It is currently Sunday morning. I’m sitting at a picnic table at the pond on the back of my dad’s place. When you read this it’ll be Monday morning (at least), so once again I am late on my weekly “Saturday morning” post.
Most of my weeks recently have been a bit “out of the ordinary,” but perhaps that is only true if “ordinary” is based off of an average week in January or February. Life is busy for everyone, and generally spring and summer increase the busyness of life. I guess I should quit complaining, or perhaps I’m “just being honest.”
Over the last two months or so I’ve found myself starting to drop the ball on a number of the goals that I made at the beginning of the year. While I tell myself that the main reason was a major up tick in busyness, if I’m honest with myself, it’s probably a bit more complex than just that.
At any rate, it’s been a little while since I’ve shared a run down of my yearly goals and how they have been going. So, in this post we’ll take a look at most of my goals for this year. For each one I’ll talk about how it has been going, and I’ll wrap each goal up with any changes I’m going to make, if any, going forward.
Goal by Goal Update
Review goals weekly – In my “life task management” software, Asana, I have a recurring weekly task. It includes each of this years goals and the task is to “review yearly goals.” Each week since the beginning of the year I have marked that task complete. Early on that meant that I had written a small update in a text document about how I had done with each goal that week.
A few months ago, I switched to just reading over the list and thinking about each one a bit. The last month I’ve been just glancing over the list, marking the task complete and moving on to other “more pressing” things on my task list.
Going forward I need to rewrite that task a bit, cleaning up the actual list of goals (it will change a bit based on the changes I’m making in the goals below), and get back to writing (even just briefly) about each one on a weekly basis.
Publish 1 video per week – This goal is one of the ones that I was most attached to at the beginning of the year. I love to consume media from other creatives. Folks like Cody Waner, Becki & Chris, and a small host of others. At the beginning of this year I decided that it was time for me to do a similar thing, so I committed to the weekly practice of creating and publishing a video.
That all went fairly well till into April, and by “well” I mean that I was doing it. I was creating and publishing a video each and every week. Initially the struggle was “coming up with things to talk about.” Then, during my month long stay in Budapest, I felt like I actually had something to share. It was fun to create.
I was learning a fair amount, and was putting into practice a bunch of technical tidbits that I have heard about over the years. However… after I returning from Budapest I realized that I was quickly sliding back into the “what do I talk about this week” hole very quickly. When you couple that with entering a busy season here on my families farm in mid April, plus my regular job, plus the rest of my goals and side “hustles,” led to deciding to skip a few weeks. Now I’ve missed four or five weeks straight.
I enjoy creating and editing video. There is something incredibly fascinating about taking a bunch of little things and putting them together to try to tell a bigger, more complete story.
So where does that leave me? Here is what I’m currently thinking. I don’t have the amount of time (or energy frankly) to put into creating the videos that I’d like to. For now I’ve decided to put a halt on the “weekly video” goal for the year. Does that mean I won’t be releasing videos? No, it just means that they will only happen when I have something worth sharing.
I think that’s where we’ll leave this goal for now. Perhaps I’ll revisit it at some point in the future.
Publish one blog post per week – This has been my most consistent goal so far this year. It’s looking like I’ll continue on with this one. I do want to do better about writing throughout the week so that I can actually publish Saturday mornings.
Continue to grow as a web designer – This is something that I continue to work on by doing “actual work.” A lot of the learning curve that I first experienced when I moved from Sketch and started working with Figma has evaporated, but I’m still not 100% there on keyboard shortcuts and all the little helpful tools that Figma offers. There is always plenty to learn, I hear people who are years ahead of me in design say the same thing, so I doubt I’ll “arrive” as a designer any time soon.
Start a podcast – So… I have technically accomplished this goal. My brother and I host a biweekly podcast for our farm called “Conversations with Yoders’ Farm.” I have another idea or two for podcasts, and may dive into one of those before too long. If I do I’ll let you know. 🙂
Launch one of my side SASS projects by June – This hasn’t happened. At the beginning of the year I built an app to track a number of things personally. Originally I was going to flesh it out and offer it to the world. I may still do that, but for now I’ve got too many other things on my plate. I’m tabling this one for now, but won’t rule out working on it if I get a chance to.
Read 1 book each month – I have read more books this year than any year in recent history. Those metrics get a bit different if you only count books that I’ve read with my actual eyes, but as long as we are counting audio books I’m good to go here. At some point I want to write a post about some of my favorite books of all time. For now I’ll just keep reading/listening.
Be more in tune with finances – I think I’ve already mentioned that a big part of this goal was to finish separating my personal finances from my business finances. That has been accomplished, and it makes things a lot easier to understand and keep tabs on. Could I be doing better with money? Yeah… I think I’ll have room to grow on this front for quite some time yet.
Become a full time morning person – I do love mornings. If that is the only thing we’re going for then I probably wouldn’t have to worry any more about it. But, I really need start getting up early again. The first couple of months of this year were some of the most productive I’ve had in a long time, a big part of that was due to my getting up around 4:30. I’m going to dive back into that schedule this week. It’s definitely harder to go to bed early now that it’s light outside till quite late, but if I can get myself to sleep and then get myself out of bed I know that the results will be worth it.
Get More Healthy – Ok… this is the last goal I’m going to talk about in this article. I started the year quite well on this front. In the first six weeks of the year I lost 15 lbs and was working out two to three times each week. Then I made an exception to everything while I was in Budapest (a decision I do not regret in the least because the food was great), but that led to going back the way I had come.
Since I’ve been home from Budapest, and since the last two months have been extremely busy I mostly just gave up and went back to eating normally and not working out. That all needs to change again, I don’t know how much weight I’ve gained, (I’m slightly terrified to step back on the scales) but I know I’ve put at least some of that weight back on.
Tomorrow I’m headed back to the keto diet. I’ll give it a week or so and then start working out again. At least that is the plan right now!
Conclusion
So, to wrap this up… it isn’t too hard to look back at these goals and see where I’ve not done so well and start to think of myself as a failure, at least a little bit.
But, if I give myself a little bit of grace, and reframe things just a tad, I can also see that I’m moving in the right direction on a number of fronts. Do I still have a long ways to go on a lot of them? Sure… but we all know how big things are accomplished.
One. Day. At. A. Time.
So, that’s where I am this morning. Here’s hoping my next “goals update” post can be more positive on all fronts!