December 31, 20245 min read

How set up your goals for 2025 + Year reflection · The Bunker #114

Hi friend 👋🏻!

A Newsletter in which we talk about UX Design and the Freelance Journey, dedicated to those who are starting out in both worlds and who feel identified.

From The Bunker, we accompany you on the way.

We say goodbye to another year. Today is the 31st, and another year of hard work comes to an end.

You might be a new subscriber to this newsletter or have been reading it for a while now. Either way, thank you for being here.

Today, we close another year of work and goals. So far, we’ve published 114 articles, and we plan to continue this way into 2025. I hope to be writing this message next year with at least 166 valuable articles on topics like design, freelancing, side projects, business, design systems, and everything we love sharing.

If there’s one thing worth highlighting about 2024, it’s the type of goals I set. This year, instead of measuring success solely by results, I focused on enjoying the process more: the projects, the small daily wins, and finding a balance between working hard and resting when needed. I’ve learned that rest and allowing myself to get bored isn’t a luxury; it’s a key strategy for long-term efficiency and creativity.

Thanks to this approach, I not only managed to hit important milestones but also learned valuable lessons that I hope to share with you in next year’s articles. Some topics I’d like to dive deeper into are:

How to optimize your freelance projects without sacrificing personal time.
How to build scalable design systems that truly make an impact in your projects.
Ideas for side projects that could become your next source of income.
How to make your side-projects successful.
How to actually build your side-projects ideas.

If you need any help now regarding one of these topics, please reach out.

I’d like to use this final newsletter of the year to invite you to reflect on your own achievements and lessons learned.

What was the most important thing you accomplished in 2024? What would you like to do differently in 2025?

One concept that helped me a lot this year was "The Wheel of Life." It’s a tool I highly recommend for segmenting your life into different areas to get a holistic view. The main areas you can consider are:

Think about this way of understanding life; it will help you understand everything better. Visuals resonate with us much better. Treat everything like a little side-project. Not only something abstract that stays in your head. Materialize your thoughts.

Romance
Personal growth
Career
Friends and family
Physical environment
Finances
Fun
Health

This exercise not only helps you identify areas for improvement but also appreciate the aspects of your life that are already working well. I encourage you to try it and see how it can help you balance your priorities.

If you want your 2025 to be different, here are some recommendations:

Ask for help when you're doing well, so when hard times come, you're prepared.
Seek balance. Not long ago, I was 18, and now I’m almost 24. Time flies ridiculously fast.
Remember, money isn’t everything. If your entire family disappeared tomorrow, what would you do with money? Ask yourself these questions whenever you overthink.
Set challenging goals; otherwise, nothing will push you forward. And if possible, write them down.
Treat everything like mini-projects: going to the gym is a mini-project; eating healthy is a mini-project.
Set deadlines for your goals; without them, you won’t feel the urgency to act or move forward.

This year has also been special because of the achievements we’ve reached as a community and on a personal level. Some of the most notable milestones of 2024 are:

We’ve been super consistent on social media.
We’ve published one article per week for the newsletter.
We founded brandingwebsite.com and koalaui.com.
We improved the personal portfolio.
We earned the Webflow Templates license and created more than 15 templates.
We worked with Wix Studio and Pantone, two huge brands.
And we managed to surpass $5,000 in some months of the year.

What are the goals for 2025?

Keep creating new templates, ideally 20-30. Two per month is a good pace.
Improve Branding Website and Koala UI.
Take Koala UI to the next level, make it as complete and perfect as possible.
Invest in equipment to create better videos for Instagram.
Launch new educational products.
Share more educational and valuable content in this newsletter.
Continue growing the YouTube channel.
Create UTMs so I can better understand the analytics of my products.
Implement email marketing across all my stores. Surely I’ll do it with Loops.so.
Automate more of my processes using Make.

For me, this newsletter is much more than a space to share ideas. It’s a conversation with you, a community we’re building together. So, if there’s a topic you’d like me to cover or an idea you want to share, don’t hesitate to reach out. Your input matters.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and being part of this journey. I wish you a 2025 full of challenges, learnings, and successes.

See you next year!

Until next time,

Jordi Espinosa.

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