Lazy Man and Money

Creating My 2019 Goals and Plans

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February is almost over so it’s a good time to create my goals and plans for 2019. My first goal is stop procrastinating. I guess I already failed on that one ;-). I admire all the bloggers out there who have their act together and get these things out in late December or even the first week or two of January.

Before I jump into 2019, I have to very briefly review 2018. There’s a saying that you can’t get to where you want to go if you don’t know where you are. Like every year, I had a lot of grand plans in 2018 and like every year, I feel like I didn’t get them done. That feeling doesn’t always match up with reality. Part of the problem is that I planned for the year to go one way, but life doesn’t go as planned. You learn to pivot and adjust for a new course. So even though I didn’t stick to many of the plans, I can look back at 2018 and consider it a success.

Prioritizing Productivity

Last year, I created a brief productivity plan. I’ll try to remind myself to focus more on these in 2019:

  1. Plan my most productive day – I’m self-employed and work from home full-time. That works for a lot of people. It’s not ideal for me, but it’s necessary to support the kids and my wife’s military career.
  2. Work with Pomodoro Technique – I find that I’m most productive when I’m using the Pomodoro Technique, which is a method consisting of working hard for a while and taking short breaks. This goes hand-in-hand with the above item.
  3. Making SMARTER Goals – I’ve been writing about making SMARTER goals for more than a decade and I still have trouble doing it.
  4. Review my old Success Guide – I wrote an article How to be Successful around 2006. It’s a good time to review my thoughts from a dozen years ago and see what I can take away for 2019. With a wife and kids, I’m in a very different place in life.

Those are tools. They may help get something done, but they aren’t the goals that I want to accomplish.

Home and Family

Let’s start the list with the most important items… home and family.

Everything Kids

This is an overly broad item. Every parent has a focus on their kids (I hope). I helicopter more than most. Part of the reason I consider 2018 a success is that I feel very comfortable about the quality of time spent in this area.

In 2018, we tried a lot of new things like soccer, swimming, chess, cooking, and ice skating. Swimming, chess, and cooking were the only activities that seemed to stick. We’re looking karate, more team sports, piano, and maybe a beginning computer programming class (designed by myself). I want them to experience as much as possible.

I thought about not mentioning this because I don’t plan on quantifying it. However, it dominates almost every other goal or activity, so it was impossible to leave out.

Clean/Organize

I’ve had that KonMari book in my Amazon cart (saved for later) for probably 5 years now. Someday I’ll pull the trigger. Last year, we made major progress in cleaning and organizing by buying a few IKEA Kallaxs.

Unfortunately, we I haven’t had the time to organize them efficiently. We also have a whole garage and basement in desperate need of cleaning and organizing.

The goal for 2019 is to pick one area a month and clean and organize that. In January we did a lot of the office stuff. In February, we did much of the kitchen. The garage and basement are probably going to take a couple of months. They are bigger projects because disposing some of the stuff is very large and can only be thrown out at certain times of the year. Some other things are sold on Ebay/Craigslist and they take a long time to go.

We’ll try to have a yard sale too, but I often find that they are a lot of work for almost literally a dime or nickel here and there.

The very next step I need to take to is to match up areas with months. That will help with accountability.

Vacations

Once again, we have a lot of vacations planned for 2019. We’ll be going to Disney World for the third time. What’s unique about it is that we have never actually planned or wanted to go to Disney World. It’s happened through some outside source or circumstance combined with my wife’s military status allowing us to hack a relatively cheap Disney trip. This year, the kids’ grandpa wanted to use his timeshare to spend time with the kids.

We’ll also take our annual staycation to disappear to Block Island. It’s good to get away from technology for a bit.

We may go to our timeshare in Aruba, but we might also sell the week this year and use the money for a cruise. I usually like to break up the New England winter with a trip to someplace warm and tropical.

We’re trying to fit in one more small road trip. We’d like to drive to New York City to explore for a few days and then continue to Pennsylvania and Hershey’s Park. It’s been a couple of years since we’ve been there and that’s too long. It’s much, much cheaper than Disney and the kids enjoy it just as much, so it’s a shame to not do it more often.

