Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life

January Blogging Challenge

Jason Clark has provided the impetus for this month's challenge -- come up with an evaluation of last year's goals and a new set of goals for this year.

This should not be a facile collection of cliches like "I will lose weight" or "I'm going to save some money" but carefully thought out, significant goals for your life. Don't just list indefinite, non-specific platitudes, but specific, achievable goals. Include a plan for accomplishing each goal with concrete milestones and dates.

Instead of just saying "I will lose weight", make a goal of "I will lose 20 pounds by September 1, 2005." Make your goals realistic -- small enough that you can accomplish them, given everything else in your life and the world -- and include the changes you'll make or steps you'll take to achieve that goal. These should be plausible items such as "Go to the gym once a week" or better still "I will park at the far end of the parking lot every morning".

Realism is an important part of achieving any goal -- you can't say "I will cut out all chocolate" if you're a chocoholic and expect to reach your goal. Better would be to say "I will limit myself to one piece of chocolate per day" or "I will only have chocolate on those days that I go to the gym." Similarly, if you say "I will make the world a better place", not only can you not really completely accomplish that, but how would you know? Where would you start?

You would certainly need to delineate how you will make the world a better place, and how you can tell if you've succeeded? Instead, make your goal something like "I will spend one day a month helping others" and list ways you can do that, such as volunteering at a nursing home, helping out at your kid's school, or donating to a worthy cause.

Jason's list of resolutions from last year is a good example of resolutions that include both personal and professional goals. He included ones for his weblog as well. I generally break it down to personal, professional, and family-related. I think it's important to grow yourself in all areas of your life -- work, play, family, etcetera.

One last note -- this challenge includes a review of your goals from last year (if any). That's a reminder that this years goals should not be put on a shelf somewhere and forgotten. Refer to them frequently throughout the year to remind yourself what your priorities are. Publishing them publicly on a website provides you added impetus to reach them; we'll be waiting to see how you've done at the end of the year.

Related Links Jason Clark nursing home worthy cause resolutions professional

[ Posted: 08:00 | home | print ]

Last Year's Goals

At the risk of sounding like I have no direction, my list of goals for last year was a short list of very important items; each with some hefty added 'splainations. Personal Goals (in no particular order of importance) -------------- 1. Get my family the hell out of Dodge City. The town I lived in was fast becoming "Gagstah Central, y0". That's not any kind of comment on racism, but on lifestyle and the danger certain lifestyles sometimes bring. Let me put it this way, one day my kids got on the bus to go to school, and after the bus left and was out of sight, the police and DEA moved in and raided two homes that sat right near the bus stop. Then, the week we finally moved there were two fatal shootings right on the street I lived on. Oh, and the pipe bomb that blew up my neighbor's truck. Can't forget that. No, I shit you not. I was finally financially and impetus-ly (Coined phrase - embrace it) able to move my family to a much better neighborhood. Outcome: Roaring success. I've since moved to a nice, quiet, safe and Cleaver-esque new bedroom community in southern Chester County. 30 miles from the nearest city and over 50 miles from Philly. I'm broke, now, mind you, but my kids can leave the house without their flak jackets. I call that a success. 2. Become more involved in my oldest daughter's life. You see, I have five kids, the oldest from another relationship prior to my being married. Due to some poor decisions and choices by both her mother and myself, she was raised more or less alone by her mother and I was kept out of the picture. No, this wasn't my choice but being young and stupid, I didn't fight it as much as I should/could have. So, she only became aware of me a few years ago after she turned 13. Now she's 17, a bit of a personal and social mess and has little or no interest in my being her daddy. Outcome: This has been an ongoing failure of galactic proportions. She was raised completely different from how I raise my other kids and that adjustment has been one of the most difficult things I've ever faced. For more reasons than I can list here. But... I plod on and continue learning; enduring the occasional boot heel to my emotions. Parenthood has its... rewards? (sigh) 3. Get back in to motorcycling. --3a. Get people I know involved in motorcycling. I've been riding since I was 12 and after a rather devestating and life-changing back injury in 1989, I decided to cut back on cycling. Eventually... '97? I sold the last remaining bike I had and just kind of gave up. Gave in. Accepted defeat - very much against my own ideals. Outcome: Another roaring success. Last February ('04) I went and bought a '95 Honda Magna more or less on a whim after a 6? 7? year hiatus from cycling. I'd found that on the right bike and the right kind of riding I could do it now. Apparently the last 15 years of gut wrenching pain and daily medication, I can ride again, with caveats. No more dirt riding, hill jumping and no sport bikes. It's cruisers and tourers for me. I ride now as often as possible, and I've even convinced a lot of my friends at work (and some I don't work with) to either re-enter the biking world or to at least take the M.S.F. course and get a proper and "correct" introduction into motorcycling. I can ask no more than to at least give it a try. I believe even Jason's gonna look into it! :) 4. Make things overall better at home. A few years ago - as "luck" would have it, right around the same time my oldest daughter came back into the picture, my wife and I were having some marital issues. We'd been married for about 11-ish years by this point and... well, who knows? Relationships are complicated things. I think each of us felt there were things missing. I wasn't happy - to be fair, I was flat-out miserable. Then she got pregnant with our 4th, and that just made me even more miserable. Outcome: An ongoing success. We agreed to stay together at least thru' the pregnancy and somewhere along the line I woke up one day and decided to do a concious reboot of all the crap and try for a fresh start. Anyone who's been involved as long as we have knows; it's impossible to have a "new" start. But you can make a choice to leave a lot of bad in the past and move on. We did. Things have been good. Every day is a new day. Feb '05 marks 15 years of being married. Nothing's perfect, but it's good. And in this freak-pit of a world we live in, "good" is a hell of an accomplishment. Jeezuz that's more than I'd planned on typing. Now that I'm posting this here, I'll have to link it from my own site. Or maybe not. Maybe having this list elsewhere will encourage me to get out there and see what more people are saying. One of my '05 items (I steadfastly refuse to buy into "resolutions") is to stop being such a recluse. Online and off. You see, I wake up in the morning, I go to work, I come home. I get involved in my few hobbies, then start all over again the next day: 1. motorcycling (which gets me out and I do get to meet lots of interesting people, but is mostly "man and machine" time) 2. woodworking (very much a solo act, although I do get the kids involved sometimes) 3. some writing (another solo act) - A couple of years ago I got back into jotting down some fiction/short stories rattling around inside my skull and want to continue that. 4. electronics (I dabble, a solo act) 5. recreational coding - (yep, another solo act) can't help it. I just love writing code sometimes, depending on topic and impetus. There are times when I feel like a bit of an antisocial prick, but hey.... I'm sane. And isn't that what hobbies are all about?

Posted by chornbe

ah, crap. I had that all formatting for Markdown. Sorry.

Posted by chornbe