I’m thinking about doing a ‘goals thing’ for a month to test the idea of doing goal setting within a blog.
Yesterday, I did my morning meditation for 15 min, sports psyching exercise for 20, started Day 1 of my gratitude program, played Ping Pong with my daughter, and played no racquetball — all things that I’ve been thinking about and wanting to somewhat do but that take some self-discipline to do regularly.
I’m not going to have trouble with playing Ping Pong. My daughter got the hang of it quickly, surprising herself and me, and the glow in her eyes when she said goodnight and made a racquet swinging motion tells me that she’ll bug me to keep playing regularly and that I’ll have fun doing it. Heck, I’ll even be able to practice my ball concentration.
There are a few other things, I’m trying to do more of, too: lifting weights, reading a novel, SOSs, and I can’t remember what else. Sheeeeit, it sort of seems like a lot… am I Mr. Self-Improvement these days, or what?
I’ve used some of the Covey tools in the past to help with this goals stuff: mission statement, of course, but also the weekly Compass for role-based goal setting and the monthly log for tracking my performance on certain ‘habits’ I’m trying to create. The Compass has worked well for me for years. I tried to switch from a paper Compass to a Palm-based one the past 6 months but the software sucks and I’ve quit trying to make it work for me so I guess it’s time to switch back. And I never got the hang of the monthly log, so maybe I’ll just use a simple spreadsheet and see if I can make it a one-click button to upload it as HTML. If I can figure this out for me, then I’ll see if I can figure out how to invite other guys to do it via Real Joe, maybe in small groups. Hmmmmm.