Money

Since this is a personal finance website, I feel like I should make some money goals.

First, I have a confession. I have problems making money goals. That’s not a good thing for a personal finance blogger.

One of the problems is that I don’t track our savings and I don’t stick to a budget. I just believe in making frugal choices. I watch the big expenses and don’t have a lot of daily spending habits (i.e. latte factor). It seems to work well for us.

However, I’m not going to use that as a free pass. I’ve come up with some money goals.

Net Worth

When most of your money is in the stock market or real estate, it’s not a good idea to set net worth goals. I can’t control what those markets do over the next year.

However, I can’t resist setting a goal for net worth. I consider it the most important number in personal finance. In general, as long as this is going up, we are making good financial progress.

My goal this year is to grow our net worth 20%. That doesn’t mean much to you because I’m not saying what our net worth is to start. If we had $10 to our name, we could find two dollars on the street and reach that goal. However, we’re at the point where it’s getting tough to grow. Last year our net worth went up only about 7%.

How do we get to 20% in 2019? I made a website sale in early January and our net worth was up nearly 15%. That leaves us with another 5% to go. It may seem easy, but I don’t expect the stock market to do much this year.

“Passivish” income

I keep track of my “passivish” income every month. This is money in real estate or the stock market. I massage the numbers liberally as I explain in the link before. Once massaged, the result is a number of monthly income we could expect to earn from rentals and dividends.

At the start of February our “passivish” income was $39,223. My goal is to end 2019 with $45,000 or more.

Make More Progress on Energi Gal’s Retirement Plans

I started this blog 13 years ago, because my wife would be able to retire with 20 years of military service with a pension of 50% of her base pay. I didn’t want to continue doing traditional office work another 22 years after she was done. This year is year 20 for her. It’s very close to “Go time.”

Things have changed over the years. We moved to California and then back to New England. We got a dog. We got a house. We had to boys. We bought two cars. We invested in retirement plans and rental properties.

The biggest thing that I couldn’t predict was that we’d have the very good problem of having the boys in a great private at a great military discount. However, if my wife retires we may lose that military discount. That makes the expense go up tens of thousands of dollars at a time when income drops in half.

An obvious solution is to send the kids to public school. However, we’re hoping we can find a way to work something out with the school. That’s a conversation that I hope we can have sometime this year.

Beyond the numbers, there’s a more psychological goal, but this one isn’t for me. My wife has to figure out what kind of work (if any) would make her happy. We made some good progress on that this week. Unfortunately, it’s far from a polished plan… or a plan of any kind.

It takes awhile to retire from the military. My wife says it is an 18-month process. So even after we get some of the answers to the questions, we got some time to implement all the plans.

Make $75,000 in self-employment income

Blogging income can be all over the place. I’ve picked up a couple of steady contract jobs to supplement that. I also do a lot of dog sitting. That’s four sources of income that I hope can add up to $75K. It’s a stretch goal.

Health

I’ve found that the “lose 10 pounds” goals typically don’t work for me. I’m not alone in that.

Eat More Fruits and Vegetables

I’ve always been a meat and potatoes kind of guy. Except that it’s usually meat and ramen. It tastes great to me, it’s cheap, and it’s quick and easy to prepare. It’s not the healthiest way to eat obviously.

I often buy fruits and vegetables, but they sit in the “drawer of death” in the fridge and never get eaten. However, over the last four weeks, I’ve been doing something different. I’ve been eating a lot of broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, and nuts. I went to the local Dollar Tree and got some stackable 1 cup containers. I fill them up with cut broccoli and baby carrots. Each day I take out two of them and put them on the counter to snack on throughout the day.

This tiny change of habit has worked wonders.

I’ve added tomatoes and nuts to the routine. I think I’ll do strawberries and blueberries as well.

Exercise with my Wife

I haven’t put in consistent time in the gym for several years now. I didn’t have easy gym access for awhile in CA and walking my dog felt like all the exercise time I had available. By the time we moved back to the east coast, there were babies to take care of. In short, I have a pile of excuses.

