I am just Captain Blog Poster lately!

It was kind of a throw-away line in my basement cleaning post, but one of the goals that I have for the upcoming year is to do at least one productive thing in the evening. We got rid of our TV almost a year ago, primarily because we found that to be a major evening time waster. And for awhile, we were pretty productive in the evenings. We finally finished remodeling our kitchen as well as other various redeemable tasks.

But lately we have gone down a slide of laziness and unproductiveness. Not really the TV – even though that’s back, it hasn’t been used that much. I do watch some shows (mostly sports related) and we do play some Play Station (again, sports as well as DDR), and the kids do watch some movies, but overall, I feel that the TV is in its proper place in the house. Something nice to have and occasionally do, but not a “god”.

It’s been other things. Ranging from playing video games, or surfing the Internet, or watching shows online, or even “good” things like doing a puzzle or reading a book or whatever. I’m not some sort of Luddite and I do think that there is probably a place for all these things, but I find that I don’t feel good about myself if I realize that I’ve spent my entire evening just doing nothing. It usually feels good WHILE I’m doing it, but afterwards I feel like I’ve wasted my time. I’m sure I’m not alone in this kind of dichotomy.

Anyways, I’ve finally decided to do something about it And, as I like to point out, a goal that is not written down is just wishful thinking. So I am resolving that I will do (at least) 1 productive thing in the evening.

What defines a “productive thing”? There is no set definition – it can ebb and flow from whatever. This past week, we’ve been basement cleaning. I’d also count working on my business stuff or other home improvement projects or exercising. Tonight I’m going to play basketball and so I’m counting that (exercise baby!).

My other goal is that I will wake up with the alarm when it goes off. None of this snoozing and laying around in bed for hours. It is not any more restful, and it prevents me from doing other things I’d rather do – like spend a bit of time with the fam before I leave, and/or have enough time to hit the Y before work and that kind of stuff.

I have put some thoughts into some of these, and decided on these 2 to start with. I have avoided putting anything else on my “goal” list because I have heard that you shouldn’t try to do too many new goals at once because it becomes overwhelming.

Now of course comes the question of how to track it. Knowing me, of course it must be tracked, and in some “cool” way of course. Probably almost a year ago, I came across the website Joe’s Goals. What that does is allow you to put in any number of goals, and assign “points” to each goal. So then each day you mark whether you did the goal or not (and you can also have “negative” goals that cost you points), and then each day gets a “score”.

I did some things with the site back when I found them, but kind of lost focus with it. I re-discovered it recently and have spent some time over the past few days / weeks trying to figure out how to best organize things. Obviously there are a lot of different ways that you can set things up as far as goals go. One sticking point I had was how to best handle weekly and monthly goals. I didn’t want to “skew” things by getting a huge boost on one day because that just happened to be the day I went to the temple, or did my home teaching, or did a weekly planning session. I also toyed with setting a goal like “Did HT last month”, so that way if I did my HT in January, I would get to check off that goal for every day in February. I liked being able to set a bar as a “perfect” day, and then comparing each day to that ideal. I felt like having sporadic (weekly or monthly) goals didn’t accomplish that

In the end, I just decided to ignore that problem and just stick with 2 goals to start (both daily). I decided that satisfied the desire to start small, as well as allow me to measure the “perfect” day. I decided that at least for now, the “perfect” day is 10 points. So I get 5 points for waking up when the alarm goes off, and 5 points if I did one thing productive thing in the evening. My plan is that later on, once I’ve mastered these goals, that I can then add another one. So maybe I drop those 2 goals to being worth 2 points, and add a goal that if I eat less than 2000 calories in a day, I get 6 points. Again, 10 points is a perfect day. One housekeeping note – I also added a 3rd negative “adjustment” goal, with the idea that I could use that to fine-tune goals. For instance this morning, I did wake up and turn off the alarm. But then I lounged around for awhile. So I decided although I technically met the goal, I didn’t feel right about taking the full 5 points. So I gave myself 2 negative points, meaning I’ll get an 8 today (assuming I do something productive today).

And another cool thing about this site is that it also has a widget! So, just like my exercise widget, I have added my Joe’s Goals widget to the blog over there on the right, so you can all track how I’m doing. 2 slightly annoying things – it only has the 4 days of data (since I started on Sunday), and because one of my goals is done in the morning and one isn’t done until the evening, for most of the day, the graph shows a downturn (for instance now it goes from 10 to 3, because I haven’t done my 5 point productive basketball playing yet today)