Goals for 2026

It’s Top Ten Tuesday again. This week’s topic is “Goals for 2026.” Do I have 10 goals for this year? I don’t think so. But I do have a couple of pretty big goals, so maybe they count for more than one each. They won’t be in any particular order.

In my writing group, we had a goals class earlier this year, where we discussed what is a good goal. It should be something you have some control over. So “winning the lottery” is probably not a good goal. Not unless you’re spending millions of dollars on lottery tickets. They should also be reasonable. “Read 1000 books”—also probably not a reasonable goal, unless you’re a super fast reader and have a lot of time to read. I mean, Rapunzel in Tangled talks about “and then I’ll read a book or maybe two or three” every day before noon, so I guess she could do it.

But I’m not a superhero, so here are my goals:

1. Get a book out to agents. So I have two books that are really close to sending out to agents: THE ELF AND THE OUTLAW and SAVE THE BEST FOR LAST. I have 11 1/2 months left. I should be able to get one of them out in this time.

2. Read 85 books. At my current job, I get a lot of reading done, so this should be doable.

3. Finish an afghan I’m making. I started making this in the fall of 2024. The finished product will have 9 squares (I’m almost done with square 8) and then I have to do the ends and the border. I’d like to get this done by Thanksgiving.

4. Finish the first 50 columns on my cross-stitch project. So I started making a large cross-stitch project in the spring of 2024 (I think). It is 270 stitches wide and 360 stitches tall. So it’s a lot of stitches. Anyway, I’ve finished the first 70 rows and I’m working on the first 50 columns. I’m on column 24 at the moment, so this goal shouldn’t be too difficult if I keep on working on it. The 50 columns align with a set of pages in the pattern. Once I’m done with these I’ll start working on the horizontal rows. The project is so big that I’m doing it this way so I can keep track of where everything is.

5. Work on a crochet afghan project I’ve been having sent to me monthly. Since I’m a lot closer to finishing the knit afghan project, I’m focusing on that one, for now. But I hope to finish that in plenty of time to start this one sometime this year.

6. Get to B1 level in German. At least according to Duolingo. I just got to the B1 level content in Spanish last week (yay!). I’m getting there with German. While I don’t have any trips planned to Germany any time soon, this is a language that I started learning in 5th grade so it would be nice to get to this level.

7. Get to A2 level in Japanese. We would like to go to Japan in 2029, and when I go, I’d like to be somewhat proficient in the language. I started practicing this language every day when we got back from our trip to Europe last October. While I had dabbled in it a bit before our trip, I’d never tried to focus on it. I don’t know if I can get to B1 level before we go, but it would be nice if I could get close. I was pretty happy with my proficiency in the languages of the countries we visited last year (high A2 for Spanish and French, A2 in Italian) and would like to be able to understand at at least that level when we go to Japan.

I guess that’s it! My life doesn’t revolve around these seven items, but a lot of the other things I do don’t really involve goals. Yes, I’ll continue to go to the gym, work at my job, etc., but I don’t really have goals in those areas.

What are your goals for 2026?