For the last couple weeks of the year I’m going to post a few wrap-ups to summarize how I did on hitting personal goals from the beginning of the year. At the beginning I laid out a number of attainable but aggressive targets for myself, having never really done this before in any trackable way. I’ve never been an extremely goal-oriented person, so I thought I’d experiment to see what sort of mental impact this could have and how it helps the habit-forming process.

I’ll briefly run through the targets I set up, with a status on my performance. Let’s see how I did…

Health

• ✅ Run 500 miles — I wasn’t sure how this one would go down. It seemed like an aggressive number as I went through the first couple of months trying to stay the course, but I ended up way over the mark.
• 🚫 Eat better — I would say I didn’t do enough here to call it success. Life and other things got in the way of focusing on this very much. It’ll be on the shortlist for the 2020 mission.
• ✅ Meditate 10 minutes per day, 5 days per week — Hit this one, but it took some effort to force it every day (there are a few days left this year, but I should be able to stay the course). Next year I intend to iterate on this a bit and approach it differently.

Reading, Learning, and Writing

• ✅ Read 50 books — On track to finish 52, possibly 53. Wasn’t too challenging, surprisingly (I like reading anyway, a lot). Looking forward to a couple of “best of” posts on my favorites. I’ve learned a ton, not only from the books, but also about the kinds of things I prefer and new subjects I’ve found interest in.
• 🚫 Learn and do some work with R — Didn’t get much time on this one this year. I tinkered around some earlier in the year, but might have more time in the professional context to explore this in 2020.
• 🚫 Get better with SQL — Same as above. We’re working on some things in Fulcrum that could flex this muscle some more.
• ✅ Keep working on cartography and keeping up with open source geo — Spent a good amount of time in the late winter and mid-summer on QGIS stuff. I’m satisfied with the time spent here. I still have a cartography project in progress I’d like to keep pushing on.

Professional

• ✅ Go big with Fulcrum Community — We made a lot of progress here this year. I’m happy with it. We’ve also learned some things that’ll adapt the course going forward to some even more exciting places.
• 🤷🏽‍♂️ Launch two new products — I’ll call this one a wash since we changed course intentionally midway through the year on one of them. Half success.
• ✅ Improve our product narratives all around — Definite success. Even more progress and success in store in first half of 2020.

Other

• 🚫 Take the kids on a trip — Didn’t do anything spectacular here. Not mad about it. We had plenty of fun and plenty of other things to do.
• ✅ Buy a new house — Success! Super happy with the new location.

I’ll dig in on some of these in detail in the coming weeks. All told, a successful year. Tracking and measuring the numbers, it turns out, is a pretty big motivator for me.