Squishy goals are bad. When you set a goal, like a New Year’s res­o­lu­tion, it should be con­crete. Instead of “I’m go­ing to eat health­ier” your goal should be some­thing like “I’m go­ing to eat un­der 2000 calo­ries six days per week.”

My res­o­lu­tions from 2015 con­crete; does that mean I got every­thing done? Let’s see how I did:

1. Work on to do list be­fore work in the morn­ings

I was do­ing well here un­til Lydia was born. Since then I’ve been get­ting to bed later and haven’t been get­ting up early enough to do any­thing be­fore work.

2. Exercise 5 days every week

Same as above. I was ex­er­cis­ing in the morn­ing a cou­ple days a week, but haven’t even once since Lydia ar­rived. I did play rac­quet­ball on week­ends, but not as much as I’d like (my goal is twice a month).

3. Daily Family Meetings

I pur­posely de­layed this one. Keep read­ing.

4. Make dent in To Do items

I have a Trello board where I keep track of items I need to do. At the be­gin­ning of the week I’ll choose sev­eral to get done that week. I did make a dent, but I’m al­ways com­ing up with more things I want to do. (I have too many hob­bies.)

5. 5 hours a week on web­sites

Did I re­ally want to do 5 hours a week? I did­n’t spend that much time, but I did:

  • com­plete a small re­design of bri­ankoser.com
  • com­pletely re-write koser.us with a new back- and front-end
  • make Antonio, a small pro­ject for a few BGG users (No longer main­tained. Move along.)
  • start mak­ing Thomas, a board game rank­ing tool

So I’m go­ing to count this as a suc­cess.

So ap­par­ently I’m not great at keep­ing New Year’s res­o­lu­tions. Let’s see if I can do bet­ter this year. Keep me ac­count­able! Since I had five res­o­lu­tions in 2015, I have six for 2016:

1. Read 20 books (including at least 2 au­dio books)

I read 9 books in 2015, and some of those were graphic nov­els. Lately I’ve been read­ing more on­line: tech­ni­cal blogs, po­lit­i­cal and sports news, board game fo­rums, red­dit. I also did­n’t fin­ish lis­ten­ing to the au­dio book I started, fa­vor­ing pod­casts in­stead. In 2016, I’d like to cut back on the on­line read­ing. Until I’ve lis­tened to a cou­ple au­dio­books I’ll slow down the pod­cast pace. That way I can fin­ish half the books that I’ve started, read some more that are sit­ting on the book­shelf, and lis­ten to those I have on my phone.

2. Finish 9 epics

Scrum is a pro­ject plan­ning sys­tem that I’ve used at work. I’ve bor­rowed some of the scrum ter­mi­nol­ogy for my to-do lists. Quick items (done in a week or less) I call “stories”. A pro­ject made up of mul­ti­ple sto­ries I call an “epic”. I cur­rently have 18 epics on my to do list, and I’d like to fin­ish 9 in 2016.

3. 30 min­utes a day, 21 days a month on to do list

To work on those epics and other sto­ries, I’m go­ing to set aside a half hour per day for three weeks out of the month.

4. Blog once per month at bri­ankoser.com and koser.us

I’m go­ing to start post­ing my non-pro­gram­ming writ­ing on koser.us, which is prob­a­bly where you’re read­ing this.

5. Family Meetings

I had this as a goal last year and de­cided to post­pone it un­til af­ter Lydia was born. When she starts eat­ing solid food and we start eat­ing at the table again, we’re go­ing to start hav­ing fam­ily meet­ings. We’ll be able to keep up with what’s get­ting done and what still needs to be done. We can keep each other ac­count­able so we don’t keep putting off im­por­tant things like get­ting our wills signed (oops!).

6. Start a pod­cast

I re­ally en­joy the medium of pod­cast­ing. The switch from the “push” model of ra­dio and tele­vi­sion to the “pull” model of pod­casts and web video is a huge im­prove­ment. In 2016 I’d like to start a pod­cast. I’ve got a few dif­fer­ent ideas but haven’t de­cided which to fol­low through on yet.

I want 2016 to be a year of get­ting things done, and the best way for me to make sure it hap­pens is con­crete goals and ac­count­abil­ity. Let’s do it!