Sean’s Blog

 Here is an update on the goals as of Feb.  I’m kinda surprised by how difficult it is for me to read 50 books in a year.  Maybe I am a slower reader then I though.

So without any further ado here are my Goals as of February:

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It’s been one month, and I’ve made a little progress on my goals.  I’m going to try to update the goals monthly and make any changes that I need to.

So without any further ado here are my Goals as of January:

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Last April, I put up some goals after reading a post about goal setting.  It was kind of slapdash and haphazard and I really didn’t pay to much attention to it.  But it was really a beneficial exercise.  Every once in a while I would refer back to it and find something that I needed to do, but didn’t actually get around to and had slipped my mind.

So I’ve decided that I am going to make a fresh start.  Not resolutions, per say, but goals.  I’ve linked them here and will update them as I go along.

2008 Goals

Anybody that knows me or has been reading this blog knows that I’m a bit of a scatterbrain.  I have a million things that I would like to do, but for some reason I never seem to get around to finishing them.  This has been the case for as loong as I can remember.  At school I would forget or push off projects until I had no time left and then have to rush through them, not doing as good a job as I knew I was capable of.  In my professional life, I’ve been better about it, but I still feel like I am hanging on by my fingernails.

I’ve tried various methods and tools before.  I’ve used calendars and day planners haphazardly, been the proud owner of 2 different PDAs that spent a couple months gathering dust before being sold off, and most recently I’ve been walking around with enough marked up paper todo lists to make the Sierra Club weep. What I’ve come to realize is that I need a system, not just a tool to get myself together.

I had heard about David Allen and Getting Things Done for a while, but it was finally when I read a review by Trent over at The Simple Dollar that I decided that this might be something I want to look into.  So I picked up a copy and decided to give it a shot.  And being a child of the Web 2.0, i decided that I’ll blog about it as I’m learning so any GTD blackbelts can offer tips or pointers and other people can have some idea what the system is (or just laugh at my attempts to get organized :)  )

What I plan to do over the next couple of weeks is blog Getting Things Done chapter by chapter and let you know how I’m applying it and how it is working out.  Tomorrow, chapter 1

So one of my goals was the nebulous “Take more pictures“. That is all well and good, but I think I need something more tangible, so i am going to start posting my week in photos. The are just going to be photos that I have taken that week. They are going to have absolutely no documentation purpose, other then to hopefully document my growth as a photographer. So without further ado here is the current week in photos:

This week in photos at Flickr - 04/27/2007

So it has been 11 weeks since I quit smoking. Not too shabby. While it has not been all champagne and roses, I feel that it has gone pretty well. I also learned several things that i feel can be applied to more then just quitting smoking. Several things I learned:

• Smoking is expensive. I always knew it, but never had any sort of tangible evidence. But in 11 weeks, it breaks out like this: I smoked a pack a day. I bought cartoons for about $38.00. A carton lasted on average 10 days. So over the 11 weeks (77 days), I saved (( 7 * $38) + (.7 * $38) = $292.20! And that is just over 11 weeks. That’s around $1300 a year.
• Messing up on is not a reason to give up. The last couple times I tried to quit and failed, I would go cold turkey and when I slipped up, I would just go back to smoking. This time when I messed up, I just got on with it. I would have a cigarette, and not let it ruin what I had accomplished. This, I think is something important to take away since it can apply to alot in life. Instead of getting discouraged by missteps, just keep at it since nothing ever goes perfectly the first time though.
• Boredom is the enemy. Aside from getting angry (which is surprisingly easy when you are going through nicotine withdrawal), being bored made me want to smoke. Idle hands and what not …
• Don’t try to change everything at once. Maybe this works for some people, but changing too many things at once for me just gets a bit overwhelming and makes the whole thing come crashing down.

I read an interesting piece about goal setting yesterday on Get Rich Slowly about completing 101 goals in 1001 days. I didn’t really like the 2 1/2 year time frame with some of the changes I have going on in the somewhat near future. But I did like the idea of setting the goals, so I thought I’d give it a shot in a smaller scale.

Since this is something I’d like to keep tabs on, I’m going to create a new page for it so I can update it as I go. I’ll update the page as well as post about how I meet them as well.

So here is the link to the goals page.  They are in no particular order and are pretty much all over the place, from classic books I’ve meant to read, to paying down my student loans.