100 Goals for 2027: A List You'll Actually Want to Finish

There is a particular genre of New Year’s resolution: “this year everything will be different”. It lives until roughly the third week of January, after which the list of five items quietly moves to a desk drawer and life slips back into its usual groove. It isn’t a matter of weak willpower. It is that five goals written on the last evening of December usually turn out to be too vague (“take better care of myself”), or somebody else’s (“finally learn Spanish”), or exactly the same ones as last year.

A list of a hundred goals works differently. It doesn’t ask you to do everything. It exists so you can see in one place what you actually want, and then calmly choose the handful of goals worth a year of your life. How to choose is covered in a separate article on the ten most important goals; here is the list itself. Below are one hundred goals for 2027 across ten areas of life. Not as instructions, but as a menu from which you will assemble your own order.

Why a hundred and not ten

When people are asked to name their goals for the year, they name what lies on the surface: lose weight, earn more, take a holiday. These aren’t bad goals, they are first goals, the loudest ones. The quiet wishes don’t make it onto the list in that kind of survey, even though they often decide whether the year was a good one.

A long list solves this mechanically. To write a hundred items you have to walk through areas you don’t normally consider: what’s going on with my friends, my home, my inner life, what am I leaving behind at all. At item thirty the obvious wishes run out. At fifty the borrowed ones do. After that begins what is truly yours.

There is a second effect. With a hundred goals in front of you, you can see where they pile up. For some, twenty out of a hundred will be about money, for others about relationships, for others about finally living for themselves. That is the answer to the question of what you want from 2027. An answer you can’t get from staring at a blank page.

What separates a good goal from a bad one

Before the list, one short rule. A good goal for the year answers three questions: what do I want, how will I know it happened, and what will it give me besides the tick? The goal “read more” answers none of them. The goal “read twelve books I’ve been putting off and discuss at least three of them with someone” answers all three.

There are also goals best dropped at the list stage: those bought at the price of health, relationships or self-respect. Income doubled at the expense of sleep, or a marathon run on bad knees, are not achievements but debts that will come to collect in 2028. A goal is good when there is more life after it, not less.

100 goals for 2027

The goals are grouped into ten areas, ten in each. Within each area there are big goals for the year and very small ones for a weekend. This is deliberate: a small goal completed gives more than a big one postponed.

Health and body

This area comes first, and not out of politeness. Everything else on the list rests on whether you have energy, sleep and a body that doesn’t hurt.

Get a full medical check-up and take care of what you have been putting off for years: teeth, eyesight, blood tests.
Go to bed before midnight for thirty nights in a row and write down what changes during the day.
Walk or run a distance that seems long right now: ten kilometres, a half marathon, your own number.
Learn one bodyweight strength exercise you can’t do yet: a pull-up, a push-up, a single-leg squat.
Remove one habit from your daily routine that is definitely not on your side, and stay without it for a quarter.
Pick up a practice for your back and neck, whether yoga, Pilates or ten-minute stretches, and keep going until it stops requiring willpower.
Go a month without alcohol and honestly note what there is more of and what there is less of.
Learn to swim if you can’t, or swim a kilometre if you can.
Go on an overnight hike, with a tent or to a mountain hut, but without hot water or phone signal.
Find a doctor you trust and put their contact details somewhere they won’t get lost.

Money and work

Money is not a goal but a tool, one worth keeping in order. The goals here are about no longer being afraid of your finances, not about worshipping them.

Track your income and spending for three months in a row, then spend one evening going over the results.
Build an emergency fund covering three months of living costs. If you already have one, make it six.
Pay off one debt completely, starting with the most expensive.
Find out what you are actually worth on the market and have one conversation about a salary or a rate.
Learn a skill that pays more in your profession and prove it with a real project.
Open your first investment account, or put an existing one in order by understanding what exactly your money is invested in.
Do one thing you’ve long wanted to do “with your own money”: a course, an instrument, a trip, without clearing it with anyone.
Spend a week with no work messages after seven in the evening and see what collapses. Usually nothing does.
Describe on one page what work you want to be doing in five years, and take one concrete step toward it.
Give up one project, client or commitment that has long been costing you more than it gives.

Relationships and family

The most important people usually get the leftovers of our time and attention, whatever didn’t go to work and the phone. The goals here are about turning that queue around.

Introduce one weekly ritual with your partner or family that doesn’t get cancelled: dinner, a walk, a screen-free evening.
Call your parents or older relatives on a set day of the week and keep it up all year.
Record your family’s story: ask the older generation while you still can, and save at least ten pages.
Give someone close a day planned entirely around them.
Say out loud one thing that needed saying long ago: thanks, an apology, or “this matters to me”.
Travel together somewhere you haven’t been, even for just two days.
Do something new together: a course, dancing, a volunteer shift, a home renovation.
Learn to argue in a way that leaves you closer, not further apart. If you can’t manage it yourselves, see a couples therapist.
Do one thing for your children, nieces and nephews or godchildren that they will remember as adults.
Once a month, be fully available to your loved ones for a whole day, with no “just a second, let me finish this”.

