Each month I review my progress (or lack of!) towards my personal goals for 2014. You can see my full goal list in this post here – Goal Setting For 2014 And Creating My Decision Making Framework. The monthly review will look at my key learnings for the month and each quarter I write a full review of my progress.
As we are already three months through the year this is my first quarterly review. I have spend significant time reflecting how everything went this quarter and I am not happy with all of it. At the end of the post you can read what I am going to do to change it.
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Work – Place boundaries on my work hours
- Limit my average work week to 30 hours. – Utterly failed! Disappointed with how my I went with this goal and was working significantly more than 30 hours up until last week. A major project I was working on took up much more time than anticipated. With the bulk of the work completed for this now, I feel I am on track to achieve this goal.
- Undertake no work activities before the kids go to school. Achieved! For various reasons, which I will talk about in another post, I have more time in the mornings so am using that to get a jump start on family activities while chatting with the younger kids.
- Undertake no work activities after the kids come home from school until the younger ones are settled in bed. Achieved! While I have overall worked more hours than what I would have liked this quarter, I am pleased with my prioritisation of family and work tasks.
Family – Increase family harmony
- Quarter one only – have the key focus of settling the kids into the new school year. Achieved! Having this one main focus for the quarter was incredibly helpful. It made decision making on where I spend my time. This did mean with more work than planned and keeping up this focus, that I didn’t sleep and relax as much as I needed to.
- Maintain a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative comments (lead by example). Inconsistent achievement. There was a direct correlation between lack of sleep and failing to meet this ratio. I am going to be having this goal as my lead goal for quarter two 2014.
- Conduct monthly family meetings. Achieved. We have been having great discussions about contentious issues at the family meetings. In one earlier this year we creating a family contribution schedule as a new way of managing household tasks amongst all members of the family.
- Eat out together on a quarterly basis. Achieved.
Health and fitness – Test myself
- Run another marathon. Am in training for this. Have had issues with ITBs but am hoping the worst is over with that.
- Run an obstacle course. Not this quarter.
- Compete at a local CrossFit competition. Not this quarter, but I did participate in the CrossFit Open and exceeded my own expectations which was great.
- Maintain a whole food approach to my diet. Achieved. This is still a work in progress as I tweak and alter what I eat to ensure it keeps me not only healthy but able to perform at my desired intesnsity.
Local community – Increase my participation in the local community
- Undertake the role of class co-ordinator for the prep child’s class. Achieved. This is the first time I have been a class co-ordinator and I am enjoying it so far.
- Volunteer for canteen duty at the kids’ secondary school. I handed in my form too late, so did not make it onto the roster. I think this was a sign, so will leave it at for this year.
- Allocate a speaking session a quarter to local community groups. I have made the difficult decision to not do this for the rest of the year. While I do love getting out to meet local groups, preparing the presentation, practising it and then attended the allocated session time to present at the group takes up significant time. This year is a about setting up sustainable work flow for me and with a hectic start to 2014 I need more time to set myself a solid base.
- Find a local community group to partner with for the blog annual fundraising event. I have not worked on this as yet. I am planning to do something much less time intensive than I have undertaken over the last couple of years, for the same reasons outlined above.
Learning – Find new sources of information to grow my knowledge
- Attend four workshops/conferences/seminars over 2014. I have conferences to attend in Aug and Sept. On the look at out still for others too.
- Listen to one podcast a month. Achieved. I have really enjoyed listening to podcasts regularly again. You can see highlights of what I have been listening to in these posts.
Fun – Increase the time I spend with those I love
- Organise a night out a month with the husband. Failed and must work more on this next quarter.
- Organise a monthly get together with girlfriends. Achieved.
- Organise a monthly get together with my sisters.Inconsistently achieved. This has proved harder than I thought to find times for us to get together. It is worth the effort though as I love spending time with them.
Changing my modus operandi
Quarter one was much busier than I anticipated, but having one core goal for the quarter worked brilliantly in prioritising some of my activities. Having this key focus also showed me quite quickly that my goal list is too long.
I am revisiting Rushing Woman’s Syndrome by Dr Libby Weaver and realise now that the long goal list stems very much from me not wanting to let people down.
I will keep my commitments or take on tasks so that I don’t have to say no to others or feel like I am disappointing them. I will still meet up with a friend even though I am tired and I could use those hours to rest.
I have always tried to support and help others however I can with this blog. I will accept speaking engagements for local community groups free of charge because I really want to help them. I will help other small businesses promote their products or services. But it comes as additional workload to me as my paid work still needs to be completed. End result is a more rushed me.
I have made baby steps towards changing my modus operandi. I am taking better control of where I spend my time whether it is in a paid or unpaid capacity. Observing my pattern of behaviour over the quarter made me realise the net result of my rushing around is less family harmony. If I was to choose only one of the above sets of goals to work towards it would be to increase family harmony – this is the one that means the most to me.
So I am going to be continuing my journey of changing my modus operandi. I cannot say that I am finding making these changes easy, because I am finding it quite hard. It makes me think the above quote Jim Whittaker, American mountaineer and CEO is even more applicable to myelf.
“You can never conquer the mountain. You can only conquer yourself.”
I need to conquer my busyness. My family’s harmony and my health have to take priority. I think the more change I make the easier it will come – I am hoping so anyway!
I will keep the 2014 goal list as is, but I will most likely continue to prune it as I narrow my focus and resultant workload, to something which is more manageable, allowing for greater family harmony and for me to take time to rest and breath.
I would love to hear how you are traveling with your goals this year. What have you learnt about your goals for 2014?