Goals Update
Well, time to do a re-cap on my progress for my goals and challenges for the year. This is the first one so far, and I’m sad to report that only one of the three has been progressing fairly well. I’ll go through them one at a time, and point out some of my mistakes in my approaches so far that might help improve my efforts going forward.
Firstly is my language goal. Using Duolingo, I managed to catch up to the point I had previously been for my German in about a week, and have since been moving ahead on learning more. I have also spent some time with French in order to brush up on my French. Unsuprisingly, I am still a long ways from being able to read an article in German comfortably, but it has only been 2 weeks. I think I’ve been doing a good job with this goal. I’ve been strengthening or learning German almost everyday since I’ve started the challenge.
Next is my budgeting goal. While I did go ahead and create a budget on Mint.com, and used data from previous months in order to try and gauge reasonable values from month to month, I’ve been noticing that my totals have been very optimistic this month. I will have to re-assess some budget values for next month and be a little more concious with my purchases. I think part of the issue this month that resulted in slightly higher spending then normal (not that my budgets were set at reasonably expected values) is that I figured that since I had a budget, and had allocated funds in a way that I had deemed reasonable, that all of a sudden everything else would fall into place. This has not been the case, and going forward, I need to focus on my spending totals a little more closely.
In a turn that surprised me, I haven’t been to the gym nearly as often as I expected recently. Last week, that was primarily due to some soreness in my shoulders (I received 5 vaccines on the Monday) and didn’t feel comfortable going to the gym when I wasn’t 100%. This week, I’ve been very busy, but this isn’t a reasonable excuse. I need to be taking care of my body and my health, and while it is sometimes necessary to put in a lot of time to get stuff done, I need to remember that it can’t be done repeatedly or for long periods at the expense having time to myself.
All in all, so far I am 1 for 3 on keeping up with my goals. Time to get back on track - I don’t need to be fantastic at all of them right away, but I do need to be working on them.
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Patrick Cockwell | An Uncommon Approach To Life
My thoughts and experiences as a young adult in San Francisco
