The 2025 Great Lock-In: Achieve Your Goals Before the New Year Starts
This blog post is all about the best self-improvement trend of 2025.
The Great Lock-In is trending on TikTok. It runs from September 1 to December 31, with the aim of achieving your 2025 goals in 4 months.
I know we’re already in November, but I believe even two months can make a big difference in achieving our 2025 goals.
Now is a great time to start thinking about our New Year’s goals. But why wait until January to build new habits? The Great Lock-In lets us get a head start and begin the year feeling prepared.
Wondering how to “lock in” and actually achieve your 2025 goals? Let’s dive into it!
What is The Great Lock-In?
If you’ve never heard of the concept “locking in”, it means concentrating on a task or mindset. It’s setting your mind on something and actually doing it. “Locking in” is usually used when we are talking about self-improvement or studying.
The Great Lock-In is about focusing on your 2025 goals that you’ve been putting off and actually achieving them.
That means creating habits that support those goals so you can actually reach them. If you struggle to build habits, check out my review of the Atomic Habits system.
TIP: Keep track of your habits so that 1) you can keep motivated, and 2) you see how you are one step closer to your target.
My Personal 2025 Great Lock-In Challenge:
I first heard about this self-improvement challenge on LennaLift’s video, and I felt so motivated that I had to try it out. 💪
I want to experience The Great Lock-In, too, so I have set my mind to sticking to my 2025 goals and building new habits. However, since I didn’t set goals for 2025 (I never do that; I just come up with possible goals throughout the year, but never actually try to fulfill them 😅), I have set new goals.
I chose four improvement areas: physical health, mental health, studying, and self-improvement, each with two to three goals.
Here’s how I’m approaching my own Lock-In challenge:
- Mental health: journaling every day, and avoiding screens 30 minutes before bed
- Physical health: working out 4 times a week, sleeping 8-9 hours each night
- Studying: no studying on weekends (my problem isn’t that I don’t study, but that I make studying my whole life, and I put aside my personal hobbies. This leads to burnout, so I want to prevent that), and getting at least a 7 in all my assignments/exams
- Self-improvement: learn more about investing (I already invest, but I feel like there’s a whole other world out there) and read one book a month
Now that I have set my goals, I try to keep track of my habits and goals. We all have bad days, and some days we aren’t able to cross all our habits or tasks. By keeping track of our habits, it’s easier to see the bigger picture and see how we have improved over time.
I use this Notion template to track my habits:
Final Thoughts:
November has already begun, so it’s your turn to start “locking in”. Think about your 2025 goals and how many of them you have actually achieved. We don’t become the best versions of ourselves overnight. We need to work hard for that, and it’s essential that we actually start the process.
Had you heard about The Great Lock-In before? What would your top three goals be if you joined the Lock-In?