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2013–2015 Goals Review/2016 Goals

18:16 Fri 01 Jan 2016. Updated: 23:21 01 Jan 2016
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I haven’t written about yearly goals since 2013. Time to revive the practice.


2013 Goals Review

My seven goals for 2013 were:

  • Finish a major creative work. No. Not close. This has been a difficult struggle.
  • Back squat twice my body weight. Not close. I stopped squatting regularly in 2013 and haven’t been close to 330 pounds again.
  • Run the third season of my roleplaying campaign. Done, in that I ran it; the “third season” is still ongoing (and has been fun).
  • Get paid for a piece of writing. No. Once again, I’m keeping this here in the hope that I’ll do something about it.
  • Recover and sustain my cardiovascular fitness. No. My fitness continued to decline in 2013.
  • Release eight small software projects. I definitely did not get eight done.
  • Read 50 or more books. Yes, 51. This is the only goal from 2013 that I definitively accomplished.

Obviously, 2013 was not a good year for achieving my goals. That’s partly why I decided not to publicly set goals for myself for 2014—although it doesn’t excuse my not having written a 2013 goals review post at the start of 2014.


2014 Goals Review

I didn’t have explicit goals for 2014, but I essentially carried these over:

  • Finish a major creative work. No. Not close. I tried NaNoWriMo, but it didn’t work at all, and the attempt burnt me out creatively on the project I tried.
  • Recover and sustain my cardiovascular fitness. Recover, yes; sustain, no. I got fitter near mid-2014, but then lost that again.
  • Read 50 or more books. Yes, 58. Again, the only one I definitively accomplished.

2014 wasn’t that great for achieving goals either, and again I decided not to set public goals for 2015.


2015 Goals Review

I had these in mind at the start of the year:

  • Read 80 or more books. Yes, 87. I set my sights higher after having had a good reading year in 2014, and got there. I want to write about my approach to reading in 2015, but that will be another post.
  • Recover and sustain my cardiovascular fitness. No. 2015 was another bad year for fitness.
  • Join 18F. This is cheating slightly, since I probably would not have listed this as a public goal at the start of 2015, but it was a goal from very early on. And I accomplished this one.
  • Do some wilderness travel. I probably did have this in mind early in the year, and I did get it done, going on a Utah road trip with Seth that involved some amazingly beautiful landscapes. I need to put some of the photos from that trip up on my blog.

Partly due to scaling back on the goals, but also because 2015 went a little better, I got more of them done—three out of four is a good outcome.

Good enough that I’m tempted back to the point of being overly ambitious.


2016 Goals

These are in an arbitrary order.

  • Read 90 books. I’m tempted to just aim at 100 here. The last couple of months have been excellent for reading, as I’ve managed to push time I usually spend either aimlessly surfing the internet or idly playing videogames over to reading. It’s not clear how sustainable that is, but 90 is a reasonable target one year after hitting 87. If I get close I’m going to start looking at the 100 mark as the end of 2016 approaches.
  • Run a Q’Rith mini-campaign. I’ve been meaning to do this for years. I have friends who have either never played roleplaying games or haven’t done so in a long time, and who are curious but also unable and/or unwilling to commit to playing in my regular game. So I want to run a short scenario for them so that they have some idea of what my game is like.

    This involves a lot of work, but I still want to do it. The plot for it has been in my head for at least two years.

  • Get paid for a piece of writing. I’m putting this here once again in the hope that I’ll actually do something about it. This is a difficult one , although really all I need to do is produce some good short fiction—something I’m still confident I can do[1]—resist the temptation to immediately publish it on this site, and then get myself to go through the work of submitting it to various places. Not trivial, but not ridiculously hard, either.
  • Make progress on a major creative work. Watered down from “finish a major creative work” at the start of 2013, but I’d settle for any progress at this point. But it has to be progress on a long-form work. I feel confident about my ability to write short pieces and the opposite when it comes to anything longer. Possibly the toughest goal here in that I don’t have a clear set of steps to follow for it.
  • Do at least one piece of public speaking. I’m confident that I can do this—the main problem here isn’t the speaking, or the preparation of the piece, but rather the work of finding a venue to speak at and finding something suitable I want to speak about at that venue..
  • Package and release my book tracking software. The code I’ve written to track my reading is extensive enough that I should make it easy for other people to use to generate their own mini-sites.
  • Convert tadhg.com from WordPress to a static site. This has been an ambition for years. Pelican is going to be the generator, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do about comments—a difficult problem.
  • Get back in shape. Yes, again. This time, I’m going to focus on two targets: 10 or more pullups and being able to fit into 32-inch pants again. Not the most scientific goals, but I trust myself not to lose the plot—I won’t try starvation to narrow my waistline, but will focus on functional capability and try to get there honestly.
  • Fix at least half of the long-term things that bug me about my apartment. There are a bunch of things here that require more than minor effort to deal with, and I’ve been letting them slide for years. I need to stop doing that.
  • Deal with all of the paperwork currently in overflow areas. I have a few areas that are meant to temporarily store paperwork that I’ve declined to handle. All of them are full, and some papers have been in them for years. I need to tackle all of that and get to a point where I stop accumulating that kind of thing, and instead deal with it as soon as it shows up.

As a bonus, I have an extra day this year to get all this stuff done… Good luck in whatever your 2016 goals are[2]!

[1] At least, I’m confident right now, distant in time from any requirement to actually come up with an idea or start writing.

[2] Assuming they’re not diametrically opposed to mine, or inimical to my principles, and so on.

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