My wife has made time to get to the gym (it’s a military requirement for her), so I need to start doing the same. We’ll pay a small amount more ($15) to upgrade to the family membership at the local YMCA, vs. the previous plan that included her and the kids.

Run a 5K (stretch goal 5 miles?)

My wife has run a couple of 5Ks over the last two years. She’s looking to do a 10K this year. I’d like to get in shape enough to do it with her.

Miscellaneous

I need to look into some fun things for myself. My problem is that I’m not sure what I find fun anymore. I think I need to get into something completely new an random. I’m toying with the idea of learning to fly with a flight simulator or signing up for Masterclass.

If anyone has any suggestions, let me know in the comments.

Final 2019 Goal Thoughts

I feel that this post may be a microcosm of how 2019 is shaping up for me. I think I rushed through it. It’s almost as if I’m reacting to the hectic pace of life around me rather than planning and methodically moving towards the goal.

On the other hand, publishing imperfect content and feelings is what I have always loved about blogging. There should be an expectation that things are a little rough around the edges.

Reviewing my 2018 Goals and Plans

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It’s January 3rd and I already feel behind on 2019. Most of the bloggers somehow managed to write their year-end recaps at the end of year.

On the positive side, I created my 2018 Goals and Plans in February. In comparison, I’m doing quite well.

In last year’s article, I listed a bunch of quick excuses why I didn’t accomplish as much as I wanted in 2017. I was the main care-giver for a 3 and 4 year old. I spent a lot of time reading politics. I was being sued for defamation, which can be a multi-millionaire affair… not like a 30 minute Judge Judy thing that you might expect.

In recapping 2018, much of the same was true, except that the boys are a year older. Oh and I won that lawsuit! For the first time in about 6 years, I have no pending defamation lawsuits… and I didn’t lose a single one. One thing that I’ve learned in the process is that, for independent publishers, there’s no such thing as freedom of speech against large corporations. The legal system hasn’t evolved from antiquated state laws that were better designed to protect big news media such as HBO or the New York Times.

Sorry about the rant, but one New York woman was sued for a million dollars due to a negative Yelp review. It’s cost her more than $20,000 to defend initially and spiraled out of control for just talking about the case.

Let’s move on…

Last year I shared the Four Burners theory:

Essentially you imagine your life is a stove with different burners. They represent family, friends, health, and work. The theory is that to “be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. To be really successful you have to cut off two.”

I don’t really believe it’s healthy to cut off any of those burners (especially the “health” one, because that would be the definition of unhealthy). I believe in trying to find a balance among them all. I know that I won’t be Julian Michaels (health) or Jeff Bezos (money), but I don’t need to be. I like to think you define successful yourself.

To make this analogy more difficult, none of these burners include any time for yourself. It is very important to read a book, watch a favorite show/movie, meditate, journal, or enjoy your favorite hobby…

… So, I’ve got to manage five burners, which is now two more than I should have to be successful.

For the past few years, the gas in my five burners has been about 45% family, 35% work, and 10% myself, 5% health, and 5% friends.

I’m not sure that’s a good mix. I’m curious what your mix is. (Let me know in the comments.)

I decided to break down my goals and plans into different areas.

Productivity

I’m going to give myself a grade of C in Productivity. That might be overly generous too.

My plan was to do the following 4 things:

  1. I will be more organized and reduce clutter. I’ve let too much pile up over the last year or two. It’s time to reduce and simplify.
  2. I will plan my most productive day. Again, having a plan is a good thing. Executing on it is better. That’s going to be the hard part.
  3. I will stop fighting poor technology. In an effort to save money, I fought my old computer that had too little memory. It often meant waiting up to 30 seconds for a new Firefox tab to load. (I have a Firefox tab hoarding problem.) I have already solved this by buying a new computer. Now things are fast. I’ve found that I’m am more productive, but the real time spent is often in that browser tab, not just waiting for it to load.
  4. I’m going to try to use the Pomodoro Technique. I think that structure will help me get more done.

