Hello again! You may have noticed that I have been away for a while, which sounds like a bad thing, but actually wasn't. I have still been ROARing away in the background, while also indulging myself in a three-month festive frenzy of Halloween and Christmas activities. I figured that the first three-quarters of 2025 had been suitably busy and productive, and I wanted to take a break and just enjoy myself from October to December. Rexie concurred, and gave me permission to have fun while he was 'conducting important prehistoric research'. That turned out to be him attacking everything in sight and giving it a CHOMP rating out of ten. (If anyone is interested, I made it to the top of the list and am now officially Rexie's favourite chew toy. Lucky me 😏)
Anyway, we are now almost a week into January, which means it is time to review my old goals and set new ones. At the end of 2024, this was a pretty depressing task, so this year's review process has been an absolute joy.
This post is going to be a summary of ROAR and what it allowed me to achieve. Over the next few weeks, I will go into more details about each of the points and what I learned.
So, here we go. Let's start by looking at what 2025 was really about.
Although I set myself a bunch of things to do in 2025 (Latin, Farsi, piano) my real 2025 goal was to find a goal-tracking system that actually worked for me. After years of failed 101-in-1001 lists, abandoned New Year's resolutions, and the crushing weight of 'I never finish anything', things finally fell into place and ROAR was born.
I didn't come up with ROAR until April, which meant that I only had eight months implementing it instead of a full year. However, in that time, a lot happened, as I was constantly experimenting and refining the system to find out what worked and, equally importantly, what didn't.
Here's what I learned.
Rigid daily requirements: 'Life Happens' more often than not, and trying to force myself to do the exact same things every day was unrealistic and depressing, because if I skipped even a single goal, my mind immediately went back to 'you're a failure' mode.
Completion-focused deadlines: December 31st is 'just another day', not a magical finish line. Learning to stop caring about strict completion dates has been one of the hardest things about this whole journey, and something I still need to work on occasionally.
Serious, professional-sounding goal language: Joy-infused language – aka silly ramblings with shouty dinosaur interruptions – is more motivating for me than goals written in the same language as workplace KPIs.
Trying to track things that didn't bring me joy: This is probably obvious to everyone but me 😄
Trying to track everything at once: Unsurprisingly, trying to track too many things at once is overwhelming and leads to a paralysis in which nothing gets done.
Tracking sheets with stickers: I found my inner five-year-old, and she gets very enthusiastic about putting sparkly stickers onto tracking sheets whenever I complete a goal.
Wall-mounted tracking sheets with stickers: Having the evidence of progress plainly visible is what turned ROAR from a good idea into an effective idea.
Celebrating the journey: Adding 'and enjoy the journey' transformed stressful deadlines into sustainable practices.
Flexibility over perfection: Resilience when things don't go to plan is way more important than perfection.
Adapting goals when they're not working: Not abandoning, just adjusting.
Using additional tools as well as tracking sheets: There are a lot of goals on my to do list, and I soon realised that I needed more than just stickers to keep track of it all. I also have a list of ten daily goals in a Word document, and when I outgrew Trello's free plan, Mr Cranky built me a custom work management tool that helps me prioritise the goals I want to track.
I read, understood (mainly – even the experts can't agree on every aspect of the story) and enjoyed reading Ulysses by James Joyce.
I learned that getting to grips with complex, challenging text is possible when I:
I am a 'dabbler' when it comes to foreign languages, and I chose Farsi because it was unlike anything I had studied before. I chose to focus on listening, understanding and responding instead of reading and writing, because although I would love to learn to read and write Arabic one day, that is not something I had time for in 2025.
What I learned:
This was an unexpected goal that occurred to me once I realised that ROAR was working for me. This was an intensive project that required:
Ironically, my productivity blog temporarily destroyed productivity on my other goals.
Not all of my achievements last year were for fun, as I also had quite a lot going on at work. I've been with my current company for about two years, and it's been a fairly steep learning curve as I got used to the requirements of a new industry and my role.
I completed two professional development courses:
The timing was unfortunate, because I had a few weeks of overlap where I was trying to finish the assignments for the proofreading course while starting the assignments for the assessment-writing course. Oh, and still doing my regular work duties on top of that.
(I still managed to ace both courses, though 😊)
I always knew that Latin was going to be one of those things that will take ages to get good at, especially as I am self-taught. I completed 9 of 35 chapters in about five months.
What I learned:
My other Big Goal for 2025 was to learn to play Moonlight Sonata on the piano (the full version, not one of the easy versions for beginners). I did start this with the intention of practising until I had mastered it, but at the same time I was having such a good time studying Latin, piano faded into the background. As it was becoming a chore instead of a joy, I decided to pivot, and put this goal on hold until 2026.
What I learned:
2025 wasn't just a good year – it was the year I figured out how to achieve things by working with my personality instead of against it.
Oh, and with a chompy T-Rex supervisor and lots and lots of stickers 😄
I am so excited to find out what 2026 will bring!
Carpe skateboard! 🦖🛹