Inspired by Everyday Reading, I decided to get a little personal today and talk about what worked in 2023. Years ago, when I was a successful freelance writer, I learned I had to bury the personal and make it all “business.” I redacted my name for my family’s safety wherever I could and generally sterilized what I shared on the Internet. I wanted my writing to be warm and familiar, yet I didn’t want myself and my family to be the point of any content. So it’s rare that I open up. But 2023 felt different, I felt more confident in myself than ever, and as 2024 opens, I find myself walking slowly into the new year with purpose and conviction.
Plus, when I read the Everyday Reading post I thought this could be an easy content post here on The Family Trip. I could whip up some interesting, personal, inspirational content in a couple of hours. HA.Â
This was surprisingly hard, especially without a solo mini-retreat this year. A year is both a long time and brutally short. But in slowly easing my way into 2024, taking my time with my goal-setting and vision boards, I unearthed the six things that mattered to me in 2023, things I want to keep.
Some of these are practical. Some are emotional. But they all matter to me.
Six things that worked in 2023:
1. Really using credit card miles and travel points
It may seem crazy I hadn’t optimized this yet given I travel so much (14 trips in 2023!) but we had been splitting our spending into different accounts for various reasons (none of which seem good now). We met one of my 2023 goals by engaging in an entire financial health check-in with our financial advisor. In tandem with that, I did a LOT of research on how to better leverage our daily spending power to get the rewards that work best for us. And with two older kids in travel sports as well as the grocery bills with two teen boys, our daily spending power is significant.
We now use the Capital One Venture Visa for nearly all daily expenses, but we also have the Delta SkyMiles American Express operating for us in very specific ways. Of course, we don’t carry credit card debt, we pay in full every month. But this new system has worked for us. Our plane tickets to Costa Rica were almost entirely paid for by Capital One points, I am headed to Vermont on Delta SkyMiles, and we just leveraged $600 in points against a Mexico trip.
2. Daily journaling (with a new daily prompt)
I have long been an advocate of daily journaling (read this post here). I found the practice became critical during the days of the pandemic, when life suddenly changed. Journaling helps me keep my bearings.
This year, I started adding some daily prompts. Each day I ended my journal entry with:
- Today I am going to:
- Today I am not going to:
- Today I want to feel:
I keep the answers short and sweet. It’s not a to-do list, it’s a mental and emotional list. “Today I am going to” usually includes things like “put the phone down when my kids get home from school” or “enjoy dinner with friends.”
Short, simple, and focused on how I want to feel at the end of the day.
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3. Putting my walks and workouts into my online calendars
In 2023, I went from trying to squeeze workouts into whatever time I could grab to adding them to my calendar at the times I wanted to do them. On my Google calendar and my Outlook calendar, I treated my outdoor walks and workout/yoga classes as appointments to be kept. This has been very successful and I plan to keep this up in 2024.
4. Less time on social media
Using my 2023 Powersheets, January 2023 began with a goal to spend less than two hours a day on my phone. This sounds crazy as a content creator and a busy mom who works. But I wanted to spend more time with my “phone down and eyes up.”
After three months of pushing myself to achieve this goal, it became a habit. I can not stress enough how much happier and content I am with less than two hours on my phone daily.
But since I receive a lot of texts (which I love), and email and web browsing are daily requirements to some extent, the first thing that goes away to keep phone time under two hours a day is social media.
Facebook is no longer on my phone. I canceled Twitter at the beginning of the year. And while I love Instagram, I find that their changes make it incredibly frustrating for someone struggling to have a hobby content stream, which curbs my enthusiasm for being on it.
But less time on social media has been beneficial for my mental health. I declare this without reservation after eight months now of living social media lite.
5. Focusing more on what I love and saying "no" to other things
I am a pure Enneagram 7 and, in line with that, I thrive on new experiences. To me, a life well-lived = adventure, and dopamine hits, and adrenaline surges. When I sit down and do goal planning, this means I tend to add in a lot. I want to try everything! This, in turn, ends up with a lot of additions to my calendar (clubs, classes, meetings, etc. etc. etc.).
I recognized a while ago that this isn’t sustainable. I get stressed, I get too much on my calendar, and I start to feel l have commitment issues (which is a topic for another post).
In 2023, I worked to find balance for myself. How could I have adventure yet also not feel so overwhelmed?
I decided to reclaim the things that I loved the most – hiking, yoga, fitness, walking my dog with my friend, cooking, writing, blogging – and actively saying “no” to other things. Most of the time, this was saying “no” to myself!
I still built in time for new experiences, but I worked to make sure they were in areas that I already knew I loved (going to a yoga ashram, hiking new trails, cooking new recipes).
6. Waiting for the right thing to come along
I have a strong vision for what I want my life to look like – how I want to live and the adventures I want to have. This particularly plays out in my travel dreams. I had been setting expectations at the beginning of the year about where I wanted to go and when we’d go.
But after a long 2022, with a job situation that forced me to assess who I was, what I was good at (and what I wasn’t), and who I wanted to be, I realized that I needed to stop forcing things I thought were right and allow things to unfold.
It is a delicate balance between cultivating the good things I want – planting seeds and allowing them to grow – and pushing myself, my family, and hours spent on things just because they seem like a good thing in theory.
I have learned to move with intention toward my life vision but to also allow things to unfold.
which leads to my 2024 Word of the Year...
Like nearly every other person in America with social media now, I do a Word of the Year. I have done this for eight years (see my tips on setting a word of the year here).
I learned so much in 2023 about creating space for myself, prioritizing, and letting good things come, that I want more of that in my life. I want to move through the world with more kindness and less judgment towards others I don’t understand (seems appropriate for what promises to be a crazy Presidential election year, no?). And so my word of the year is Patience.
Patience with others, Patience with life, Patience with myself, Patience with my (aging) body, Patience with my kids as they figure out life, Patience with my schedule. I don’t have to have it all figured out now. Patience.
If you have a word of the year or a general thought about what worked well for you in 2023, please share. We’re all on a quest to make this beautiful life our best journey yet.