Welcome 2008!
Well, how about that – another year has slipped from our grasp and whilst I won’t make any comments on the year that has past, I have a feeling that 2008 will be a really wonderful year.
Earlier in the year I noted somewhere that there are many points in the year when you can reevaluate things. The ones that stick out for me are your birthday, Winter Solstice, New Years, the end of Financial Year – and looking back at this list I can see each having a goal “category”, Solstice for Spiritual, Birthday for Personal, New Years for General, Financial a no-brainer as Financial/Business. Interestingly, one for Family hasn’t made itself apparent to me – is this because we don’t celebrate any particular day in New Zealand as an obviously family day? Christmas seems like a bit of a reach for this to me – and besides who isn’t concentrating on the celebrating part of that event to take the time to contemplate long term goals.
So leading up to today I’ve been contemplating my lack of clear long-term goals and just when I thought to put that on the too hard basket and deal with it next time round I saw that Brad Issac at Achieve-IT! is running a month-long series on Goal Setting which sounds simply serendipitous to me. So here’s the introductory post and here is the post for Day One: Letting go of the fear of dreaming or goal setting.
So what apart from Learning how to Goal Set, do I have organised so far?
- My Diary – a standard A5 one page a day with no appointment times. Whilst I love the GTD way of working out what to do each day, I didn’t kick the habit of writing up a list each day of the tasks I want to achieve and then carrying over anything not completed onto a later day which kinda defeats the purpose of a custom printed planner. Perhaps this is something to work on next year.
- Sam’s Diary – a tiny one page per day diary for recording her daily activities and new words as a way to encourage us about her progress, and conversely to let us know when we’re slacking off in the providing her with useful activities department.
- A Monthly wall chart showing habits I’m working on. This month’s has Read a book to Sam, Put up a Trademe Listing, Blog Post, Daily Photo, and cringing admitting this some better Oral hygiene for both Sam and I. This is a replacement for the A5 page packed with 45+ daily things I should be doing(!) and feels unsurprisingly very freeing despite it still being a challenge.
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Beginning the 101 in 1001 project – something different and along with that starting the Project 365 and Blog 365 project (pretty self-explanatory – a blog post for every day of the year). I might have bitten off more than I can chew but I want to achieve something this year and I’m looking forward to these challenges. I’m also concerned I’m going from the extreme of not doing much each day that is done purely for enjoyment to not enough
actual work being accomplished. It’s always a struggle working out the ideal work:play ratio but I hold hope that one day (or even, optimistically, for two days) I’ll get it right.
The last few days I’ve also been fluffing around giving this site a bit of a makeover and working on Sam’s private site. We have a passworded blog which we’re updating with photos and a bit of commentary at times for family members. I haven’t been very good at the Baby Book thing so this is a chance to redeem myself :P.
I’m also working on getting my Google Reader Starred list down to manageable proportions. I’ve unsubscribed from a couple of rss feeds as they’re adding to the guilt of incompleteness and not much else. One I will undoubtedly access when I need/want to anyway and the other was mainly a source of longterm feeds to read with the plus of seeing what the community on a whole is interested in. I have a ton of posts saved from the second feed I can go through for the first purpose and I question whether I really care about the second point.
