Well, here we are. The end of 2023. This was a very difficult year. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of good things that happened too. But there was a lot of death in my family and it was overall very, very hard.
I also struggled a lot with my health. At the beginning of the year, I set three goals:
- Lose (and keep off) 15lbs by the end of the year (be under 197lbs).
- Do a workout to help my back twice a week and do some stretches for my back every day.
- Sleep 7 hours or more per night.
To track everything, I put together a fancy checklist in an attempt to make it as easy for myself as possible.
By March, I knew that everything was falling apart on me. I was failing to use the checklist, and was not eating very well. I don't think I was consistently exercising either. So by the end of April, I thought I would attempt monthly goals instead. Once again, every one that I set I failed. And that was even before September, when everything fell apart after I lost someone close to me. From that point on, I haven't set any other goals for the year; I just needed to get through the super rough beginning of things as I learn to live with my grief.
While I didn't set any more goals for myself for the year, I have been thinking a lot, on and off, about goals and goal setting. I even started reading Measure What Matters by John Doerr to learn more about goal setting. While I admittedly haven't finished the book (and so far the book has been dealing with business goal setting, rather than personal), I like his Objective and Key Results (OKR) philosophy and want to give it a try. The only other goal setting philosophy I'd come across was setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound), which is what I have attempted to use when setting goals here on this blog over the last several years. While I think I have set better goals as time has gone on, I have consistently failed to meet them year after year.
I think this is a multi-part problem:
- The first issue, which I identified back in March, was that many of my goals have had two large of a time frame. A lot can happen over the course of a year that can derail a goal set in January.
- Another issue is the way I am measuring the goals I am setting. I keep trying to build healthy habits, so I am constantly trying to measure the amount of times I am doing something over the course of the year. So whenever life derails me in any way, I completely fail the goal (especially when it is doing something multiple times a month - the only goals I consistently succeeded on were the ones where I had to make new recipes through the year, say on a once a month basis)
- My tracking method has failed me. I did alright writing things down in a planner for awhile, but then I hit a point where I just stopped doing that (I don't even know why). In an attempt to make things easier, I made a checklist with all my goals, but I failed to use that too. I'm experimenting with tracking stuff on apps, but so far nothing has seemed to be what I'm really looking for. So I'm kind of back to tracking stuff on a planner, but that's not really ideal.
- I may also be going too big. For example, telling myself I'm going to do two workouts a week plus stretches daily in January when I'm not even consistently working out ONCE a week is a bit idealistic.
So I'm thinking I need to try something new. Make my time frame smaller. Work on a smaller, more easily measurable goal (and something that I can track a bit easier), and build on successes. This is what I was hoping to do when I started setting monthly goals partway through the year, but I just wasn't quite able to get there. Hopefully with the help of reading Measure What Matters, I'll be able to set some more achievable goals for 2024!
