Next Practices

With 2013 now 1/4 complete, it’s time to report on how I’m doing with the many goals I set for the year.  My first post for 2013 on January 1 is where I shared 11 goals divided into the categories of body, mind and spirit.  Reporting on my progress here helps hold me accountable, so that’s why I’m doing these monthly updates.

There’s good news and bad news on the goals front this month.  The good news is that I’m still doing well on some of them.  The bad news is that I’m more behind on others now than I was a month ago.  One big reason why I’m more behind than expected is that I had to cancel a week of vacation for late March where my plan was to catch up with the reading and writing goals.  With simply too much happening at work to walk away for a week, I felt the impact of not having that time for working on my goals.  I’ve scheduled a vacation week for April and another for May to try to catch up some, but with other schedule oddities going on that I will mention below, it will still be a challenge to completely catch up anytime soon.

It is what it is, so here is the update…

Goals related to body:

1. Keep my weight at or below 150 pounds.  All continues to be well on this one.  I still weigh in daily, and that weigh-in determines what and how much I eat as well as influencing physical activity for the day.  I look forward to reaching the 1-year anniversary of reaching my target weight this summer.

2. Walk/jog/run a total of 10,000 steps per day three days per week. I’m still way ahead of schedule on this one because I’ve been doing it five days per week instead of three for a couple of months now to reach some reward goals with my company’s incentive program, HumanaVitality.  In March, I ran my first 5K race in about 5-6 years when my company scheduled one just for our employees and families in downtown Louisville.  My race time was the slowest 5K I’ve ever done at 31 minutes, 18 seconds (my previous race before this one, for example, was under 24 minutes), but I’ll use it as a benchmark going forward.  At least there were only seven people my age or older who finished before me.  I was #232 overall out of 2074 finishers.  I’ll take it.  Also helping with this goal is that the weather is finally getting warmer, so I will be more inclined to go for runs or longer walks with the dog than during the cold weather.

3. Average at least six hours of sleep per night.  I still don’t record numbers here, but more nights than not when I set my alarm and lay down, it’s for more than six hours from the time I’m going to bed.  I’m probably pretty close on this one.  Unless I buy something like a Fitbit that tracks sleep, I won’t know exactly how well I’m doing on this goal, but I’ll have a good idea.

Goals related to mind:

1. Read a book every other week.  I really bombed on this one in March.  I didn’t complete any book.  I’m about 2/3 through the one I’m reading, but this is one of the goals impacted by me canceling my vacation a couple of weeks ago.  I have much to do here.

2. Blog every other day (at least).  I keep lagging a few days behind in this goal, having published 45 posts this year when an every-other-day schedule would have me at 48 by now.  Catching up won’t be difficult.  Blogging daily for one week would do it.

3. Continue to follow My 3 Words: Ground, Stretch, Reflect.  As I reported last month, this one still sneaks up on me because of not blogging every day like I did in 2012.  Nightly blogging provided a built-in time for this reflection.  Without that, I’m missing it too many nights.  I still think through the sequence on days I blog to see what is worth writing about, but other days I tend to forget about the framework even though I may still do two of the three instinctively every day.

4. Double the blog’s readership from 10,000 views in 2012 to 20,000.  I’m very happy to say that as of today I’m running 46% ahead of schedule on this one.  At the current pace, I’ll pass last year’s total readership in either April or, more likely, May.  A couple of pairs of popular posts have helped the cause with each receiving hundreds of views and the most popular (The Worst Mistakes I’ve Made As An Employee) now approaching 1000 views.

5. Continue to write hand-written letters to my sons.  As reported before, this is only done a couple of times a year, so having done it last in December, it will likely be this summer before I do it again.

Goals related to spirit:

1. Finish reading the ESV Study Bible and read half of The Apologetics Study Bible.  I am more behind on this goal than any other.  Again, canceling the vacation week really hurt me here.  I have much to do to get back on track, but just a few solid days of vacation devoted to this would do it.

2. Review 100 Bible memory verses weekly.  So far, so good. This takes less than an hour weekly, so it’s easy to stay current.

3. Come to some resolution to an unsettled situation where I worship.  Completed in January.

I don’t expect to be caught up on all goals by the end of April.  My wife just had knee replacement surgery two days ago and will have the other knee replaced in about four weeks.  She needs assistance from me, of course, when she returns home, and the schedule meanwhile is way different than normal.  I’m also officiating at a wedding later in April, going out of town for a couple of days for that.  Whenever I perform a wedding, I rehearse it a bazillion times so I can say everything just right without depending much on notes, so I know I’ll spend a lot of hours on that the next couple of weeks instead of other matters my time would normally be given to.  That isn’t a complaint, of course, since it’s a great privilege to officiate at the wedding of dear friends.  It’s just a notation that spending more time in one effort means there is less time to spend in others, so there may be consequences related to these goals that I’ll have to make up later.

So that’s how I’m doing on my goals after the first three months of 2013.  What about you?  How are you doing on your goals for the year?