I got a little more organized at the beginning of the year and during the last couple of months of the year. We got some Ikea Kallax shelving units and it has made a huge difference.

We need to do a better job of getting rid of stuff though. By “we”, I mean “me.” My wife has continued to sell outdated kids toys on Ebay and at church yard sales. I need to be more active in these areas. Perhaps more importantly, I just need to let stuff go. It hurts me to see good functional stuff go into a landfill. It hurts me less if it goes on Freecycle, but then I think, “Shouldn’t I have been able to get a few dollars for that?”

I don’t remember planning my most productive day and I only did the Pomodoro technique about a dozen times.

The new computer did help with the fight against old technology. Unfortunately, now that it has the memory to handle hundreds of Firefox tabs, I now have hundreds of Firefox tabs. My computer is a victim of Parkinson’s Law.

Essentially, I need to consistently use the systems that I think will work for me.

Motivation

I felt like I didn’t have competitive fire going into 2018.

Throughout the year I felt like I had gathered a little more motivation, but it still isn’t where it needs to be. I’ll give myself a grade of B-. This isn’t a great goal because it is so subjective, so maybe I’ll do better in making my 2019 goals.

If you have any suggestions, please reach out in the comments.

Money

Last year, I made a note that because this is a blog about money, I should have quantifiable money goals. Unfortunately, I do not.

With much of our money in real estate and the stock market, I’m piggybacking on whatever the market does. That’s been a great thing for quite a few years. Alas, 2018 wasn’t a good year for stocks. However, our real estate did better. I’m saving the full financial analysis of 2018 for a future blog post, but I think we did quite well considering.

Since it’s foolish to make a money goal about things you don’t control, I put my focus in another area:

Charting Energy Gal’s Retirement

Few people realize that this blog was created in 2006 as an answer to my wife’s ability to retire early due to her military service. I didn’t want to work another 20 years. I wanted to spend that time with her traveling or whatever it was we found interesting.

The difficulty is that my wife’s military status gives us a great discount at a great school for the kids. Retirement likely means that income in cut substantially while those expenses double. It’s a big decision, bigger than the typical, “Can I Retire?” question that people have.

One of my goals of 2018 was to help navigate that nearly impossible task. While there are still plenty of questions to be answered, I’m giving myself my an A- on this. Financially, a few things fell into place for me and it looks like they’ll stick for some time. It could close the gap. We’ll have to run some numbers and see where things stand.

Blog, Health, and Personal Growth Goals

I lumped these all together when I made them in 2018. It’s appropriate that I give myself a failing grade at all three together in 2019. I didn’t grow my blog traffic 20% like I had hoped. In fact, it might have shrunk. I didn’t lose those 10 pounds. Our December vacation to Aruba torpedos that. (Not that I would have achieved it anyway.) I didn’t join Toastmasters as it meets at night on a day when my wife works late.

Travel/Fun

We went to Orlando twice. One we had already planned before the start of 2018. The other was for the annual FinCon conference.

We also did our annual Block Island trip. I love getting away from deadlines and even technology for a bit.

Finally, there was the aforementioned Aruba trip at the timeshare my wife bought a long, long time ago.

We’ll probably have around the same amount of vacations this year. For the most part they’ll probably be to the same places for a variety of logistical reasons. I think in 2020 we’ll start to change things up.

I’ll give myself an A on this part, simply because it’s the one area that seems to have went exactly according to plan.

Final Thoughts

2018 was the first year that I tried this kind of format in setting goals. I should have planned some goals better. I definitely could have executed better. For 2019, I want to add goals for what I hope to teach the kids and what kind of activities we’ll do.

I want to get some of these goals to be more specific and more quantifiable. I want to be able to break them down so that each quarter or even each month, I’m moving forward on some kind of plan.

And hopefully, I’ll be able to get those goals together by next week. That would put me far ahead of the February pace of last year.

