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Hate New Year’s Resolutions? Payton Sartain’s 4 Journal Prompts Hit Different

December 26, 2025

It’s almost January, which means you’ve probably started thinking about your goals, side-eyed half of them, and are already spiraling about how you’re behind on a timeline that hasn’t even officially started yet. Classic. We do this every year—jump straight into the tactical stuff, the vision boards, the habit trackers, the new me energy—without ever stopping to ask what we actually want our life to feel like. And then we wonder why we’re burnt out by February.

On Note to Self, host Payton Sartain takes a different approach to planning 2026, and it doesn’t start with a to-do list. It starts with four journal prompts designed to help you get clear on the big picture. Whether you’re already deep in your planning era or lowkey dreading the whole thing, this one’s for you.

Start at the end

Most people try to plan the year by obsessing over what they should do next. Sartain flips that entirely. She asks you to start at the finish line—not with achievements, but with how the year felt. “Close your eyes and imagine it’s December 31st, 2026. You’re looking back on the best year of your life,” she says. “What made it so?”

When she answers it herself, the takeaway isn’t flashy milestones or aesthetic wins. It’s contentment. Feeling organized instead of perpetually behind. Having her ducks in a row instead of constantly chasing the next thing.

And she’s onto something. Research on mental contrasting and future visualization shows that imagining a desired future helps clarify priorities and reduces overwhelm. When you define success in hindsight first, you stop chasing everything and start focusing on what genuinely matters.

Chase the feeling, not the goal

Once you’ve imagined the end, Sartain suggests getting even more specific. “When you think about 2026, what’s the feeling you want to chase?” she asks. “For example, grounded, expansive, luxurious, free, aligned.”

This is where the planning gets interesting. Because most of us set goals hoping they’ll deliver a feeling—we want the promotion because we think it’ll make us feel successful, we want the relationship because we think it’ll make us feel loved, we want the fitness goal because we think it’ll make us feel confident. But we rarely name the feeling first.

“I wanna chase alignment and freedom,” Sartain admits. Except freedom, in her world, doesn’t look like zero responsibilities or endless vacation days. “When I say freedom, I kind of mean it in the way of remaining disciplined enough to have free time,” she explains. “Instead of just…like almost procrastinating my life away.”

This is such a millennial/Gen Z paradox. We crave freedom, but we self-sabotage by avoiding the very things that would give us peace. We scroll instead of doing the task, then feel guilty about scrolling, then can’t enjoy the scrolling, then resent the task even more. It’s exhausting. The good news is, once you name the feeling you’re chasing, the plan gets a whole lot simpler. You stop setting goals that just look impressive and start choosing ones that legit support the life you want to live.

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A post shared by Note to Self by Payton Sartain (@ntsbyps)

Define what ‘arrived’ looks like

Most of us say we want to feel settled, successful, or finally together. Very few of us can explain what would actually change in our daily life if that were true. That’s the gap Sartain zeroes in on next. “What’s different about your life in 2026 that makes you feel like you’ve arrived somewhere new?” she asks.

It sounds simple, but it forces clarity. It’s easy to run after vague ideas like happiness or success. It’s much harder to describe what “arrived” looks like in real life terms—how you move through your days, how you spend your time, how you treat your own promises.

For Sartain, the answer is deceptively simple: “I keep my commitments to myself and I limit my commitments in general so that I can keep my own personal commitments and commitments to others.” Read that again. She’s not talking about some massive external achievement. She’s talking about being the kind of person who does what she says she’s going to do—for herself and for others.

In other words, “arriving” doesn’t have to mean some dramatic life overhaul. Sometimes it just means becoming someone who actually does the things they said they were going to do.

Give yourself the permission slip

The last prompt is the one that might make you uncomfortable—in the best way. “What’s the one thing you’re giving yourself full permission to want, pursue, or become this year?” Sartain asks. “And then the vision you’re calling in.”

Permission is a loaded word. So many of us walk around waiting for someone else to tell us it’s okay to want what we want. To go after the thing that feels too ambitious, too impractical, or too selfish. To become a version of ourselves we’ve kept small because it might make other people uncomfortable. This prompt is your permission slip, and you’re the one writing it.

Sartain frames this as the bridge between vision and action. “Just getting to know yourself through these questions and understanding what you want broadly,” she says. “And then we can start to kind of funnel down into more granular things.”

That’s the point of these prompts. They’re not meant to replace goal-setting—they’re meant to come before it. Because if you don’t know what you’re actually chasing, you’ll end up hitting targets that don’t mean anything to you. You’ll achieve the goal and still feel empty. You’ll check the box and wonder why nothing feels different.

So before you make another resolution, buy another planner, or set another goal you’ll abandon by Valentine’s Day, sit with these four questions. The tactical stuff can wait. This is the foundation.

For more insights, tune into Note to Self wherever you get your podcasts.