2008 Goal Progress Update

Date Published: 04 April 2008

2008 Goal Progress Update

If you just read my blog for technical stuff, you can skip this one.

So at the start of the year I set a few personal goals. Since the best way to achieve goals, I’ve found, is to break them down into smaller and smaller pieces (as in “The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step”), I thought I would assess my progress on the five goals I set for myself.

Goal 1 – 200 Blog Posts in 2008. That breaks down nicely into 50 per quarter, and in the first quarter I published 52 posts, just barely on track. February was pretty light with only 9. I’m sure if it had had 30 days in it I could have written a lot more posts. Of course, if it had had only 28 days, I might not have had nearly as many… We’ll call this one 25% complete.

Goal 2 – Lose 17 pounds. So far I’ve lost 10 pounds. That’s pretty good, and definitely on track, although I’m still hovering around where I was for most of 2007 (I basically lost what I gained over the holidays and maybe a tiny bit more). So, it’s definitely good but I know the next jump will be harder. And then keeping that all off as of 1 January 2009 will be hard. But I’m on track. This goal is about 58% complete.

Goal 3 – Write a Silverlight book. Progress has been slow. I have two chapters due this month and the whole thing should be turned in for the first draft by mid-June. So I need to make a lot of progress this quarter. If I do another update around the start of July, this goal should (had better be) close to complete. Right now it’s probably only around 5%.

Goal 4 – Get a puppy. Done! We got an English Mastiff puppy named Odin in January. He was about 8 weeks old when he came home and around 20-25 pounds. Now he’s about 4 months old and 60 pounds. It’s amazing how fast these guys grow. This was the easiest of my goals to achieve, and is now 100% done.

Goal 5 – Achieve next belt in karate. I’ve been practicing regularly, which probably has helped with Goal #2. I don’t expect to test for my next belt until Fall, but I think I’m on track, so we’ll say this one is 25% done at this point.

If nothing else, putting these out for public consumption helps motivate me to work toward them, since now if I don’t achieve them, the whole world knows about it. My apologies to those of you who simply don’t care. Why did you keep reading this far?

Steve Smith

About Ardalis

Software Architect

Steve is an experienced software architect and trainer, focusing on code quality and Domain-Driven Design with .NET.