Creating My 2018 Goals and Plans

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I was going to wait until April to post this, but I’m a little ahead of schedule. Seriously though, we’re in February which speaks volumes about my productivity. That’s why this might be the most important article that I write this year.

One thing I learned from 2017 is that I need structure.

I can point to a whole host of excuses reasons for why I didn’t get as much done as I wanted in 2017. I was forced to waste a lot of time on a frivolous lawsuit. I was the general care-giver to a 3 and 4 year old (more on that later). I spent a lot of time reading about politics, which seems to have taken over the general news cycle. Yada, yada, yada.

I’m not sure how much of those will change in 2018, but maybe with a list of steady goals, I can work more efficiently. Or at least I can focus on the things that are really important.

As my 7th grade math teacher had posted in one of those old dot-matrix printer banners, “Failure to plan is planning to fail.” So here’s an attempt at a plan. It might be ambitious, but why not “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” (Don’t worry, I think I got all the cliche quotes out of my system.)

Four Burners Theory

I once read something brilliant called the Four Burners Theory. Essentially you imagine your life is a stove with different burners. They represent family, friends, health, and work. The theory is that to “be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. To be really successful you have to cut off two.”

I don’t really believe it’s healthy to cut off any of those burners (especially the “health” one, because that would be the definition of unhealthy). I believe in trying to find a balance among them all. I know that I won’t be Julian Michaels (health) or Jeff Bezos (money), but I don’t need to be. I like to think you define successful yourself.

To make this analogy more difficult, none of these burners include any time for yourself. It is very important to read a book, watch a favorite show/movie, meditate, journal, or enjoy your favorite hobby.

So, I’ve got to manage five burners, which is now two more than I should have to be successful.

Or in the words of Jack Johnson’s Subplots:

Well, how many subplots you got runnin’ around your mind?
The Gordian Knot must be cut through
Give me a red pen, I will simplify your story
Which part of yourself can you afford to lose?
And if you show me your list, then I will show you mine
Let’s kill off a character or two

Here’s my list. Anyone got a red pen? (Err, maybe just leave me comment at the end of this article.)

Productivity

Everyone says that they want to be more productive. It’s great to say it, but it’s hard to do it. It’s also difficult to measure.

This means that I’m going to have to revisit my old BeBetterNow Productivity Guide for some specific action items. While I would like to be more efficient with email, that’s far too broad for an action item. Instead here are a couple of specific items that I can focus on. Indirectly they’ll help with the email goal, but they aren’t about email at all.

  1. I will be more organized and reduce clutter. I’ve let too much pile up over the last year or two. It’s time to reduce and simplify.
  2. I will plan my most productive day. Again, having a plan is a good thing. Executing on it is better. That’s going to be the hard part.
  3. I will stop fighting poor technology. In an effort to save money, I fought my old computer that had too little memory. It often meant waiting up to 30 seconds for a new Firefox tab to load. (I have a Firefox tab hoarding problem.) I have already solved this by buying a new computer. Now things are fast. I’ve found that I’m am more productive, but the real time spent is often in that browser tab, not just waiting for it to load.
  4. I’m going to try to use the Pomodoro Technique. I think that structure will help me get more done.

Motivation

I need to revisit motivation. I don’t have a lot of competitive fire. After the Patriots’ impossible win in the AFC Championship game, Tom Brady said, “You need sparks. You need something to ignite you. When you’re losing, it’s which play are you going to make that’s going to kind incite everything?”

(The Patriots defense didn’t have those sparks in the Super Bowl, but let’s move on.)

I don’t have 66,000 screaming fans. I need to explore where I’m going to get those sparks from. Perhaps I’m too comfortable. I don’t have a burn the ships situation. I don’t know the exact historic root of that saying, but I guess some conquerors would burn the ships so they had nothing else to go back to. The result was that they had no choice but to win the fight.

That’s motivation, right? While I admire the dedication, as a father of a couple of boys, I won’t burn the ships. In fact, I’ll spend extra time extensively baby-proofing them.

Money

This is a blog about money, so I should probably have some firm money goals, right? Wrong.

