Resolutions and Goal Scoring

Happy new year to you all. I wish you a blessed year of 2012. I spent 5 hours in the kitchen yesterday, but I did not complain cos i was prepared for it. At the end of the day, it was a good day.

2011 was a good year for me. I don’t do New Year resolutions. I wrote a post on New Year resolutions last year January about why New Year resolutions fail most times. I think it is quite insightful and you can read it here. What I do is to set realistic and measurable goals and score myself later. So, after doing my stock taken based on the annual goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year, I scored 38.6%. Yeah, I know it is low, but at least, it is better than last year’s 36%. The irony is that the more I achieved in life, the less I scored.

Funny enough, I don’t think the reason was that I set goals that were too high to attain. I think one of the reasons was that I focused so well on achieving one part (e.g career and finance) and neglected so many others and at the year, it affects the average, because the goals I usually set encompasses so many parts of life.

Other times, I set goals that are beyond my control. An example can be ‘To go to India.’ What if I am denied Indian Visa? You see, I will automatically score 0% that goal there cos even my efforts will not count, as the goal did not put my effort in consideration. So if I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot, I can say ‘To take concrete steps towards travelling to India’. Though, this particular one is more subjective and gives room for laziness. Since I am setting the goal for myself, I’ll rather be strict with myself and set the first one.

One other reason why I scored low was because I wasn’t going back to check the goals monthly, so it was the ones I considered more important, which apparently, stuck in my head more, that I ended up achieving. This also causes one to chase other goals that were not initially set. There is nothing wrong with this, as long as you achieve most of the ones set before. What I have done to combat this is to set monthly goals, feeding into the yearly goals so I achieve as much as possible.


We practice this at work, so I am kinda used to this thing, though I started this before I started working. I feel have started boring you guys. Niways, see some of my scores below


2008 – 48%


2009 - 57.5%


2010 – 36%


2011 – 38.6%


I have looked at the goals for 2012, and I think the scores will be more impressive this time around cos I have changed strategies. I think I also set goals within my control. Let’s see how it goes sha.

I haven’t finished, but the post is getting long. I think I have to continue in another post