Thanks to Chris Guillebeau for a blog and lifestyle that helped me set and meet some my goals last year.
Using his guidance on goal setting last year enabled me to do much more than I might have otherwise, in one sense anyway. I qualify that because I didn’t actually meet all my goals. In fact, one goal for the year was to review my goals every two months and I didn’t do that. The plan was to take some time throughout the year to review what I’d accomplished, what remained on the list, and make course corrections along the way.
Not only did I not meet that goal, I didn’t meet many of my other goals. I was either super aggressive or delusional in my goal-setting or totally lazy in actually trying to achieve them or my lack of ongoing review really did impact my ability to achieve what I set out to do. It is unclear at this moment which.
Let’s not focus too much on what I didn’t do, but rather what I did do.
- Travel 50,000 miles (via plane, train, automobile, or boat). Total for the year: 42,656 (give or take a mile or two).
- Participate in one home exchange. Total for the year: 6 home exchanges.
- See the Tour de France in Paris. Watched two stages–one in Rouen and one in Paris.
- Learn Polish. Didn’t get fluent but know much more than I did before, and still working on it.
- Improve my French. Didn’t take any formal classes, but spending several hours with a non-English speaker with our only shared language being French definitely helped improve my French.
As I work on my goals for this year, there are two things I will keep in mind.
- Set intermediate level goals. Maybe monthly, maybe weekly, it depends on the goal. It’s great to say that I’ll travel 50,000 miles in a year, but if I don’t know that that means I must travel at least 4,166 miles each month, will I make that goal again?
- Review on a regular basis. Life happens, things change. Maybe my goals will need to change, too. But I won’t know that if I don’t review them.
Good luck meeting your goals for 2013, whatever they may be!