Friends and community

Adult friendships rarely die of arguments; they die of “we should catch up sometime”. These goals are about no longer putting people off.

Reconnect with three people you were once close to and then lost touch with.
Have friends over, not for any occasion, just because, and do it at least once a quarter.
Meet ten new people outside work and see some of them a second time.
Find or start a community around an interest: a running club, a book circle, board games on Wednesdays.
Speak in front of an audience of thirty or more about something you know well.
Learn to listen so that the other person gets to finish their thought. It is harder than it sounds.
Ask for help when you need it instead of coping alone. At least once, on purpose.
Spend a weekend with friends without phones, at a cabin, on a hike or in another city.
Become a mentor to someone: a junior colleague, a student, a teenager next door.
Let go of one relationship that has long been held together only by habit and guilt.

Mind and learning

Learning after thirty is harder not because the brain is tired, but because nobody makes you. The goals in this section replace outside pressure with inner interest.

Read twelve books in a year, at least four of them the kind you wouldn’t normally pick.
Bring a foreign language to the level where you can watch a film without subtitles or chat with a stranger on a trip.
Finish one course. Not start, but finish, with the final project.
Learn a skill you’ve long lacked in daily life: driving, understanding contracts, giving first aid.
Get to grips with one topic that seems “not for you”: how the economy works, how a neural network works, what taxes really are.
Keep a journal of what you read and see: two or three lines on every book, film and lecture.
Learn to touch-type, or another “boring” skill that will save you an hour a week for the next thirty years.
Study something for twenty minutes a day for a month and see where it leads.
Attend ten lectures, tours or workshops in person, not online.
Teach someone what you know. It is the best way to find out what you actually know.

Creativity

Creativity here is not about talent or a result you can show. It is about the part of life where you do something simply because you feel like it.

Start a fifteen-minute-a-day creative habit: drawing, writing, playing, photographing.
Finish one thing you began long ago: a manuscript, a song, a series of photographs, a knitted sweater.
Learn an instrument well enough to play one whole piece from start to finish.
Write ten texts that someone other than you will read: posts, stories, letters.
Learn a craft with your hands: ceramics, carpentry, sewing, baking.
Photograph the same view once a month all year and turn it into a story.
Exhibit, publish or show your work to people who don’t know you.
Go to twenty concerts, plays or exhibitions this year, and not only to things you feel you “should see”.
Spend a creative day off: one day with nothing useful in it, only what interests you.
Make a gift with your own hands for someone who isn’t expecting it.

Home and daily life

A home either gives you strength or takes it away. The goals in this section are about making it work for you.

Sort out one zone that has annoyed you for years: the balcony, the wardrobe, the drawer of cables. Then the next one.
Get rid of a hundred things you don’t use. Count honestly, item by item.
Create a place in your home where you feel good, even if it is just one armchair by the window.
Learn to cook ten dishes that always turn out well and that you’re not embarrassed to serve guests.
Get your home to the point where an unexpected guest doesn’t cause panic.
Set up your household finances and documents so that any important file can be found in a minute.
Grow something edible or flowering, on a windowsill, a balcony or in a garden.
Finish one renovation or one big household task that has been hanging for over a year.
Live a month without food delivery and see what changes in your budget and your well-being.
Move, if you have wanted to for a long time, or, conversely, stop thinking about it and make the place where you already live your own.

Travel and experiences

Experiences are the only purchase that gains value over time. What matters here is not geography but how differently you see the world after a trip.

Visit a country you haven’t been to and spend at least a week there not as a tourist.
Visit three towns in your own country that you know only by name.
Take a holiday without a schedule: one ticket, one return date, everything else as you go.
See a natural phenomenon you haven’t seen: the northern lights, a wildflower meadow in full bloom, a storm at sea.
Travel somewhere alone for a few days and don’t fill the silence with phone calls.
Live for a month in a different city while working remotely, if your profession allows it.
Travel a route that has long been in your head: by car, by bike, by train across the country.
Take yourself on a micro-trip once a month: the next town over, an unfamiliar neighbourhood, a forest two hours away.
Try ten dishes you have never eaten, in places where they are made properly.
Keep a travel diary with one photo and one paragraph a day, so you have something to reread a year on.

Inner life

These goals aren’t visible from the outside and don’t fit into a story post. That is exactly why they are so rarely set, even though everything else depends on whether they bring joy.

