Goal Setting and Consistency

Well, I’ve completely failed over the last two months to maintain any consistency with making blog posts. I also did not reach my goal of learning a new language by the end of the year. With that in mind, and the recent new year, this post is going to be about settings goals for 2015. I’m going to follow the structure of my coworker’s blog post on the same topic as it was simple, measurable, and insightful. If you’d like Greg’s post, you can find it here.

The following is grabbed directly from his post, but I found they were very good definitions:

Goal – Something I want to accomplish that is measurable and relatively continual. eg. exercise X times per week or decrease sugar consumption by X percent. These are often habits I want to build into my life an my hope is that by doing it for a year, it will stick.

 

Theme – A central topic for the year – something I can spend time thinking about and take a few concrete efforts towards. eg. build community or rethink what health means. These are often abstract ideas that are hard to measure but important to spend time focusing on.

 

Challenge – Something I want to conquer. Crossing an item off my bucket list. eg. climb Mr. Everest or learn to tight rope walk. These are binary, I either complete them or I don’t.

2015 Goal: Become Fluent in 2 More Languages

I’ve been very poor so far at working on this consistently, so I’m going to be coming up with a plan on covering my progress towards this goal here. I’ll try to provide as much info as I can with regards to any tips I learn along the way.

Since I want this to be measurable, I’ll define “Fluency” as the ability to read a news article, out loud, in the languages that I am learning. I also want to avoid losing these languages (or any of those that I am currently fluent in), so I will further stiffen this requirement by requiring that this be done once per week, for every week of the year once I feel I’ve learned these languages, and I’m going to also add French to this as well since I already consider myself fluent in French.

The two languages that I am going to learn are German and Swedish. Similar to my previous post on multilingualism, I will be using Duolingo to learn these languages with their mobile app and web application. If you’d like to challenge yourself (and me), you can sign up here and follow my progress here.

2015 Theme: Budgeting & Saving

The one thing that I haven’t done much of yet, but that is probably going to bite me hard later in life if I don’t do it. While I’ve been fairly responsible with my spending in the sense that I am not living outside my means, I also haven’t been paying much attention to how much I’ve been spending. If I was to be much clearer and proactive with my spending, I could probably save a significant amount more money, and feel much less guilty about spending money on fun activities.

I’m going to be following some advice by another coworker, Chase Seibert, with regards to budgeting. You can find his blog post on the matter here.

I’ll begin by using Mint.com to track my expenses (which are probably much higher that I imagine them to be), and by figuring out what my net weekly pay breakdown needs to be. Once I’ve got that set up, I will be looking into open multiple accounts so that I can separate my expenses, and thus track and budget for them.

2015 Challenge: Complete a Tough Mudder

I tried to do this last year, but due to some scheduling and transportation issues, I was unable to attend. Even if I had though, I doubt I would have been in good enough shape to do very well. The Tough Mudder site lists the average completion time at just over 3 hours, so I’m going to set my goal to be under 3 hours. That being said, the primary purpose of this challenge is to complete it in the first place. I’m going to continue with my CrossFit and add in some extra running so that I can get myself in shape to do well for a race.

If you’d like to join me for the race, once I’ve decided which race I’m going to compete in, I will make a post here and provide information with how you can sign up and join me.