Heading into 2023 I’d become convinced that I was probably being held back a bit by not ever setting goals for myself and pushing to achieve them. So for 2023 I set 23 goals for myself and tracked my results. It was… revealing. I did manage to accomplish some things I might not have done without them but I also had a lot of things I didn’t even come close to.
Positives!
The best results for 2023 were probably that I managed to exercise 300 hours and lose enough weight to reach 220 pounds. I didn’t start prioritizing exercise until late June and barely made it to 300 hours in the final days of the year. That included some golfing (I usually walk) but I didn’t count stretching I was doing for much of the year so I definitely feel good about the work I put in. It’s probably not an accident that while I was prioritizing exercise I lost 40.8 pounds after July 2nd of last year. I also was more focused on my diet, reducing how much I ate overall rather than trying to “eat healthier”. Snacking probably holds me back from losing weight quicker but it’s still been a positive direction. I had originally wanted to reach 220 by August so technically I didn’t make that goal but I did get there by the end of the year at least.
The other goal I definitely hit was spending 500 hours outside in 2023. This goal led to me intentionally spending more time outside in the spring/early summer reading and I bought a hammock that led to some great outdoor naps. As the year got on it was pretty clear I was going to make this goal easily and I hit 520 hours before December and stopped tracking it. It helped that I did a decent amount of newspaper delivery last year. I didn’t count the entire time I was out there but when you’re driving around with the windows down constantly getting out to walk up to porches there is a good chunk of that which should count as being outside!
I wanted to spend more time with our parents in 2023 and had a goal of 12 occasions with each. We definitely hit that with Chantelle’s parents and I think we fell one short with my parents. I’m not sure we really went out of our way to get together much and it would probably be nice to do more intentional getting together outside of the obvious reasons on the calendar but this was a positive year in this area.
Not the worst…
There were some goals I wasn’t able to hit but had some results in. I wanted to run a mile in 8 minutes by the end of the year and in mid-November hadn’t even gotten under 10 minutes. One great run on Thanksgiving gave me an 8:25 mile that didn’t complete the goal but wasn’t bad at all. I also had a goal of going on 36 hikes with Chantelle. Hiking was sporadic and we made it to 24. We didn’t prioritize doing this enough throughout the year so it mostly occurred when we were out of town on vacations.
I wanted to play video games with my neighbor 50 times in 2023. He’s got some mental disabilities but playing video games has been a natural way for us to connect and he really enjoys bringing his PS5 over for us to play. We logged 34 times but that fell off significantly in the fall as I got busy with work and school and I wish I’d found a way to make more time for him. Kind of a similar story with reading – I had set a goal of 24 books and hit 15 before the end of August but only made it to 19.
I have a few things I’ve wanted to get more consistent at doing daily and so I tracked how often I accomplished them – Cleaning the cat’s litter boxes, doing a crossword puzzle, reading a few pages of comics from Pearls Before Swine, reading the Bible, and stretching. There were stretches of the year I was great at this and stretches where I was terrible. I’m more convinced than a year ago that these are all important things for me to be in the habit of. Also I got to the point where I can do the NYT crossword most days without feeling like I’m lost and need to google everything. That was a highlight of the year for sure, I’ve really enjoyed the feelings doing the crossword gives me.
Negatives
There were a lot of things that I didn’t even come close to and that feels kind of depressing. I enjoy playing board games/card games so I set a goal of just 24 times and ended up with… ZERO. I wanted to start having people over to our house regularly and the only occasion we did was when Chantelle’s sister’s family was in town over the summer. I wanted to start having potlucks regularly again with our church ministry group and we did have ones in October and November but that was much later in the year than I wanted to start.
I love naps but naps (30 minutes) often become fail-naps (think like 2 hours) with the way my life is structured. I hoped to limit that to 75 fail-naps and I didn’t even come close to that. I usually sleep 4.5 hours a night so I’m often up early and am home from work by the afternoon so nap time is easy to schedule and easy to just go back to sleep when a cat is being cuddly. I also wanted to limit my social media/useless internet usage and I don’t think that went very well. I watched way too many Facebook videos in 2023. It’s like they have an algorithm serving me up content they know I’ll find irresistible.
Lessons Learned
I definitely learned that focusing on and tracking 23 goals throughout the year is… a lot. There was a decent amount of documenting I needed to do on some of my hours goals so these were constantly top of mind. On the other hand I had a goal of putting up Christmas lights, something that only needed a few hours in November, but I never did it. It was just never something that needed to be done today and so it never became a priority. I came away from this overall thinking that setting a goal and tracking your progress isn’t a bad thing but it’s really about building habits that will last. I did that with my exercise goal and in 2024 I’m not tracking my hours anymore but I don’t anticipate that will cause me to stop exercising.
The other lesson I feel like I learned is that it’s going to be pretty common to look at your goals at the end of the year and have a lot of them you didn’t hit. The point of them is to push you to strive for more and so naturally you’re going to fail to check all the boxes. Technically I only hit 2 of 23 goals but I accomplished so much more in 2023 than I did in say 2018.