Our theme for the month of March is “How to.”
I decided to do a follow-up to last month’s post to reflect on how my new system is working out for me.
In case you want to replicate this system for yourself, here’s a reminder on how it works:
- Choose three to four goal categories that you want to make progress in throughout the year. Example categories are fitness, career, education, hobbies, finances, etc.
- Write down three ‘levels’ within each category: bullet points of what you need to do to reach your goals. Level 1 is the lowest bar to meet every day, Level 2 is slightly harder, and Level 3 is the hardest. For Career, that could look like sending out one job application a day, two job applications a day, or three job applications a day.
- Make a spreadsheet with the goal horizontal across the top and the dates vertical on the side. Then record your numbers at the end of each day. You can color-code it to easily see where you’re making the most progress and where you’re falling behind. In my example spreadsheet, 3 is in green, 2 is in yellow, 1 is in orange, and 0 is in red.
Overall, I’m pleased to report that this system does seem to be working for me quite well.
This system has helped me stay consistent more than other systems I’ve tried in the past. (And consistency is the number one ingredient to being successful—eventually). If you look at my spreadsheet, you can see that there were only three days where I failed to complete a certain goal—on one of the days I missed my self care goal, on another day I missed my exercise goal, and on the most recent day I missed my writing goal. Considering that I’m aiming to get all my goals done every single day of the week, that’s pretty good!
However, I did notice a few downsides to this method.
Unfortunately, I rarely wrote more than 250ish words for my novel a day, because I’d usually write after work when I was about ready to check out for the day, and I was only aiming to hit my 200 word minimum word count goal before I turned my computer off and went to sleep. Setting the 200 word minimum word count goal has made me a bit lazy. I really want to be writing at least 500 words a day, and my main goal for March is to make that happen.
In regards to my marketing job, measuring what exactly constitutes a ‘task’ was a bit harder than I anticipated. Sometimes I would complete a bunch of smaller ‘tasks’ underneath one main ‘task’ and then mark that on my spreadsheet as ‘one task’ even though you could consider it half a dozen ‘tasks.’ There’s also the fact that some ‘tasks’ take longer or require more brain power than other ‘tasks,’ so a day that appears to be less productive with only one ‘task’ complete could’ve actually been a very productive day for me.
I realized that I probably need to redefine the self care goal, because the ways that I’m exploring taking care of myself are evolving as I figure out what I actually need to improve my physical and mental health. So I didn’t end up completing some of the to-dos I listed for self care, but I substituted them for other things that I didn’t end up counting. So my self care numbers look lower than they (probably) should be.
The exercise goal worked the best out of all of them, because it’s so straightforward and also because ever since college (a bit thanks to the rigor of Calvin Cross Country lol) I’ve never really had a problem getting myself to exercise. In fact, sometimes I do it too much! The amount of exercise I’m doing right now though is very reasonable: I run about twenty-five miles a week and weight lift three times a week.
I think it would be cool if I could keep this up for a year and be able to look back on a whole twelve month’s worth of my progress, so I’m gonna keep chugging along and see how it goes!
Loran Vanden Bosch is a Chicago-based writer, tradesperson-in-training, community organizer, and long distance runner who graduated from Calvin in 2021 with an English degree. You can also follow them on Medium @loranvandenbosch.
