2018 in Review Part I

Since December arrived, I’ve been reflecting on 2018. I think that it was one of the best years we’ve had since my wife and I were married 18 years ago.

I began 2018 by writing out some goals for the year. I had good momentum with my weight loss, so I wanted to keep that going. Reading is just a good thing to do and I wanted to make sure that I kept it up. There were other things that I wanted to do, but didn’t know what level I could achieve, so I just made stuff up.

Right now, it looks like most of my goals will be met in some way, and a few of them will have been vastly exceeded. I wrote some as proper SMART goals, but not all of them. I achieved the SMART goals more easily than the non-SMART goals*. Instead of rambling on, let me share my 2018 goals and the results.

Fitness & Wellness

I had two fitness and wellness goals. The first was to get below 170lbs by the end of the year, and the other was to build muscle. I recorded myself at 180.2 lbs on Jan 1, 2018.

This goal had some momentum. I’d been working for a couple of years to lose weight. I’m not sure exactly when I began, but at my highest, I was 225 lbs. I aggressively lost weight in 2017 and was doing well. When formulating my 2018 goal I wanted to make sure I was putting good practices into place to keep the weight off. That was why I chose 10 pounds to lose.

This was the most successful goal. As of the last week of December, I’m hovering around 158 pounds, having lost more than double my goal. I’m very happy about this one.

My other health and wellness goal was to build muscle. That one was not a SMART goal as I wasn’t sure how I would measure it. In the end, I didn’t do any kind of measurements, baseline or otherwise. Anecdotally, I can tell that I increased muscle tone and definition from doing push-ups and squats. This will become a primary wellness goal in 2019. I’ll make sure to research this week how to get some good baseline measurements in order to track my progress.

Reading

Reading is an important part of keeping informed and keeping my mind sharp. The fact that I love reading helps. My 2018 goal was to read at least 12 books (1/month), and that at least 5 of them had to be non-fiction. I started tracking for the first two months, but when I had 6 non-fiction books read by mid-February, I knew that it wouldn’t be a problem to achieve this goal and that I grossly underestimated the number of books I could read in a year. I’m not a fast reader, but clearly, I’m faster than I think. Two of my favorite books that I read this year were The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley, and Crush It!, by Gary Vaynerchuk.

Professional/work

My work goal was to finish my training by the end of March so that I would qualify for the incentive bonus at the end of Q2. I was able to do this, with an aggressive training plan that I shared with my boss, who approved. I not only qualified for the Q2 bonus, but I squeaked in enough to qualify at the end of Q1 as well.

Home

We wanted to complete several home projects, so I made some of them into goals for 2018. I itemized them and created a timeline for completion. The projects included: fix the garage door, repair fascia, repair the driveway, paint the garage, get my truck running and get rid of the scrap metal. Most of them didn’t get finished in the timeline that I laid out. This was where goal #3 came in direct conflict with goal #4. I was happy that all of them did get finished, as they had to in order for us to put the house up for sale.

That’s the first half of my goals. To make the post shorter, I’ve made this into a two-part entry. Stay tuned tomorrow for part II.

SMART goals is a system of creating better goals. It is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. You can read more about SMART goals here.

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