling out forms and applications, mail. 

The other two new goals are both reading articles, one for like, magazine articles the other for journal articles. The latter goal is called "Science" but does of course also encompass the humanities. 

We'll have the new trackers up in a little bit, probably not all at once. Next Dresden Files post should be in the soonish.  Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!