See a therapist for at least five sessions, even if “everything is fine”. Especially if everything is fine.
Build the habit of an evening review of the day: three lines on what went well, what was hard, what’s next tomorrow.
Spend thirty days in a row with a morning practice of stillness: meditation, prayer, or simply ten minutes without a screen.
Deal with one fear that drives your decisions: heights, being in the public eye, rejection, change.
Learn to say “no” without long explanations and guilt.
Spend a week without social media and write down what filled the freed-up time.
Write a letter to yourself a year ahead and read it in December 2027.
Stop waiting for the “real life” that begins after the next condition. If you recognise yourself, there is a separate conversation about this.
Forgive one person. Not for them, for yourself.
Find your own formula for rest: what exactly restores you, and what only looks like rest.

Contribution and meaning

The goals of the last area are about what remains once all the other items are closed. They rarely make it into New Year’s lists, and wrongly so: they are the ones that answer the question “what for?”

Regularly support one cause that matters to you, with money, time or skills, but regularly.
Become a blood donor, or join the bone marrow donor registry.
Do one thing for your street, neighbourhood or city that will remain after you.
Share your knowledge for free: an article, a lecture, an open lesson, a walkthrough for beginners.
Help one person take a step they hadn’t dared to take on their own.
Write down ten principles you want to live by and reread them when things get hard.
Sort out what will happen to your affairs, money and loved ones if you are no longer here. It is an unpleasant goal, and that is exactly why it is here.
Plant a tree that will outlive you.
Learn to accept thanks without brushing them off.
At the end of the year, sit down and honestly answer one question: is the world a little better for your having been in it in 2027? And what could you do so the answer is more confident in 2028?

How to choose your ten from the hundred

A hundred goals is a lot, and you are not supposed to complete them all. The point of the list is different: read it through, mark everything that resonated, cross out what belongs to others, and keep ten to twelve goals that don’t pile up in a single area. Then turn each into a first step with a date and spread them across the quarters, two or three per quarter.

Each of these steps has its pitfalls, especially the second: telling your own goal from the “right” one is harder than it seems, and it is on other people’s goals that lists fall apart by March. The whole method, with the signs of a goal that isn’t yours and an example of ten anchor goals, one per area, is in the article on the ten most important goals for 2027. In short: don’t choose by ambition, choose by what made something stir inside you, and check that your ten include both big goals and very small ones. For contested cases there are methods for prioritising.

How to turn goals into a plan, not a pretty file

Between a list of goals and a lived year lies exactly one thing: the week. A goal that hasn’t made it into any specific week won’t happen, however much you wanted it in December. But before a goal lands in a week it needs a number and a date; how to bring the chosen items into that shape is covered in the guide on SMART goals.

That is why the most practical way to work with goals for the year is not to remember them at the end of each quarter, but to look at the list when you do your weekly planning and ask: which one step toward which one goal fits into these seven days? One step. Not ten. Over fifty-two weeks, one step a week adds up to more than heroic bursts in January and September.

One more thing helps: tie the goal to a habit you already have. If you already plan tomorrow in the evening, add one question there: “what did I do for my goal today?” Thirty seconds a day keeps a goal in sight better than any motivational picture.

A year you don’t have to start over

The most valuable thing about a list of a hundred goals is not how many of them you complete. It is that in January 2028 you won’t have the feeling of “I got nothing done again”, but a concrete document: here is what I wanted, here is what I did, here is what I let go of and why, here is what I’m carrying forward.

That is the difference between a year that was lived and a year that merely passed. Not the number of ticks, but that you knew what you wanted and moved in that direction. Maybe not on all hundred items. Maybe on ten. Your own.

FAQ

Why 100 goals if I’m going to pick ten anyway?

One hundred goals is not a plan, it is a menu. A wide list helps you see areas you hadn’t thought about and notice where your wants actually cluster. Ten goals picked from a hundred are usually very different from ten written from a blank page.

How many goals can I realistically complete in a year?

For most people, eight to twelve, as long as the list mixes big goals with very small ones. The more goals on the list that demand daily effort, the fewer there should be.

What if a goal stops mattering?

Cross it out without regret. A goal set in January reflects the person you were in January. If you have changed by May, the list should change with you. Dropping a goal that is no longer yours is also a result of the year.

Do I need to write goals down, or is it enough to keep them in my head?

Write them down. Not because paper is magic, but because a goal in your head gets mixed up with worries, other people’s expectations and today’s mood. On paper you can look at it, sharpen it and come back to it a month later.

Where do I start if I don’t have the energy for a long list?

With one goal from “Health and body” and one from “Inner life”. Those two areas give you the energy for all the others. The rest of the list can wait until you feel like coming back to it.