I Think I See My Shadow

The traditional time for New Year’s resolutions has long past. Initially, I had intended to make some resolutions this year as I’ve never really done it in the past. One reason I never made resolutions was that it felt like too much over-thinking and not enough doing. I think I had that impression because the typical way to make resolutions is just to make a list, but not really create any actionable plan to go along with it. That’s why resolutions tend to die off after a month or two.

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of articles and blogs about productivity, planning, goal setting, etc. I think that has helped me gain a better understand the importance of creating frameworks and systems for achieving your goals. With that in mind, and after stumbling upon this great blog entry about Groundhog Day Resolutions, I decided that this was a good time to really think about some resolutions/goals that I want to achieve this year and also create an actionable plane.

The thing that I like most about David’s Groundhog Day Resolutions is the timing of it. He’s right; the New Year is really busy and hectic and is not the easiest time to think clearly about resolutions. I couldn’t believe that it was already February! You need some time to distance yourself from the holidays and get back into your normal mode to really reevaluate yourself and your goals.

The other thing I like about his plan is that he sets up benchmarks to help check his progress. Again, I think this makes perfect sense and goes against what typically happens with New Year’s resolutions. I think when most people make New Year’s resolutions, the first thing they do is think about the resolutions they made the year before and evaluate the success of those. Quite honestly, I think this is the first time most people actually evaluate the success of their resolutions, partly because they forgot the ones they made months ago. One year is too long to wait to evaluate your progress so David’s monthly check is more practical.

Ok, so now to the fun part: what are my GHD resolutions?

I have some pretty broad resolutions/goals that I want to accomplish this year and I think that I’m being overly ambitious with them all, but I think it’s probably better to set more goals and fail at some of them than to set just enough goals to achieve unquestionable success.

So here’s my list of resolutions/goals, in no particular order (sorta):

1. Fitness
2. Enjoy the outdoors
3. Discover what I love to do
4. Financial independence and competence
5. Be content with less
6. Create/start a business
7. Expand knowledge base
8. Become a better public speaker
9. Create and strengthen connections within my current network
10. Expand my network (size and diversity)
11. Time management and conception
12. Watch less TV
13. Read more
14. Write more
15. Become a better cook
16. Be a better brother, son, uncle, etc.
17. Create a piece of art
18. Learn an instrument
19. Explore religion/philosophy
20. Travel
    

Though this list is not in order of importance, I tried to group some of the resolutions/goals together as some of them are interrelated. For example, #1 and 2 are health oriented, #3-8 are career/finance oriented, and so forth.

Now that I have a list, I need to create a plan for each of them. In future posts, I’m going to outline my plans for achieving these resolutions/goals and go into more detail into why I think they are important. Wish me luck.