A Review of 2011

It's that time of year when everyone stops among the holiday bustle and shopping trips and thinks about where they are headed for the future.  We begin to think about the dreaded and hopeless New Year's resolution lists and that gym membership we promised ourselves.

Last year, I made a long list of goals that I hoped to accomplish throughout 2011, but I didn't really finalize them until March or April.  I also broke them down into categories: Physical, Spiritual, Career/Education, Fun, and Other.  I spent a great deal of time thinking about them and setting them up.  It didn't take long before I forgot about the list completely!

It was a blogosphere meme that reminded me to go back and look over my beautiful list of lovely aspirations.  At first glance, I assumed it was just a list of failures, a reflection of my inability to see anything through.  But as I stared at it, I realized that I actually did accomplish some things towards my goals.  In fact, I think there were only two items that I actually completely failed at.

My biggest failing, other than completely forgetting about the list, was making the goals too abstract (even though I really knew better).  And whereas I was good about listing my goals at the start of every month, January 2011 was the last time I did that.

A lot of my goals for 2011 will be carried over into 2012.  However, I'll be more specific and assign several mini actions to each so I have a way to gradually build up to whatever the goal is and ways of measuring my failures and successes.  They'll also be more relevant to each other and that helps make everything a little more successful.

I'll be detailing more about this over the next two weeks.  You'll probably want to stab me or something before 2012 even gets here.