I’ve learned that the Mr. Market does his thing. That is true for the stock and real estate markets. I’m a leaf on the wind. When I started writing this article (see the AFC reference above) the market was soaring high. In the last couple of days, it’s taken a nosedive.

It’s not wise to create a goal around something that I have zero control over. Instead, I’ll focus on the long-term, high-level goals. I may not have full control of these either, but at least I can steer my leaf in the wind in the right direction, right?

I’m putting my focus in 2018 into one thing:

Chart a Path for Energy Girl’s Retirement

I started this blog in 2006 in part because the love of my life could retire at 42 with her government pension. Would you want to work 23 more years than your spouse? Of course not!

Life takes its twists and turns and I’m fortunate to have started a family with her. Many of those 2006 thoughts are obsolete today.

She’s eligible to retire in 2019. I have about 15 months to put together a 13 year master plan. No pressure, right?

Does Facebook still allow you to have a status of “It’s complicated”? If so, that’s where this money goal is. It’s a long article on its own, but a lot of it boils down to balancing golden handcuffs and the value of your children’s education.

Aside from that, we have a bunch of short-term money things to think about. I need to flesh this out a bit, but fortunately, I can (and do) write about it publicly here.

Blog, Health, and Personal Growth Goals

I looked at these three things in the spreadsheet I’m making and I got overwhelmed with all the things I wanted to write on each of them. Here are some quick thoughts:

Blog – I’d like to grow blog traffic by 20% from the average of last year.

Health – I’d like to lose 10 pounds (ha ha, such a typical goal), but also get under 20% body fat. I don’t know if anyone really cares about my body type and goals related to it.

Personal Growth – I’d like to finally join Toastmasters and learn how to speak publicly. This is very difficult because the meetings don’t match up well with my wife’s work and taking care of the kids.

You may notice that everything starts with “I’d like.” This is an obvious problem with goal planning. I have a fear of committing to anything.

Travel/Fun

It looks like we’ll be going to Orlando twice this year. We had planned a Disney trip in March more than 6 months ago. Then FinCon threw us a curve by also being in Orlando on my son’s birthday. The only way to go is to bring the whole family with me. So that’s the plan.

We are also planning to go to Block Island as we do every year. It’s the town with the fewest people (~1000) in the smallest state. Christopher Walken and James Taylor have been known to hide out there.

If you ever want to get away from the hustle and bustle and connect with nature, Block Island is the place to be.

Finally, we’re also looking to do our annual Aruba trip at the timeshare my wife bought long, long ago.

Final Thoughts

It’s clear to me that I need to “zoom in” and make these definitive goals and break them into smaller pieces. I need to start somewhere and just typing this article helps me focus in on where and how.

I understand how ridiculous it is to write about goals for 2018 this late in the year. However, we’ve actually been working on an important one with cleaning and decluttering the office. By “we”, I mean mostly my wife. I’d like to say that we got a lot more accomplished in January, but we put a lot aside due to everyone in our house passing the flu around.

Do you have goals in 2018? Let me know in the comments!

Setting Goals for 2015

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There’s some irony in sitting down to write this article on the morning of January 29th. I had hoped to have it done a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully that’s not an indication on how my goals are going to go this year.

I’ve thought long about how I set goals every year just to find give myself a D+ the following year. The fundamental problem I’ve been having is to look at things from a year-long perspective. There’s always next month to hit revenue goals. I can lose 5 pounds next month. I’m trying to do something a little new and set goals by the month. For example, there’s Setting Goals for January 2015.

I’m not going to take this space to set monthly goals though. It doesn’t make sense at the financial stage we are at. The closest thing I can think of is building up emergency fund, which we are making great strides in.

There are a couple of things that I want to shot at though:

The Big Net Worth Milestone

One of the biggest goals I have is hitting that big net worth milestone. I’m not saying what that is, but if you read the comments, you should be able to put it together. Much of our net worth is not liquid, tied up in real estate investment properties and retirement brokerage accounts. Unfortunately, I don’t control either the stock or real estate markets, so my influence is limited to what I can save. I have to leave the rest up to “the powers that be”.

