In 2014 I will- goal setting

Half yearly review 2014

Each month I review my progress (or lack of!) towards my personal goals for 2014. You can see my goal list in this post here – Goal Setting For 2014 And Creating My Decision Making Framework. This half yearly review looks at the highlights and lowlights so far in 2014.

Work – Place boundaries on my work hours

  • Limit my average work week to 30 hours. – I have achieved this. Sometimes it makes me feel a little stressed as I have things I would like to have completed before the end of the day, but I am no longer seeing the end of my day as indefinite. I am prioritising my sleep and this means I need to let some things go. To that end I have made some decisions for this year like not taking on any more speaking gigs, limiting time on social media, creating brief standard email responses and hiring a virtual assistant.
  • Undertake no work activities before the kids go to school. – Mornings are much quieter this year and I use this time to get the house organised and make sure the kids and I leave the house calmly and on time. I actually really like not being inundated my new messages etc first thing in the morning. It lets me stick to my to do list for the day and not be distracted by seemingly important new stuff.
  • Undertake no work activities after the kids come home from school until the younger ones are settled in bed. – I have met this with the exception of one afternoon when the kid’s have after school activities and I will work will they are at them.

Family – Increase family harmony

  • Quarter one only – have the key focus of settling the kids into the new school year. – I am glad I had this as a key focus as we had lots of changes and it did take the full term for everything to settle down.
  • Maintain a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative comments (lead by example). – Probably only hitting this 50% of the time. Much work still needed on my behalf.
  • Conduct monthly family meetings. – These have been going really well with the kids raising some sensible and significant issues.
  • Eat out together on a quarterly basis. – Yes! And I am really enjoying this. We are mixing up the places and times we go and it is much easier to take the kids all out now with the ages they are (although I have to check with the 15 year old to see if he is free!)

Health and fitness – Test myself

  • Run another marathon. – I ran the Great Ocean Road Marathon in May. While I came in at the time I thought I would, it wasn’t my best run. I went out way to fast for the first half which is incredibly hilly and my legs were so tired for the last half. Rookie mistake for a hilly marathon! Have put it down to a learning experience.
  • Run an obstacle course. – Haven’t found one to fit in with the family schedule as yet.
  • Compete at a local CrossFit competition. – I have registered for one in August. Every time I think about it, I feel a bit nauseous!
  • Maintain a whole food approach to my diet. – Really happy with the way this is going. I have taken on advice from the lovely Katie 180 which you can see here and I am currently undertaking the RESET challenge with the CrossFit Gym. This means sticking with my whole food approach, greater emphasis on organic, free range and grass fed, eliminating sweeteners and protein powder and a few other small changes. I am one week into it and am enjoying it as it has given me boost to mix up what I have been eating and vary my foods more.

Local community – Increase my participation in the local community

  • Undertake the role of class co-ordinator for the prep child’s class. – I am enjoying doing this role. It isn’t a huge role, but it has been a great step back into getting more involved.
  • Volunteer for canteen duty at the kids’ secondary school. – As noted earlier, I missed the boat on this one, so will try next year.
  • Allocate a speaking session a quarter to local community groups. – I made the decision to pull back on this to ensure I could achieve my family harmony goal.
  • Find a local community group to partner with for the blog annual fundraising event. – I have also altered my fundraising initiative this year so it is not as time intensive. I will write more about this soon.

Learning – Find new sources of information to grow my knowledge

  • Attend four workshops/conferences/seminars over 2014. – I was lucky enough to go to Denver for a conference in May and have another couple coming up in the next few months. I really would like to find one on blog photography/styling to undertake before the end of the year.
  • Listen to one podcast a month. – I have been listening to quite a few podcasts and am enjoying getting back into them. You can see some of the ones I have listened to here.

Fun – Increase the time I spend with those I love

  • Organise a night out a month with the husband. – It would be more like once every two months, so more work required here.
  • Organise a monthly get together with girlfriends. – Probably about an 80% success rate here.
  • Organise a monthly get together with my sisters. – This has been trickier than I thought. Trying to find times when all three of us can get there. I need to work more on this too.

Overall I am pretty happy with how the first half of the year has passed. As noted previously, the goal list was probably a little long and I will change that for 2015.

Have are you tracking with your goals for 2014?