Remember way back to the start of the year. It was the beginning of 2015. All shiny and bright…full of possibilities. I remember thinking to myself, “This is going to be the best year yet!”.

Well, I’m a month in. So are you, come to think of it. 31 days have passed in the new year, and unlike so many years past, I’m actually carefully looking back at the first month and assessing what my goals were, celebrating where I succeeded, and analyzing where I stumbled. I’m taking a look at those goals that were set in the dawning days of the year and honing them for better focus.

Over the years, I’ve developed a system to help me categorize my goals. I have seven categories:

• Health/Nutrition/Fitness
• Household
• Family
• Financial
• Business
• Intellectual
• Spiritual

I have am irritating habit of trying to address too many areas of my life simultaneously. I make broad, over-arching goals at the start of the year that set me up for failure. I try to do too many things at once, and end up failing at all of them. This year, I decided that I would work on themes every month and incorporate them into the seven categories. In fact, I admitted that I can’t really work on all seven categories equally every month, so my themes only touch a few of the categories. At first, this made me feel like I had failed before I even started. I wasn’t being as dedicated as I should be. In fact, I felt like I’d given up…and this was just during the goal setting part of the year.

But somehow I was able to shake off the funk. I was able to realize that I can’t do everything at once. I need to take smaller steps towards larger goals. And sometimes those steps are going to be slower than I’d like. In an ideal world, I could do everything all at once…but I live far away from the ideal world, residing in a place called reality.

For January, my theme was consistency.

After 52 years of living, I’ve come to realize that when I’m consistent I accomplish vastly more. I may be inching along, but after a while, I’m a long way from where I started. The progress is barely noticeable on a daily basis. But those small steps, day after day, will take me far.

So here’s what happened during January. Rather than sharing my goals up front I’ve decided that I’m going to work on the goals and then I’ll share the results. At least that’s what I’ve done for January 2015. I guess we’ll all have to stay on this journey for a while to see how it develops.

So here’s my report card for January 2015:

Health/Nutrition/Fitness – Grade A

My primary goals for health, nutrition, and fitness in January was to exercise 5 out of every 7 days. I tried to plan my rest days so that they didn’t happen back-to-back, but had goofed that up by day 9. I was kind of in a foul mood about taking two rest days in a row, but I managed to right my ship and actually exercised 25 of the days in the month. That put me 3 sessions above the required 22. I didn’t really work all that hard while I exercised, but each session was at least 30 minutes long. Due to issues with my knees and current weight, I stuck to the stationary cycle throughout the month. I did log several days of 90+ minutes (7 to be exact) and only twice did the minimum 30 minutes.

While it isn’t the greatest accomplishment on the planet, I’m please with my ability to actually get moving and do something again. I used to be much more dedicated, but it’s going to take a while to get back into that mode completely. January was a step in the right direction though!

Household – Grade C

On the household front, I have determined that 2015 is going to be the year where we get our entire house back under control. With up to ten of us living here are various times, and family members moving in and out over the past two years, things have deteriorated dramatically. I’ve written about decluttering in the past, and in the future I’ll write about our severe case of C.H.A.O.S. (Can’t Have Anybody Over Syndrome). I realize this is a huge problem for our family as a whole, and particularly for me. So I’m going to try and lead by example and take the point on getting the house in top shape.

Unfortunately, my well-laid plans for January stalled out just nine days in. At the time, I was following the January Declutter Calendar from Home Storage Solutions. I’d successfully spent at least 15 minutes every day doing work that needed to be done. Things were beginning to look up. The kitchen counters looked presentable and the kitchen drawers were more organized and usable.

Then I was faced with clear off the kitchen table as a task. And I was stymied. I would make progress, but the junk would reappear. The table would be cluttered up again. All the things that seemed to have no other home ended up on the table. It was like storming Normandy day after day…but this time the stuff on the table rebuffed my attacks vastly more successfully than the Germans did to the Allies. I was beginning to feel like this was more of a Dunkirk than a Normandy.

But I kept trying throughout the month. I wouldn’t check off that task until it was done. Now I’m sitting here a month later, and still don’t have the table under control. Nor have I done the other tasks on the remainder of the January list…I haven’t even started the February list.

But instead of taking this as a defeat, I’m going to accept what’s happened and try to do double duty in February. From this point forward I’m not only going to do the rest of the January list (with it’s minimum of 15 minutes per day), but I’m also going to try and attack the February Declutter Calendar in parallel. I’m going to give it a shot and see if I can get back on track so that the workload will be a bit lessened in March when I only have to do one month’s worth of work.

The kitchen really is a pretty good-sized disaster for us, so it’s going to take some work. But I believe that I’m up to the challenge, and for almost a third of the January I did prove that I can do 15 minutes of work every day. That’s my starting point!

Financial – Grade B-

My primary financial goal for January was to catch up from August 2014 onwards. I’d gotten far behind on data entry into Quicken. The Bike Across Kansas and August trips to New Jersey/Maine really took some time away from my regular data entry. I need to get this data entered and cleaned up before I can do our taxes. Then I need to complete the FAFSA for all three who will be in college in the Fall. February was supposed to be FAFSA month, and the deadline is hard and fast on many of the scholarship applications…so I’ve got to get it done. I made a huge dent in the backlogged date entry, but I’m still not quite there. Needless to say, I haven’t even started on the taxes yet.

