2017 Reflection

I meant to do this post a week or so ago, but I just didn’t get around to it. 2017 was a good year and I wanted to reflect back on my goals for the year and how well I did with them. At the time, I classified them in three different areas:

• Personal
• Projects
• Professional

So let’s take a quick look at each other those areas and how I did in 2017 in getting those goals accomplished.

Personal

I had two personal goals for 2017, workout 5 days a week and to come up with a cleaning schedule for the house and stick to it. I wanted to workout more just because I wanted to be healthier. I stuck to this goal for 5 months and then the wheels came off. I did manage to workout at least once a week, but it was nowhere near the 5 days that I had planned. The cleaning schedule came about because, at the time, we were struggling with finding a balance of family time, keeping the house up, and pretty much everything else. Baby boy was getting better on this feet and just required a lot more attention. This too, I kept up for a few months and then let go. I used Google Keep to send me daily reminders of what needed to be done. It worked, but then I got lazy. I would like to address both of these goals in 2018.

Projects

I really like having side projects of things to work on. In my pervious teaching job I got to spend a lot of time creating things for my students. Projects help fill that void. I like creating things. I had four main goals in this area:

1. Create a weekly YouTube blog
2. Complete a new set of Autodesk Inventor videos
3. Create three new Udemy classes
4. Create a podcast with my wife

I did a good job with YouTube but after our trip to Norway, I stopped. I found that I wasn’t creating for fun, but out of habit. That’s not how I want to create things, so I stopped. I did not create a new set of Inventor videos but I do have plans for doing so in 2018.

I was able to create not only three new Udemy classes, but five! I have some more goals in this area and I really enjoy creating online learning content. At the time of this post I have over 4,500 students from across the world. That’s a pretty cool reach to have outside of my typical classroom. I’ll have to dedicate a post to Udemy and online teaching sometime in the future. If for an reason you are interested in viewing my classes, you can see my classes here.

My final project goal was to create a podcast with my wife. I’m happy to say that we did start one and it has been going really well. We have lots of ideas and need to do a lot more work to really get it going, but I’m encouraged and thrill that we got it off the ground. If you want to check it our, here it is, the Budget Couple Podcast.

Professional

I had a number of professional goals based on developing new and interesting content for my students. I wanted to try new approaches and give ideas like Genius Hour a try. Unfortunately I did not meet a single professional goal for myself in 2017. I made a lot of strides in various things, but I did not fully address a single professional goal to my satisfaction.

2018?

I’ve written down my 2018 goals but I’m not ready to share them quite yet. I want to refine them a bit more to make sure that I don’t bite off more than I can chew. I think one of my problems from last year was taking on too many different things. I wasn’t able to focus properly on any particular item and I was always looking at multiple items. I want to change that.

Right now my goals are kind of general, but I want to add some timeframes to help me focus on things properly so that I can achieve my goals in 2018.