Alex's Undercover Blog

Almost 4 years ago, around this time I wrote about doing new year's resolutions differently. It's funny to look back that far and read about my good intentions in that single post but not reading anymore about my goals that I mention again. This year I'm going to attempt to identify what I've done wrong in the past and do things differently so that I can feel like I accomplish more in the year and avoid insanity.

Lets have a look at the goals I set 4 years ago and see how I've ended up:

• Writing more: Technically I did write more (from 0 to some) but certainly far less than what I had intended by saying "more".
• Continue to improve healthy habits: This is probably the one I've done the best at. Though I was hesitant in the original post I did end up running my first half-marathon in 2009 and have run several races since, including a full marathon in 2011.
• Accomplish more personal projects: There have been a few minor things that I've done under this high-level goal though the only specific thing that I can think of is writing my own blog platform which I only just accomplished in 2012 (and am using now to share this post).

What exactly was it that was missing from the goals I set back then? First of all they were too vague. Take the writing goal for instance. The goal that I set didn't provide any specific means for measuring its success or failure. Again, technically I met the goal given that I wrote more than nothing but I don't feel that the goal was met. If I had come up with something more specific like "Write at least one blog post a month" it would've been much easier to measure the success or failure.

The second thing I should have provided for the goals was a time frame for accomplishing them. The "once a month" goal above would've have worked well for the writing goal. Really any timeframe other than "by the end of the year" would've been a big help in preventing procrastinating with regards to the goals.

One last thing that I can think of that would've helped is occasionally checking in to see how much progress I was making towards the goals to see if the goals should be adjusted, if they ended up being too unrealistic or weren't specific enough.

Now that I have these things in mind what goals am I going to set for 2013 you ask? While I have some specific goals in mind but I want to give some time to thinking about what those goals are and put together a plan for how I want to accomplish them. So really my first goal for the year is to come up with goals for the year. Sounds kind of silly but if I take the time to plan them out I think I have a much better chance of accomplishing them in 2013. I'm committing to coming up with more specific plans by Sunday evening (Jan. 6). That's not to say I'm going to have the whole year planned but at least have a few specific plans in mind to get started on.

Hopefully by this time next year I'll be able to look back and feel like I've accomplished what I set out to.