Lots of people have opinions about goals, and even more people have opinions about new years resolutions. I haven’t made up my mind yet, but so far I’ve discovered they can definitely be hard to maintain. As I sit right now I’m 23 miles behind my running pace (after running 6 miles today), behind my lifting goal, missed a month of blog posts, and on my third book when I should be finishing it next week. This is where everyone says, “see and that’s why they are bad, they just make you sad”.

Rather than be discouraged I am grateful that almost all of my goals are flexible enough that they allow me to make up time. For all but the blog posts as long as I don’t get too far behind I can still easily make the goals happen. This summer as it gets warmer I plan to run more frequently and for longer. I also won’t have frisbee practices so frequently during the week and should be able to go to the gym more often. Finally, for the books I am the closest to being on pace and should be able to easily get back to pace.

This leaves the blog posts. This was a tough goal that I set by saying it had to be monthly. That meant that each month was a pass or fail and in March I definitely failed. What it came down to was that I was limiting myself. I only wanted to do posts about programming and projects I was working on and in March I just didn’t have the time to do that. I had only one weekend where I wasn’t away from home and I had a week long vacation in the middle. What I should have done was post about the trip and share photos and videos from the trip¹. So from now on I want to make this a blog that is more about everything I do and not just the narrow portion about programming. That might mean trying to tag posts so that it is easier to separate them out but that can be managed later. Therefore as to not “fail” at my goal I am aiming to write 24 blog posts in the year and make up for my missed month along the way.

1. still on the list of things to do ↩︎