by Nathan Stout (of AccordingToWhim.com)
Goals are important. Setting goals are fairly easy and give you an overall view of what you want (whether is for the upcoming year or goals for one day of your week). I like goals. Chris likes goals. We both try to set goals and accomplish them over 10 week periods (as you may have read about in this blog in the past).
Today’s post is about my goals for the upcoming year. We haven’t really discussed goals recently (like we used to) mainly due to Chris’ extreme employment situation. We usually sit down and list goals we want to accomplish individually and then list goals we want to work on as a group (According To Whim). These goals will be anything from painting the house to paying off a bill to reading a certain number of books.
I will admit we have a hard time accomplishing a lot of our goals. That doesn’t mean we should just ditch the idea of setting goals. I think that the process helps focus you on what you really want and any sort of forward motion is good (even if you don’t accomplish it). Chris is really big about goals that push you out of your ‘comfort zone’. This is some goal mumbo jumbo he read in one of the many books he has memorized about goal setting. I hate that term: ‘comfort zone’. I hate it because I know it’s true. If you want to accomplish something major it almost always involves coming out of your comfort zone. A comfort zone might be anything that make you ‘uncomfortable’. Me getting off my ass to drive to Fort Worth to shoot some stuff at the haunted house was a bit of coming out of my comfort zone. I think that some of these experts in goal setting dont’ think it’s worth bothering with unless you are coming out of your comfort zone. I believe that any goal that you set out to do and accomplish is worth the effort.
We haven’t had our 2012 goal talk yet. I briefly discussed it with Chris on his way out of the house last night. He came over for a few hours to play (and teach me) Back Gammon, eat dinner, and talk a little about my debt reduction stuff. I told him I had a few ideas for goal setting for 2012 and that we need to have that meeting. During one of these meetings we will go over what we had as goals for the last ten weeks and year and discuss why we failed to meet some of them and what we want to do for the coming year.
My 2012 main goal is to get out of credit card debt. This is a goal that Chris has discussed in one of his last posts. He is going to help me stay focused on getting this debt take care of. That is my main goal but there will be several other goals that I will set for 2012, all of which I haven’t even thought about yet. One of the things I will do is go back and look at the yearly goals I have set for myself over the last couple of years and see if any are still pertinent and should come forward.
The only other goal I have is some what large but doesn’t require me to come out of my comfort zone too much so it should be easy in the long run. I want to take all the videos we have on YouTube from Season 1 of our Public Access Show: According To Whim and re-encode them into DIVX format and re-upload them. When I started uploading back in 2003/4 I was using the Windows Media Player to encode videos and that along with the compression that YouTube does it made all those videos look really rough. I have 166 videos up there and about 75% are in the old compressed codec and they look awful. This will mean we will lose our total ‘view’ count (which is at 102,000) but this is minor when you consider it’s the content that is important, not the views.
I will come up with more goals and we will try to keep them but will probably loose out on a few. That’s just the way it works. I will try though.