2012 Goals

I’ve always liked goals. To-Do lists, checkboxes, sticky notes. They give me a feeling of moving forward somewhere and comfort in knowing I’m not stagnant.

However, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend lately. All the crossing-off of tasks and check-marking little boxes were to no avail. My lists were growing, despite how much effort I put into them. At one point, I had 132 tasks..

Perhaps it was my GTD system, or discipline in completing tasks. In retrospect, I was simply overwhelmed and spread myself too thin.

Brush up the resume? Ok, work on it for 20min. Oh, I really need to add a sign-on for my app. Switch to it for a bit. Hey, Jquery looks cool. Let’s try some examples. Ugh, I haven’t worked out in a while. Head to the gym to clear my head.

I wanted to do everything, but ended up doing “not much”. I was busy, but shipped and produced little. It’s time for a change and I plan to do it by cutting back on my obligations.

Thus, 2012 will be a year of focus. Here are my most important goals for 2012:

• Run 100 miles.
• Be able to read a random article on Yahoo! Vietnamese.

If I could accomplish these two goals by the end of the year, I would consider it a huge success. It isn’t to say I don’t have other aspirations or things I would like to accomplish. I have lots of plans for this year, I just won’t lock myself into them. If it’s important to me, I’ll make it happen.

The Pareto (80-20) principle states roughly 80% of the outputs comes from 20% of the inputs. Let’s not forget the 100%’s and how important they are too.