At the beginning of the year, I started a series of posts about my New Year’s Resolutions. Here is a look back on the project.

As you may recall, I divided my resolutions into two categories: Personal Growth and Goals. The first being general habits, behaviors and attitudes I wanted to work toward, and the second being concrete things I wanted to achieve. All-in-all, 2008 was a good year for me. I made many positive changes in my personal and professional life, and I achieved one major goal while making good progress toward two more.

Personal Growth

I started this project in part by finding a handful things I wanted to improve on in 2008 and using Joe’s Goals to track my habits and form new ones. It was a pretty fun thing to do, and I definitely found keeping track of my progress to be a good motivator. It’s kind of like a score card for the game of life. I stuck with Joe’s Goals pretty well for about 9 months, then fell out of the habit. I only recently got back into it, and while I don’t know whether my behavior changed during the time I was not tracking it, I do know that I feel better just being aware of how I’m doing.

One cool feature of this application is the ability to run reports. Here’s what the report looks like for January through September.

The main thing that makes interpreting this data difficult is that I did not record my behavior everyday. I was quite sporadic, so the raw numbers for a long period of time are not that useful. For example, I’m certain that I had more than 81 productive workdays in 9 months!

Comparisons between behaviors are probably pretty accurate because on days that I remembered to check in with Joe’s Goals, I usually reported everything for that day. For example, in this particular time period it looks like I went out to eat on more days than I exercised. That’s something I’d like to improve upon.

My total score was positive, so that’s a good thing. There is no benchmark to measure against though, and the scoring criteria and weighting is pretty random, so it’s hard to say just based on the numbers how the year went. For Example, I set ‘drink’ as worth negative two points one particularly hungover morning but then I checked the box every time I had a beer or wine with dinner. ‘Get Organized’ was not really defined at all and wound up being checked whenever I just felt like I deserved a point. Taking some time to fine tune my scoring criteria would be beneficial. I’ve added a ‘Set Goals’ goal so that I can track how many days I actually checked in and do some averaging, this will help solve the missing data issue in the future.

If I settle on a scoring criteria, I could run reports on a month-to-month or week-to-week basis, and strive to improve my score from one report to the next. I think I will try something along these lines for 2009.

Goals

My goals turned out to be much bigger than perhaps I realized when I set them as goals for the year. They were the kind of “Life-Moment” things that achieving more than one of would make for a really special year. The one goal that I disclosed publicly happens to be the same goal I achieved this year: Owning a Home. I have made progress toward two more goals, and I will certainly keep both as goals for 2009.

I think a major reason the Homeowner goal was a success while the others were not was the fact that it was made public. This makes sense. Encouragement from other people is one of the best motivators for me. I still can’t publicize these goals since they are more personal than I would like the whole world to know, but I did decide to share them with some trusted allies who I am confident will help encourage me in 2009.

Since Joe’s Goals was so helpful to me in my Personal Growth project, I decided to try to find some way to leverage technology to assist me in my major Goals as well. I used FutureMe to send myself an e-mail in four months checking on my progress:

Dear Gabe,

How are things going with ___________ and ___________ ? If you haven’t done those yet, get to work. Also, be sure to send your future self another e-mail.

Love, You

I think four months is a good time frame for my first formal reminder, much sooner would lose effectiveness as the creation of the goals would still be pretty fresh in my mind. This way, when I get that e-mail I can be motivated by the jarring realization that it’s already been four months. We’ll see how it goes.

I also want to set a third goal for 2009. I feel that since I achieved one thing this year, I should add another to the list. In fact, I should have added it as soon as I moved into the condo. I kind of like the idea of always having my queue of three goals pulling me along in life. I will try to have my next major “Life Moment” goal set by the end of January.

Previous posts in this series:
2008 Personal Growth and Goals part II
2008 Personal Growth and Goals part I