Groundhog Day Resolution Review Day – 2008-03-03
Today marks the first review of Groundhog Day Resolutions for 2008. You can review my resolutions at 2008 Groundhog Day Resolutions.
I’m going to list my goals and their statuses in a nice table format. I’ll add comments below. I’ve graded myself on a 90/80/70/60 scale or pass/fail.
| Daily Devotions | 17/30 (57%) | Fail | |
| Weekly Family Devotions | 11/4 (275%) | A+ | |
| Spend time with Eldest | 4/8 (50%) | Fail | |
| Spend time with Youngest | 4/8 (50%) | Fail | |
| Take The Wife on a date | 1/1 (100%) | A | |
| Spend Saturday night with The Wife | 2.5/4 (63%) | D | |
| Connect with old friends | 1/4 (25%) | Fail | |
| Join a small group | Ongoing | Passing | |
| Work out | 16/24 (75%) | C | |
| Dental Hygiene | Completed | 30/30 (100%) | A |
| Read Fiction | Ongoing | Passing | |
| Redesign uhri.com | No progress | ||
| Blogging | 5/5 (100%) | A | |
| Practice Guitar 10 minutes/day | 19/30 (63%) | D | |
| Unpack boxes | 19/22 (86%) | B | |
| Business: Billable hours | Fail | ||
| Business: RBBB Redesign | Ongoing | Pass | |
| Business: Book Yourself Solid | Ongoing | 0/2 | Fail |
| Meta: Take one action, first thing, ever day. | Ongoing | 8/16 (50%) | Fail |
| Meta: Use a timer | Ongoing | 3 | Fail |
| Meta: Use GHDRR Tracker form / daily review | Ongoing | Daily | Pass |
| Meta: GTD Weekly review | 3/4 (75%) | Pass | |
| Meta: Limit Television to 4 hours per week. | 10/16 | Pass |
Devotions
For personal devotions, I did not have a lot of success this month. Chief to my errors was leaving my devotions for the end of the day. This usually means I either fall asleep before taking the time, or end up just quickly skimming over a passage without really digging into what it says. I think I’ll try to improve this in March by moving devotion time to the beginning of the day.
Family devotions haven’t turned out the way I had hoped either, but were better in some ways. I found time in the mornings before taking the boys to school to read a passage of scripture and have a quick discussion about it. The bad news is The Wife hasn’t been part of these, especially when we read in the driveway and discuss on the way. I think the ultimate goal – to teach our sons about God – is being served. This month I’m going to bump the goal to a daily devotion on weekdays.
Personal Time
Spending time with the others in my family is much harder than I thought it would be. With the kids, it’s difficult to find the time to spend with them individually. When we do things together, it’s usually as a family. Trying to carve out individual time is tricky. The boys tend to hang together and do things at the same time. Finding an hour to focus on one without the other getting in on it just doesn’t happen. Finding an hour twice a week has also been a challenge. For March, I’m going to be less concerned about individual time and more intent on just spending the time with them.
Saturday night date nights with The Wife were certainly interesting. I was out of town one weekend, which cost me 25% of my score. One other weekend she went to bed early on Saturday even though I was ready to hang out together. We did get a chance to get out one weekend to a dinner theater thanks to a Christmas present from my sister that included free babysitting. In March, The Wife has a work trip to attend and I will be going with her. I’ll count this as our date night out of the house since its several days together without the kids.
The third area of spending time is connecting and keeping in contact with old friends. I wish I could say I did better on this – it doesn’t take long to send an email. Still, I only sent one and didn’t even get a response, so that set a challenging tone for my motivation on this task. I’ll have to ramp up my efforts again this month.
As for joining a small group, we made a little bit of progress. We decided to make a commitment to the church we started attending in January by making it our home church. Yesterday we went to a new attendee session after service and found more information about the church and where it stands doctrinally. The good news is a focus of the church is on small group fellowship. This is what we’ve been looking for so our next step is to attend the small group connect meeting to find others in our area.
Health
I’m happy with the progress I made in the health and fitness department. I started exercising regularly again, either on the treadmill or the stationary bike. I found the bike to be more beneficial. I feel like I get a better workout and, at the same time, I’m able to do a little reading since my hands are free. Some would suggest that means I’m not riding hard enough but based on how winded I get I’m sure I’m doing fine. My diet could improve dramatically, however, as I haven’t really cut down on anything I’m eating. The Wife has started to watch her diet again; that usually means I’ll start doing pretty well there again.
As for dental hygiene, I’ve been doing the floss and mouthwash routine every night. I’m going to close this as a tracked goal. I think it has become an ingrained habit now.
