The New Year is upon us, and it’s now to late to determine what you will do to make it your best year yet. This year, I’m choosing themes to help me understand my goals for the year. 2012 is to be the year of Consistency, Margin and Risk.
CONSISTENCY
Spiritual Life
Three practices I’m hoping to develop consistency in are Bible reading, scripture memorization and writing prayer lettters to God.
Fitness
My goal is to work out three times in week. This will include Crossfit, running and bike riding. I also hope to drop from my current weight of 180.5 lbs to my ideal weight on 165 in the next three months.
Relationships
My best relationships are the ones that I have built a regular time to spend together. I hope to expand this to having dinner once a week with friends and roommates. I am also seeking out discipling relationships, both those I can disciple and others to disciple me.
Creativity
Five days a week, I will write a minimum of 200 words that is purely creative, neither school or work related.
Education
I will build in regular daily time for graduate school classes as well as my 2012 reading list.
MARGIN
In 2012 I hope to grow in my practice of margin with time and finances. In order to maintain margin, I plan to practice a true weekly sabbath, with no school or work allowed. I will also take two weeks of vacation. Financially, this means reestablishing, and sticking to a strict budget and creating an emergency account.
RISK
The last few years of my life have been about survival and recovery. This year I hope grow beyond that into Risk. A mentor of mine defined me as a strange mix of adventurous and risk averse. It’s sad but true. Here’s a few risks I want to conquer this year.
Vocation
In the next few months, I have plans to take concrete steps toward a new vocation. I currently have a comfortable job and a predictable way of life. This will be quite the risk.
New Blog
I’m experimenting with at least one new blog, seeing if I can focus my content into something that will get more attention and maybe even produce some revenue.
Relationships
I’ve “taken myself off the market” for the last few months for personal reasons. However, I want to take more risks this year when it comes to romantic relationships. This means having awkward conversations I’ve avoided, seeking out new ways of meeting people, and being more honest than I might usually be.
Fitness
I want to conquer something physical as well. I’m not sure of details yet, but I’m thinking it will either be a Century (100 mile ride) or a half marathon.
How I’m Tracking My Goals
Perhaps the biggest reason we don’t achieve our goals is that we’ve never stated them. The second is that we don’t try to track them. I’ve spent some time over the last few days creating quite the spreadsheet, listing each thing that I want to do weekly and monthly. I hope to end my day everyday by visiting this spreadsheet, and having cool graphs showing how I’ve succeeded.
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