Open Thinkering

Calling myself into the office: July 2010

• Productivity, dilbert, motivation, Targets

This series, published on the first Monday each month, is aimed at personal improvement through the public sharing of goals and targets. In this post I look back at whether I achieved the last month’s goals and come up with some targets for the coming month. 🙂

Looking back

I had some stuff rolled-over last month. How did I do on those?

  1. The horror of the Edexcel standardization meeting made me chew my nails off. Gah.
  2. I’m down to under 13.5 stones now. Which is good, but still not 13 stones flat.

So I need to roll both of these over again!

How well have I done at achieving the targets I set at the start of June 2010?

  1. I’ve now got Whiteyboard customisable whiteboard stickyback stuff covering a good proportion of one of the walls in my study (there was enough left for Ben’s wall too!)
  2. My Joe’s Goals account shows that I ran 26 miles, but I went for at least a couple that I forgot to record. Given that the minimum I ever run is 2.5 miles, I can safely say I beat my 30-mile target.
  3. We bought two tents a last month. One is family-sized (8-man) and the other is a 3-man tent. We had our first family camping trip last weekend. It went really well!
  4. I’m absolutely shocked to say that I did hardly any work on my thesis last month so haven’t written any extra words, never mind another 5,000. I need to roll this one over.
  5. The crazy aerial splitter in the loft has defeated me. I shall have to call in a qualified TV person. But now that the World Cup is nearly over, I’m less bothered. I’m going to park this one.

So I’ve got 3 targets to roll over:

  1. Not to bite my nails at all.
  2. To lose one stone in weight (i.e. to get down to 13 stones)
  3. Move my Ed.D. thesis past 30,000 words (I’m currently on about 24,000)

Looking forward…

My targets for July 2010 are:

  1. Go camping with my 3 year-old son, Ben, in our smaller tent.
  2. Compose an e-book on Google Earth in preparation for Google Teacher Academy.
  3. Comment on at least one blog per day (other than this one!)
  4. Play golf with my Dad (who’s back from the UAE for the summer as of Friday)
  5. Sort out benbelshaw.com, the domain I bought for my son, with some useful content.

I was going to put as a target this month ‘Make Hannah laugh every day’, but given that she reads this blog my wife would no doubt take a sadistic pleasure in making this target as difficult as possible… :-p