4 Mar 2010

Step 1: The Yearly Review

If I'm gonna do this I know I need to be organised. The first step was inspired from a post made by Chris Guillebeau over at The Art of NonConformity. In it he advises giving yourself a year end review, just life any business would do. What did you achieve this year, and what will you change for next year etc etc.

What i really liked was the idea of an excell spreadsheet to keep track of all these things. Chris even provides a link to his sample spreadsheet. I took that and ran with it, spending a full day coming up with new pages to add, new plans, new goals and new ways of tracking my progress. I added a page to keep track of each of my major goals and the lessons learned therein, as well as a page for the major mistakes i'll make (and learn from!!) during the year. I'll give a quick breakdown of whats on my sheet for 2010.

Major Goals:

Italian - fluent in 6 months (Hoping for much sooner - living in italy now!)

Fencing - Use access to italian coaching to achieve some pre decided results at certain competitions.

Piano - To play Claire de Lune by September and be Grade 6 by years end

Habit Forming - Idea stolen from Zen Habits . Craft a new beneficial habit each month

Health - Improve diet and conditioning, and make a visible physical leap in fitness ( ie get ripped)

These are followed by a whole load of more minor goals such as reading 40 books this year (9 already), redefining my finances, give myself as many early dealines as possible and apply Pareto's 80/20 principle to everything in sight.

Each of the major goals has a series of short, medium and long term goals or steps i can follow im order to achieve what i want. I made it all nice and simple :)
I added to the metrics page as well, to keep track of how often i was going to the gym, fencing training and piano practice too, just to keep myself on my toes.

I'll be doing weekly reviews of my progress every sunday, which should take ten minutes or less. I really do want to change my life in 2010. I've said this in years past but now that i'm organised, and i can see the baby steps laid out before me, things are looking brighter. Now i just have to follow though on it- how hard can it be?

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