Josh Sherman
For the last 3 years, around the week of Thanksgiving, I have put pen to paper to list out a series of goals for myself. Some health and some wealth. Not always business related, so there’s family goals and personal growth and creativity stuff in the mix as well.
That said, I’d say that I fail to accomplish most of the things I set out to do on an annual basis.
Yadda yadda, you gotta fail to succeed. Waking up at 4am is why the early bird gets the 4-hour work week, etc etc.
This isn’t a bad thing, nor is this post a way to garner sympathy for the 3 people that read my blog for something other than VPS reviews or figuring out how to capitalize the first letter of a string in JavaScript.
The thing is, I love having goals, but when it gets right down to it, the most important things that I am accomplishing year over year are establishing better habits.
Some great habits that have come out of the last few years of trying to land on the moon include:
- Reading from a book every single day - over 1,000 days this far.
- Working out, even if not working up a sweat, every single day - nearly 700 days.
- Writing on both my personal blog as well as Alligator.io, every single week - 352 and 70 weeks respectively.
- Tracking my habits, good and bad, so I have a record of things to be able to track improvements against - over 3 years of data thus far.
Sure, I have yet to hit my annual goal of reading 60 books. I did read and listen to over 70 books one year, but I really want to read 60 books. But considering I’ve read well over 50 books this year, these habits are paying off.
With all of that, I’m fearful that not setting any goals could have some damaging effects by not being able to ask myself things like “will this decision positively impact my goal?”
As to not seem aimless, this coming year of twenty thousand and twenty is going to be my “year of consistency” by improving the consistency of some of the habits I’ve already fought long and hard to establish.
For some folks, this all probably sounds terribly regimented and that I’ve lost any and all spontaneity in my life.
Sure, maybe. But hey, live your own truth, Richard Branson, live your own truth.
Without further ado, here’s what I’m setting out to accomplish in 2020:
- Continuing what has become my weekend tradition of spending time with my daughter, without moms around. Thus far it’s always been running errands and grabbing breakfast, but ideally I’d like to be partaking in less capitalism and engaging in more experiences.
- Improving consistency on my 2019 goal to not work on the weekends. It took ~9 months before I finally started to take that one seriously. Now that I have, it’s starting to feel like it could become the new normal. Also, binge playing Diablo 3 with the wife has helped a ton to keep me off the weekend hustle.
- Improving my wake up time. I don’t necessarily have an exact time picked out yet, but my current wake up time has roughly a 2 hour window, and I think improving that will ultimately improve my productivity overall.
- And finally, running at least 2 growth hacking tests per month on my side projects. I mean, I had to have something business related in there, didn’t I?
Not a whole heck of a lot, but as mentioned, this is in addition to the habits I’ve already formed. I plan to continue reading daily, maybe finally hitting that lofty goal of 60 books read. Working out, doing daily life tracking, none of that is going anywhere.