I’m wondering if those “powers that be” are related to low oil prices. Though we probably will see a raise in interest rates this year, the low oil prices should help company’s profits. (Perhaps the strong dollar eats into those though.) If consumers save at the pump, they might have more money for rents and houses, driving the theoretical value of our investment properties up. We’ll see what happens. At any rate, it will be fun to look back on this paragraph a year from now and see how crazy it was.

This is a terrible goal to set due to the factors outside my control, but I also see it as a can’t lose situation. If I don’t achieve it, I won’t be disappointed because I’ve managed my expectations to start. If I do achieve, then it’s “unicorns, show ponies, ‘where’s the beef?’!!!”.

Business Goals I

I continue to try to keep Lazy Man and Money as a daily money journey diary sharing my favorite tips of what works for me, while looking out for consumers to keep them safe from scams. Currently too much of my income relies on this website. I would like to diversify. It’s not just for the purposes of where my income comes from, but to match my interests. There’s more to life than money, and I want to write about it.

I realize that not everyone is a fan of reading about MLM scams. They are interesting to me from an intellectual standpoint and the number of comments I get tell me the articles are extremely useful. Overall, I’d say that 95% of the population doesn’t care. Of the remaining 5%, I’d say that 99% of those people are wrapped up in the pyramid schemes and not open to me exposing the fraud.

With that I’d like to announce the launch of a new website: Be Better Now. It’s a self-improvement site with a few unique twists to set it apart from anything else I think you’ve seen. I’ll go into it in more detail later in a separate post. For now I suggest you go explore, but here’s why you’ll love Be Better Now.

(Side note: To all those MLMers, who send me death threats or simply try to sue me, your best move is to help me be extremely successful with Be Better Now. Time that I spend there is time that I am not spending exposing your pyramid schemes. Also, you do your “industry” no favors when you attack people who are trying to help others.)

With the two websites combined, I hope to have 800,000 visitors throughout the year. I’ll put a huge stretch goal at an even million. Like the net worth goal above, I control some things such as how good the content is. I don’t control other things, such as getting people to spread it or search engines to say: “This is really useful!” If I build it, will they come? I guess we’ll find out.

Business Goals II

(With the upcoming Super Bowl, I’m in a Roman Numeral mood.)

Aside from the obvious website businesses, I’m still the a full-time family CFO. This means that I’m focused on ways to save money such as shopping for bargains or refinancing mortgages. It even includes our foray into solar power.

There are a lot of these little thing that I do which stretch the money we make further.

The closest thing I have to a goal for this year is to finally sign up as a host at DogVacay and bring in some extra money outside of website stuff. I estimate that I could make about $30 a day or roughly around $2000 a year doing it around once a week. It isn’t huge money, but when you already know how to stretch a dollar, $2000 is more than you might think.

Everything Else

I have bunch of tiny goals, but nothing sweeping like the yearly ones. One example might be to drink at least 50% almond milk instead of my current milk. I’d like to investigate all those tiny health choices I can make and really cement them as habits that stick. Most of this is going to be covered at Be Better Now on a monthly basis.

When it comes time to look this over at the end of the year, I’ll go and grade those monthly goals and come up with a meta-analysis of how things went.

… And if all this doesn’t work, I’ll look to improve the process for next year. I view it as an evolutionary process.

Make a New Year’s Resolution for SMARTER Goals This Year

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[Note: Every year, I republish this article around this time as I remind myself what’s really important in setting goals for the next year. It’s the last of the New Year re-run articles, I swear.]

It’s a few days into the new year… how are your New Year’s Resolutions coming along? Maybe I’m just Lazy (wait, I am), but I typically start having trouble with mine in the next few days… just as work starts getting really busy again. Right now, I’m enjoying my freshly born son (surprise!), trying to write articles in advance, get a new website off the ground, and hundred other things. That’s the problem with New Year’s resolutions, you get busy, put it off, and then it gets forgotten. The best way to stop that from happening this year is by being SMART with your goals.

