My word for 2024 was contentment (you can read more details here.) When I look back at the year, I embraced contentment, almost to the point where I thought, "Wow, my life is really boring now." But quite honestly, I am just so content with my life - and it's nothing exciting or dramatic. It's a very simple, quiet life. I have a reached a point of peaceful happiness.
I have goals that I'm working on, but I'm content with my progress.
I worked on less resistance, more acceptance.
I did so well with embracing my word of 2024 that I decided to choose a word for 2025: budget.
I chose budget because I've been thinking a lot of how using a budget can apply to several aspects of my life. Of course, there's the common monetary budget, which my husband and I have had for years. But I also realized that there can be a budget for my time, my energy, and my nutrition.
Think about it: we all have a finite of time in this lifetime. If we look at it as a budget, how do we want to budget our time? Do we want to blow our budget on worrying or being angry, resentful, or jealous? Do we want to spend all of our budgeted time working? What about sitting around, mindlessly scrolling through our phones? That's such a waste of time, and yet I'm guilty of doing it a lot.
Instead I want to budget my time with more purpose. I'm working on spending less time and energy worrying about things that are outside of my control. I want to spend less time wishing people were different and wanting them to change. I want to live in the present moment and not spend time thinking about things in the past or things in the future that may or may not happen.
I want to budget my time to do more things that benefit my physical and mental well-being. Nutritionally, I'm now eating in a way that is helping me build muscle and hopefully avoid health issues later as I age. This means that I need to track my calories and macros to make sure I'm getting the balanced nutrition I need to fuel my workouts and day-to-day activities. This means budgeting my calories and macros. Do I want to blow my budget by eating fast food? Can I fit a glass of wine in my budget today? No? Then I need to decide if it's worth giving up something more nutritious to make room in my budget for the wine, or if I'm just going to go over my budget that day. Or even better: skip the wine.
As someone who now makes a living built around budgets and spreadsheets, I'm really excited to apply the concepts I use at work to other things in my life. While life is not as neat and straightforward as a math formula, I can still use budgets to help me make decisions, whether they are small decisions or big decisions.
If you want to be inspired to spend your time with more purpose, I'd highly recommend the book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. It inspired my choice for word of 2025.
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