As 2024 is slowly drawing to a close, now is a great time to look to 2025 with excitement and anticipation. It is a time to plan for all the things you want to accomplish. One thing you can do right now to help bring those plans to fruition is to sit down and take some time to think through setting up professional and personal goals for the year ahead.

Goal-Setting: Set Yourself Up for Success

The process of setting goals is personal to each person, but in general, think about where you want to be in one year’s time—what will you want to have accomplished?

While you consider your goals, it’s important to make sure that you choose wisely. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s less about what your goals are and more about making sure you aren’t trying to take on too much. Heaping too much on your plate can easily overwhelm you and cause you to burn out, which means you won’t be able to accomplish much! Only you know how much you can safely take on, so just make sure you pause and consider what will be realistic for you.

Keep Things Clear

Once you have your goals in mind, make sure they are clear to you, measurable, and that they include the reason behind them. Knowing why you’re working towards a goal will help give you drive to get there!

For example, if you get a lot of clients based on your social media presence, maybe you want to grow that presence (and therefore gain more clients) in the coming year. You can do this by increasing engagement and gaining a certain number of new followers.

Next step is to figure out how you want to measure the metrics of that goal. Your follower count is an obvious one, but you can also measure the reach of your posts, that is, how many people see your content each day/week/month? And you can measure replies, mentions, and shares, which will give you insight into the level of engagement your content receives.

Break Your Goal Down

Now, it’s time to break those goals down a little. Taking a large goal and splitting it into smaller, more easily achievable steps is a big contributor to whether you will see success. You can split your goal into monthly steps, or quarterly, twice-yearly—whatever will work best for you. Returning to the social media goal, “increasing engagement” might be a bit overwhelming. But, broken down into smaller steps, things will seem more easily reached.

You could set yourself the task of doing a monthly social media event, like a Q&A session, or opt to create four new pieces of gated content (one each quarter) to share on social media to interest and attract new leads.

The point is, a goal needs to be clear and actionable to encourage success. First, outline what you want to achieve. Second, break down the mini-goals and steps it will take to get you there. Third, figure out ways to measure so you’ll know when you’ve achieved it. Then all that’s left is to take that first step towards success!

Consider Key Marketing Events

Marketing is one of the key goals you always need to focus on.  Your yearly planning can include a loose schedule of when you’ll need to do certain things to keep your business thriving and well-organized. 

For example, what sort of marketing initiatives do you want to plan out for the year ahead? You could decide if and when to run ad campaigns, or brainstorm and set up topics for the first six months of your blog content schedule, or make improvements to your website. Knowing what tasks will need to be performed and planning out when you will complete them will help keep you on track and prevent things from falling to the wayside when life gets busy (as it always does)!

Plan Your Taxes

Considering general housekeeping tasks is also a great idea when planning out your year. If you pay your taxes once annually (as opposed to a quarterly payment plan, for example), then you know that tax season will be occurring in April. You can plan out when to call your accountant to get things rolling and when to start end-of-year prep to pull necessary documents together. You can schedule monthly tax prep sessions to give yourself time to organize and file receipts, update spreadsheets, and so on, to keep things nice and organized as you go.

Self-Development Is Important Too

Setting goals for your business is all well and good, but don’t forget to make a goal or two for your own personal development.  Whether it’s personal or professional, taking time to improve yourself in whatever way you choose will help keep your tank filled and help you remain inspired.

Professional

Professional goals don’t just have to be about the mechanics of your business! In the year ahead, perhaps there is a new skill you’d like to pick up, or an existing skill you’d like to improve. Expanding your editorial toolbox and remaining eager to continue learning will benefit your editorial practice, and you don’t even necessarily have to leave your home to do so. You can check out online courses, webinars, and workshops that will help you keep your skills sharp. Check out our recent blog for a round-up of editorial webinars and courses that might be of interest.

From another perspective, perhaps you’d like to become more involved in the editing community—that’s still a professional goal, and a worthy one at that. You could look into joining professional associations such as Editors Canada, and attending local meet-ups if possible (though this may depend on where you live).

Similarly, you could plan to attend a conference and do some in-person networking while learning through panels and workshops. Sadly, Editors Canada will not be hosting a conference in 2025, but there will be one in 2026, so keep that in mind.

Engaging in the editing community can also happen online through communities on Slack, Discord, or Threads. There are options out there for everyone! Check out our recent blog for ways you can connect with other editors, if that’s something you want to pursue over the next year.

Personal

Planning out your year ahead can—should, even—include personal goals and milestones. Plan out a vacation for yourself. Set a self-care goal, like becoming more active or making more time to read. Devote time to learning a new skill or hobby, like cooking, baking, painting, or gardening. As long as it’s something that will make you feel good about yourself, you can’t go wrong.

Set Aside Time to Reflect

How often you opt to do this is up to you, but when you’re doing your yearly planning, make sure you schedule in time to reflect on how things are going and how you are doing, both personally and professionally.

Professional

Work-wise, take time to consider what is working and what isn’t. Do you have a problem client who pays well but adds undue stress every time they land in your inbox? Are your tracking systems working for you? Is there a certain type of project you’d like to attract more of? How can you adjust to improve how things are going?

Maybe, when you really think about it, every rush job you’ve taken on this past year has been more trouble than it’s worth in the end. So maybe next year, rush jobs aren’t something you want to entertain. 

If you’ve noticed you prefer developmental editing projects to proofreading ones, maybe you can work on tweaking your website in the new year to prioritize attracting more of those kinds of projects.

Reflecting can help you notice patterns that you might not have before, and that’s why it’s important to make sure you take some time, every once in a while, to sit down and simply consider things.

Personal

Personal reflection will likely be a lot more introspective and contemplative than professional reflection, and it will be wildly different person to person, but it remains an important part of your yearly planning process. Only by knowing where we are can we figure out where we want to go next, so take the time to think about how you’re really doing, and what changes you might like to make to improve your life and happiness.

If you feel like a guided approach might help you out in this process of reflection, check out YearCompass. It’s a free booklet (available in print or digital) that is designed to help you learn from missteps and victories, uncover your own patterns, and design the ideal year for yourself using carefully selected exercises and prompts.

Another structured option is Reflection.App, an app that aims to help you grow into your best self by using journalling. If you’re unfamiliar with the practice of journalling, this app is perfect, because it provides prompts and guides to inspire your entries.

For example, there are 16 broad prompt categories, including “growth,” “purpose,” “self-compassion,” “resilience,” and “intention.” There are even more specific categories such as “parenting,” “creativity,” “health and wellness,” and “relationships.” Here’s the “work and finance” prompt category that might be of interest.

Planning for Success

It can be very easy to drift through life, taking things day by day without considering the path you’re on. Considering the future, though, might be exactly what you need to get yourself feeling excited and eager to move forward again. Thinking about where you’d like to be a year from now can open your mind up to all sorts of possibilities, and the planning process can help you figure out what you need to do, bit by bit, to make those goals real.

Whether it’s blocking out a day in March to pull your tax documents together so that you aren’t tearing your hair out at the end of April, or booking a webinar to learn a new editing skill, or taking the first step of achieving a goal of running a 10K by the end of 2025, knowing what’s coming down the pipeline is important. Keeping on top of these upcoming events will help you handle tasks when they need to be handled and help you make more time for what really matters to you.

Building a life you want starts with figuring out what exactly it is you want. Once you know what you want, planning will help you create the road map you need to get where you want to go!