Business – Grade A

I started and completed Jon Acuff’s 10 Day DoOver Challenge. My goal was to create content for Hectic-Dad for every day of the challenge. I fudged a little bit, and had one day where the content was rather weak…but it was something. In fact, that weak content led to an idea that I’ll be working on later in the year. That’s the only reason that I’m considering the 10 Day DoOver Challenge a success. If you haven’t ever done one, you can start the challenge at any time. It’s an interesting exercise…one that I will be repeating in the future.

My second business goal was to keep my e-mail inboxes at Inbox Zero. This has been a back and forth battle, not unlike my battle with the stuff on the kitchen table. In fact, it’s actually the same battle…too much coming in that I don’t deal with quickly enough. I have gotten much better at being able to plow through a large backlog of e-mail. What I haven’t improved on is my ability to stop the inward flow. That’s something that I’m going to have to work on. I’ve also lost a little bit of the zeal to do this everyday, meaning that the backlog is larger when I finally get to it. I’m going to try and get back to Inbox Zero on a daily basis, but that may not be achievable in February. We’ll have to see what I think I can handle.

I had hoped to have a completed editorial calendar for Hectic-Dad for January before the month started, but I didn’t get there. I managed to do a calendar week-by-week, which was OK, but not optimal. I set out to have the February Hectic-Dad editorial calendar completed before the start of February, and I did it. Mind you, it wasn’t finished until after 11pm on the 31st of January…but it was in place. I’ve tweaked it a bit since then, but I’m considering this a really big win. In fact, without that calendar, I wouldn’t be working on this post. I’d have let it slide. This is probably my biggest business win for January, and the results are paying off in February.

My last goal was related to my social media presence. I had decided back in August, during my travels, that I wanted to grow the Hectic brand name. That starts with Hectic-Dad at the present time, so that’s the brand that I wanted to make more meaningful. Part of that requires that I be able to get my message in front of people. To do that…I needed followers. So I set a loft goal of 5,000 follower to my Hectic-Dad Twitter account by the end of 2015. This meant that I had to increase my following a bunch. Like 1400%. That’s a really big number…but I wanted to have one stretch goal in the business category…and this was it.

January turned out vastly better than I could ever have anticipated, and I’m actually considering changing the end of year goal. For now, I’m setting higher monthly goals. In case you haven’t noticed (or don’t follow me on Twitter), I’ve been a lot more active. And frankly, I’m having a lot more fun with it. Hopefully those who follow me are having fun too!

Intellectual – Grade D

For me, the intellectual category has revolved around reading books every year. I’ve counted audio books in the past, and I made do that again this year. I’ve got several friends who are speaking very highly of Audible.com. At this point though, I’m concentrating on what I read with my eyes. I started out gangbusters, reading QBQ! by John G. Miller in the first few hours of 2015. I then spent a lot of time reading several really small e-books that I didn’t even record in my books database. Yes, I have a list of the books that I want to read as well as those that I’ve read. Like so many other things in my life…the want to list is growing faster than the already done list. Frustrating, but it’s part of the way life works.

Because I’m striving for better balance between business, leisure, and personal development books, I sought out Isaac Asimov Presents the Golden Years of Science Fiction (Vol 1) as my next book…falling squarely in the leisure category. As a huge fan of all things Science Fiction, this seemed like a perfect selection. The problem that I’ve run into is that reading this book for 30 minutes a day simply isn’t cutting it. I’m reading just before bed, and I keep falling asleep. That’s not due to the nature of the writers nor the stories, but rather to the fact that I’m tired. More importantly, the subtitle of the the book is Short Stories and Novellas. I keep hoping that I’ll run across a short story, because at this point everything that I’ve read has been scandalously close to full novel length. They used the term novella pretty liberally to describe this tomes within a tome.

Don’t misunderstand, I don’t regret for one second having picked this book to read. Some of the greatest authors in all of Science Fiction are included…and these are just stories from 1939 and 1940. This was the dawn of the Science Fiction era, and I love reading the stories. The problem is that I shouldn’t have picked this as the second book for the year. It really makes me feel badly that I’m only on my second book. But I have several other books picked out and ready to go. I may have to put Mr. Asimov’s compilation aside for a bit and crank through a couple other books. But I’m not quite at that point yet.

I do plan on reading 36 personal enjoyment books, 24 personal development books, and 24 business books in 2015. To achieve that, I better get cranking!

Family and Spiritual – Grade F

You’ll notice that I haven’t included anything from my categories of Family and Spiritual. I regret not setting any goals for the during January. I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do in those two categories, and honestly they are the two that baffle me the most often.

I’ve been using these same seven categories for a very long time to try and organize my goal setting, and these two are often the most difficult for me. Both are extremely important to me, but I just can’t see to get a handle on setting goals for them. It seems weird that I can’t, but it’s an ongoing problem for me. That’s something that I do want to explore more and rectify in 2015.

Conclusion

So there you have it…my January 2015 in a capsule. I was going to say nutshell, but this is a pretty big nut. Not unlike the author!

Before I started actually writing this post, I spent some time reviewing the goals I’d set for January and honing the goals I’ve got for February. It was a very interesting exercise for me. One of the tools that I’m using to help me achieve things that need to be done on a regular basis is Coach.me. I wrote a little bit about this app previously, but will probably be exploring the features and how I use it in another post…probably sooner rather than later.