My freelance goals for 2025

Happy 2025! Today, I want to talk about goals, the pressure to achieve them, and feeling like you’re behind or failing if you don’t (spoiler: you’re not!).

I’ve also included my 2025 goals if you’re interested to see what I’ll be up to this year 👩🏻‍💻

Good things take time

I was doing some end-of-year cleaning last week (as one does during the weird days between Christmas and the New Year) when I found an old notebook of mine. I flipped through to realize it was one I used right after graduating college in 2015 when I couldn’t find a job and was clearly trying to process my feelings and frustrations. One of the pages I wrote was a list of life goals (which mainly applied to my career).

Here are a few that stood out to me:

I wrote these goals down nearly 10 years ago, and I was pleasantly surprised (shocked even) to realize that they pretty much sum up what my career looks like now.

But what’s funny is that freelancing wasn’t even on my radar back in 2015 when I wrote those. A lot of these goals were influenced by my experience of struggling to get a job and feeling like the traditional career path wasn’t right for me. And I’m sure that when I said I wanted to “own my own business” I probably meant something fun like a line of jewelry or a bookstore. (I’d also like to add that some other “life goals” I had on that list were to “get on a reality TV show” and “meet Jimmy Fallon” 🥴 so I’m glad a lot of these didn’t pan out.)

The lesson? Good things take time, even if they don’t end up exactly how you imagined them.

Life, and especially freelancing, is all about figuring it out as you go. Goals are great, but they should be fluid. When we’re too rigid about a certain goal (let’s say, becoming a six-figure freelancer), then the feeling of failure is way stronger if we don’t yet achieve that goal. It also makes it easy to overlook everything else you did achieve! 

Like, maybe you didn’t reach the coveted six-figure status during your first year of freelancing, but you did:

• Create your income from scratch 

• Run an entire business on your own 

• Put yourself and your work out there

• Take a chance on your career by going freelance

And all of that is worth celebrating!

It’s natural to want all of the success as soon as possible. For some people, that may happen in a short amount of time. But for others (myself included), it can take years to achieve your goals and build something you’re proud of.

So don’t be too hard on yourself this year. Set lofty goals (or don’t!), but be sure to celebrate all of the small wins along the way 🥲

My freelance goals for 2025

Alright, all of this goal talk has motivated me to share my own. After looking back at my 2024 Year in Review, here are the goals I’m working toward in 2025: 

Expand my services beyond long-form writing

Don’t get me wrong, I love writing and I’m grateful that I’ve made a full-time living from it. Plus, the demand for freelance writers isn’t going away anytime soon 👀

But what I write — long-form, SEO-focused blog posts — can be draining when I don’t have other tasks in the mix. I’d love to expand beyond solely writing 2,000-word articles so my days have some variety and I can exercise different parts of my brain.

That could look like smaller copywriting projects, ~thought leadership~ pieces, or more local journalism. I’ve also had a couple of people ask me about freelance mentoring (!), so that’s something I want to explore in the coming months. 

Manage my time better

Yes, I’m a “full-time freelance writer” but that doesn’t mean I work full-time hours. Sometimes I work more than a typical 40-hour week, sometimes less. Some people may work well with this type of variety in their work weeks (and for a long time, I thought I was one of those people), but I’ve learned I need more consistency and balance.

I’ve also worked waaay too many late nights and weekends over the years and rarely take any real time away from work. It’s not healthy! This has led to burnout more than a few times and I know it’s unsustainable. This year, I’m going to work on creating a more consistent work schedule.

Connect with more freelancers

As I was reflecting on 2024, I realized I was very heads down most of the time. This meant that connecting and networking took a backseat. I’d love to connect more (in fact, “connection” is my word of the year) with other freelancers or people who want to freelance — really anyone who’s in a creative field or still figuring it all out.

I have a couple of IRL coffee chats planned this month and I’m looking forward to joining a virtual coworking session with Groove soon (my freelance friend Steph of The Simple Freelancer generously shared her code with me so I could try it!). I’ve also been able to connect with several people through this newsletter already and I’m so grateful to hear from other freelancers that my story resonates with them. 

Rough Draft is a bi-weekly newsletter where I share tips and musings on creating a freelance career from scratch. Subscribe here. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Threads, or my website. 👋