I first read Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project many years ago, and have since re-read it a few times. Earlier this month, I finished my most recent re-read and started thinking about what I would put into my own happiness project. This inspired me to create my own year-long happiness-type project.

With my current situation, and all of the time on my hands, I figured this was a good time to focus on some of the areas of my life that could use a little tweaking. Rather than waiting for the beginning of the year to kick things off, I decided to make my birthday the official start date. This gives me about 7 weeks to fine tune some of my goals before I officially launch.

Ideally, I will do a monthly post with my theme for the month, goals, and results from the previous month. I may end up with two posts instead of one, depending on how things flush out once I get going.

Since I will be kicking things off mid-month, I decided to have each monthly focus run from the 15th of the month through the 14th of the next month. I’ll be starting on my birthday, July 15th, so month one will be July 15th through August 14th.

So far I’ve decided on my 12 areas of focus and have started figuring out my goals for each month, as well as any supportive reading I may need. I’ve also started breaking down my month one goals into projects, which I’ll share later.

Here are my 12 focus areas:

1. Blog
2. Career
3. Sleep
4. Baking
5. Self-Care
6. Books
7. Home
8. Learning
9. Cooking
10. Nature
11. Movement
12. Community

I’ll figure out a way to track my progress through the project, though it’s meant to be fun and help to improve my life satisfaction, not a set of chores I need to check off.