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.

Gearing up for another year

With Christmas past, everyone is starting to throw around New Year's Resolutions.  And they are always the same and usually involve joining a gym or starting some similar overly ambitious change of habits that are ridiculously unrealistic and prone to failure.  We have all done it at one time or another: setup some kind of punishment for ourselves to "correct" bad behavior just because it's a new year.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend who wanted to try to start blogging every single day when she hasn't blogged in at least two and a half months (and even before then the consistency was pretty sparse...hey, I'm not judging! Just stating the facts!).  I recommended she start off smaller, maybe commit a specific time slot a week to writing.  I told her about a couple tools I use to help me store thoughts I want to flesh out later (sometimes, much much later!).

Setting up manageable goals every month has been really helpful for me.  December has been a crap month for me as far as working on my goals and keeping up with previous ones.  The holidays kind of do that.  Instead of feeling guilty, I'm just shrugging it off and doing what I can, when I can.  I'll try again next month.

I've found being specific helps.  For example, instead of saying, "I want to lose weight!" I say, "I want to cut out processed sugars like soda and start walking 15 minutes per day!"  The latter example is much more definitive and less abstract.

I'm going to have a long list of goals for January, but they are going to be small, manageable, and specific so I actually have some chance of getting something done.  Somethings I've already started working towards (because why wait for a magic date when you're ready to begin now?) but I'll put much more effort and emphasis on them in the coming months.  And, as always, every mini-goal is a step in an overall effort to better myself in anyway.