SMART Goals

Many of you have heard about SMART goals in the past. It’s common in the realm of project management. SMART is simply an mnemonic device to help you remember the steps necessary to achieve your goals. Though some of the specific terms are debated (more on that later), one interpretation is that stands for:

  • Specific – What is the goal that I want to accomplish? Do I want to get my TPS reports submitted with cover sheets? Do I want to get that T.G.I. Friday’s Chotchkie’s waitress to go out with me? Or do you want to just want to get your red stapler back? (Note: Those goals won’t make sense unless you’ve seen Office Space)
  • Measurable – How do I measure the goal? Am I successful if I submit my TPS reports with cover sheets 80% of the time? Sounds like a good start. Having I gotten to know what the Chotchkie’s waitress likes? Am I successful if I find that she likes kung-fu? Yep.
  • Attainable – Is my goal reasonable? If my goal is learn to fly by flapping my arms, I need to go back to the drawing board. In this case it is possible to achieve the TPS report/coversheet goal… and contrary to what any logic in my head says, I guess it’s finding Jennifer Anistons working at Chotchkie’s and get them to go out with you is “attainable” (maybe this is where my Office Space analogy breaks down).
  • Relevant – Does the goal matter to you and your life? Do you really care about achieving the 80% TPS report/coversheet goal? No you don’t. Does going out with Chotchkie’s waitress matter? I’m going to go on a limb and say that in example it’s something worth caring about.
  • Time-bound – When do expect to reach this goal? Maybe you want to start out with getting your TPS Reports up to par for just a month… then raise it to a fiscal quarter… then go for the full year… Maybe you want to find out three things that the Chotchkie’s waitress likes in the next week.

I mentioned earlier that there are some variations to SMART goals. Some use Appropriate and Realistic instead of Attainable and Relevant. If you think about it, Appropriate is similar enough to Relevant, and Realistic is similar enough to Attainable that it doesn’t really matter. As long as you cover the main five concepts you are ready to tackle any goal… or are you?

SMARTER Goals

I’ve noticed some people are getting a little clever with SMART Goals and trying to make them even SMARTER Goals. They do this by adding a couple more steps such as

  • Exciting – Your goals should exciting you. I think this is captured in Relevant step mentioned above. This could be debated, but in the example above, I think it’s safe to say that Peter should be excited about the idea of taking Jennifer Aniston’s character on a date.
  • Recorded – You should record your progress at set intervals. I like this one. It’s a little like Measurable, but reminds you to go back and look at how you are doing

Another variation is:

  • Evaluate – Same concept as the recorded above – evaluate your goal progress on an on-going basis
  • Re-do – After evaluating your goal’s progress, go back and adjust your goal accordingly. Now that you know some things that the waitress likes, ask her to come over and watch the Kung-Fu marathon on channel 39.

SMARTEST Goals

I’m not going to revise the acronym again. Instead I’d like to add a couple of important tips for achieving your goals that I believe get lost in the steps above:

  • Assess Where You Start – Before you create a goal, you should assess where you stand currently. It will help you with various steps in the process.
  • Break them Down – You may need to break big goals into smaller ones. Some goals may seem break the “Attainable” guideline, but in smaller chunks it becomes easier. Paying off $100,000 of debt in a year may not be attainable to some people, but paying off $25,000 may be possible.
  • Get Some Motivating Help – How do I keep up with my goals? Here are some things that I’ve found helpful:
    • StickK to Your Goals – This website can help make you accountable for not achieving your goals.
    • Buddy System – If your goal is to go to the gym, get a buddy to hold yourself accountable. On days when you don’t feel like going, you will be less likely to give up because you don’t want to let your buddy down.
    • Reminders – It can be easy to forget your goals. I would recommend setting up regular reminders on a regular basis on Google Calendar. If you are low-tech type, you could put a picture that reminds you of your goal on your bathroom mirror.

If you take just one thing away from this article, I hope it’s this: “Lazy Man has seen Office Space far too many times.”

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