Ben Roy

Looking over the front page of the blog, it's pretty easy to see that I didn't make all of my resolutions from last year. But that's ok, I'll do better this year.

I realize it's maybe a little late for this, being the third week of January, but I just got back from the annual Marketer's Cruise and was cramming on a project before I left.

My 2010 New Year's Resolutions:

- Swim 25 miles
- Run 100 miles (Easy for you, huge for me. So not a runner.)
- Bike 300 miles
- 1000 pull-ups
- 12,000 push-ups
- Make at least 50 blog posts
- Add $10,000/mo of (ideally passive) income

How'd I do?

- Swam a pitiful amount
- Ran 100 miles (barely)
- Didn't take my bike out all year (lol)
- 1000 pull-ups
- 12,000 pullups
- Made about 20 blog posts
- Added about $10k in new income, mostly pretty passive

So that's 4 "YES" and 3 "NO". Could be worse, right? My excuse is my 6-month old, whom I love dearly but complicated my summer and the rest of the year somewhat. The schedule got awfully busy for awhile there. I also did significantly more traveling this year than previously, which makes it harder for me to stick with things that are normally part of my routine.

I should reflect on my goals and come up with a couple lessons.

First, it was reinforced how great measurable goals are. It gives me something to track against. It let's me feel progress. It keeps me focused on what I'm trying to do. Maybe in the future I'll go for softer things like I see other people doing (go with my gut more), but for now I'll stay with goals that I can definitely achieve (or fail to achieve).

Also, I find it immensely useful to set yearly goals instead of daily, weekly, or monthly goals. This adds some elasticity that is sorely needed when you're entire year doesn't follow a predictable schedule. I also find it easier to measure success. If I say I'm going to do something weekly, and I miss one week, did I fail? I'm not sure. By tracking yearly, I just make up that week later and I know right where I am.

I think I got a little too aggressive with ramping up goals this year. I added 4 new fitness goals, and three of them were an entirely new category (aerobic) and required a significant amount of time. I could probably predicted exactly what happened - I had to choose one to be successful with. In the future, competing goals would probably be better off added in slowly.

One more big contributor to success (and I suppose to failure as well) was the formation of habit. Especially on the fitness goals I met I was very good at whittling them down every day. When I think about the blog goal, which felt wholly achievable, I think a lack of any plan or schedule for making it happen was a definite detractor. I'll look towards that in the future.

Overall, I felt like it was a good year despite the misses. The goals that were most important to me were achieved, and I'm looking forward to an even better year in 2011.