Submitted by Damien on
I didn't work out any goals for 2012, but I am going to for 2013 - we have a third child on the way and many things need to be done prior to that.
My overall goals for 2013 are:
- Improve my health.
- Become more productive.
- Do more with my family.
- Be happier.
Breaking these broad goals down into smaller pieces, I have the following more specific goals:
- Exercise at least three times per week - five times would be better, but I'd be happy with three to start with; we have a family membership to the YMCA that is only a mile away from our house, along with multiple exercise routines on DVD, so I have no excuse not to do this.
- Improve my diet by stopping eating high carb / calorie snacks at night, focus instead on more filling & nutritious foods, and get out of the instinct that I can randomly munch on things when I'm hungry rather than having a discrete snack.
- Drink more water, less tea.
- As a result of the above, fit my size 38 pants better by the summer, rather than feel like I should be looking to "upgrade" to size 40's. I'd really like to fit my size 36's again, but making the 38's fit correctly again would be a good start.
- Be in bed by 11pm every night - critical work-related or critical family-related things may bump this, but seriously aim to avoid being up past 11 when there's no good reason to.
- Reduce "wasteful" social networking, mainly Facebook and Twitter; with Facebook I've added far too many people that I can interact with via other means, thus creating duplicate content I feel a (albeit mild) compulsion to keep up with on, with Twitter I've a tendency to get into many conversations that I don't need to. Both of these lead to reduce productivity thus less family time. The first task for this is to reduce the number of Facebook contacts I have, the second task is to stop checking Twitter so often (will take some time to break the habit).
- Learn how to do minor maintenance on our car; I was able to change the brakes on our previous car, I can learn how to do the same with our current one, especially now that I picked up a repair manual for it. The first specific task for this will be to change the low-beam lights as one of them stopped working over the holidays.
- Have our (current) two children help more with "thing" maintenance, including the car and DIY tasks around the house - it'll mean spending more time with them and they'll learn how to do lots of day-to-day things.
- Stop whining & holding onto grudges, learn to let go.
- Blog more, tweet less.
It's going to be a busy six months until our third child is born, but I'm determined to become a better person, husband and father by then.