It's not just a new year, it's a new decade, welcome to the roaring 20's! Let's set some goals, shall we?

So this is the decade where I'll hit 40 and I'm starting to feel my age, I realised the last few months that my health trajectory isn't sustainable anymore as I'm too old to just shrug it off. With that in mine, most of my goals this year are about changing that trajectory.

1) Maintain a sustainable weight loss

Every year I've had a target weight in mind and every year, I've failed. Instead of setting myself a tough goal to reach, instead I want to just keep myself on a path to a healthy weight throughout the year. So forget targets, instead I just want to lose weight consistently throughout the year until I eventually feel like I'm at a weight I can be happy with.

Obviously to keep it off, it needs to be sustainable so no crash diets or attempts to 'shed the pounds', if I can just make sure I make a net loss week-by-week, I'll be happy, even if it's only a fraction of a pound.

2) Adopt a better attitude to food

As Colette lamented to me on New Years Day when I begged her to let us go out for a Chinese to make up for a dull new years eve, both of us have a the link between 'food' and 'fun'. That's an unhealthy link, plus it made me realise that I don't really have a link between 'food' and 'sustainance' which is probably a root cause of my unhealthy eating pattern.

In my mind, eating 'naughty' food, helps me to feel happy and relaxed on stressful days but in fact, the opposite is more likely to be true.

This is going to be a tough one as it's a link that formed over many decades and could take a long time to break. However, I think that it's an important one, food is sustainance, not entertainment.

3) I need to move more

OK so I'm of the school of thought that weight loss comes from diet and not exercise, so I've always let myself slack a bit when it comes to getting off my arse. However, this last year, I've started to feel a bit 'feeble', standing up is usually accompanied by a grunt and I've got enoguh stamina to run the tap but that's about it as far as running goes.

This one is about fitness, about heart health and about not dropping dead before my time.

I managed to get a start on this last year as I discovered I really enjoy swimming but as is often the pattern with me, I eventually let it lapse and then just quit.

So first steps this year is to rejoin the gym and get back to swimming, luckily, I'm self-employed so I can easily go at the quiet times, which will be a lot easier to motivate myself to do.

As I'm at the gym, it makes sense for me to do some weight training as well, I'm going to aim to start off with going to the gym 3 times a week.

Col and I also recently set up a VR room in our house, so my plan is to play a few intense VR games on the days I don't go to the gym.

I'll consider my goal successful if I manage to hit at least 30 mins of exercise a day. I'll consider my goal smashed if I can close all three rings on my Apple watch every single day.

Right, that's the health stuff done.

4) Get my finances in order

A few years ago, Colette and I bought a house and since then, we've both been skint, in fact we've been in debt and, whilst that's improved a lot, it's still true as of today.

So, my goal for this year is to eliminate my non-essential debt and build up a savings pool. I can't do much about my student loans, my car loan or my mortgage but I've got credit card debt and a few other loan agreements which are pretty small and should be achievable debt goals for the year.

I'll consider this one done if my credit card is clean and I only have the loans above left by the 1st of Jan next year, I'll consider it smashed if my savings and investment pots also have a healthy balance.

5) Get at least one of the projects in the house sorted

Last year I specifically said I wanted to get our bathroom renovated but that didn't happen. However Colette and I both managed to get our offices done, that's mainly because we didn't have to deal with 'decoration discussions' for our own rooms and the budget for those rooms was a LOT smaller than the others but at least they are out of the way now.

I'll consider this goal complete if one of the following house projects is complete:

• The perimiter wall
• The bathroom
• The living room
• The stairwell
• The kitchen
• The garden

I'll consider it smashed if more than one of those is done, I'll do a goddamn cartwheel if they are all done as it means that somehow we became rich during 2020.

6) Finish the first draft of Emily Bell

New readers to my blog (Do I have any readers yet?) may not know this but I used to be quite a keen novel writer, or should I say 'aspiring' novel writer as I've yet to finish one. A novel I've been working on for Many years is a story called 'The bleeding heart of Emily Bell'. I've literally been working on this for a decade at this point but the main reason I've yet to finish the first draft is because I just don't make the time to write anymore.

Now I'm only working four days per week, I want to use my extra day off as a 'doing' day. Now unfortunately I have a list of personal projects longer than my arm, so part of my job this year will be to whittle down that list and remove some of the less useful projects from my list and also get my priorities in order, I know that my top priority this year will be to finish the first draft of my novel so I will try to make a lot of time for that.

So, those are my 6 goals for the year, tune in next year to see how I did!