Creative and Household Goals
My other miscellaneous goals involve reading, writing and music. I haven’t focused too hard on reading fiction, but did read one non-fiction book this month (see below).
I wrote 5 nearly-1000-word blog posts between this site and my business blog. Writing one decent length post per week has been the right amount of time, I think. I can confirm a quote I read by Jeff Atwood that it takes about 3 hours writing an average blog post.
My goal for practicing guitar 10 minutes a day trong> was primarily to build finger strength and speed. This month need to find some scales to practice or songs to learn to keep me interested while continuing to get my fingers into shape.
Unpacking started well at the beginning of February, but has tapered off now that the main floor of our house seems to be in pretty good shape. Still, there are many, many boxes in the basement and garage that need attending to before I can consider this goal complete.
The Business of Business
I deployed a blog for Red Bit Blue Bit (http://redbitbluebit.com/) this month. I created an about page and two blog posts for it as well. I want to blog there once a week on issues I consider important to .NET developers and those looking to hire independent consultants to solve their business needs. I’ve enjoyed doing those blog posts there. I never felt too comfortable blogging on those topics here at Uhri.com since I considered this a personal blog and it is read mostly by friends and family. Too much nerdy stuff would drive them away!
I wanted to work through the book Book Yourself Solid
However, this matters little when I find myself too busy or distracted to work on current projects. I’m basically so ashamed of that performance I’m not even going to write about it.
One other "invisible" task was to work on some minor pro bono tasks I have on my plate. They have been looming over my head like an old dead goose and I want to start knocking them off. One I took care of was getting my dad’s blog set up at VladimirUhri.com. (It will be interesting to see what he starts posting.)
Meta Goals
Process is an important part of any personal productivity routine. I’ve read enough on the topic to understand that each person responds to techniques in different ways. David Allen, author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
I’ve started doing a weekly review, a pillar of the GTD process. I never thought it that big of a deal, especially since I have few independent tasks. However, by setting aside a regular time (I like Monday mornings) to make sure everything is moving along. In conjunction with a daily review and the form, nothing is getting through the cracks.
The Groundhog Resolution Review Tracker Form
I created a basic fill-in-the-dot form to track all of my goals during February. This has been huge for me as it requires that I look at my task notebook each and every day (if for no other reason than to fill it in). The Groundhog Day Resolutions Review Tracker has kept me on track for several goals and has prompted "catch up" bursts where I work on those tasks that have fallen behind. (Obviously, that only works for non-daily tasks). The form itself has a few flaws, but it was only a first draft. First, it is broken down into week-long sections. When a month starts on a Saturday (as February did), there are a number of wasted spaces because the first week is unusable. Second, I needed to use two sheets because of all of my goals. I think the half sheet concept I use to track my time will not work here. There is just too many items to keep track of over a month. I’m going to redesign the form for March, although perhaps an online solutions would be better since I’m probably looking at a monthly update to the sheet.
Here’s a scan of the sheets I used this month:
Goals and Slack
I like the idea of a check-off sheet for my goals. I think it gave me the perspective I missed during last year’s GHDRs and kept things on my mind. The only concern I can see is a tendency to get entirely caught up with checking things off the list and forgetting that other people are really more important than any of this. Most of my goals were pretty reasonable this month, but I found I didn’t build slack into my schedule. I spent several days out of town taking the kids back to Wisconsin. This threw off my normal routines and let to a drop in my scores. If I can anticipate family events better (like vacations and weekends), I think it makes for a better score and a better task/life balance.
Distractions
I’m new at the working from home routine. That said, I must figure out the faults in my work model and fix them. Distractions are my biggest problem right now. A new house means a plethora of things to do and errands to run. The Internet also means a gross metric ton of bits only a mouse click away. After reading Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek
Then there’s Twitter. I love Twitter, but the biggest time suck there are following the links posted by others. Blocking the website itself and only posting tweets via IM is the best way I’ve found to avoid being sucked in.
Finally, I have a Google Desktop time gadget I use on days I find myself easily off the productivity path. I set it for a five- or ten-minute increment to make sure I stick to
the task at hand. On good days, it’s just a matter of resetting the clock whenever it goes off. On bad days, it brings me back to the fold by reminding me of things I should be doing instead.
Last Thoughts
February turned out to be one of the best GHDR months for me so far. A combination of good goal setting and excellent goal tracking has made this process enjoyable. I hope March goes well and that other GHDRers are as successful in the coming month as well. You can follow Dave Seah or Corrie Haffly on their respective blogs.
2 Comments
- Corrie said:
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