The final check-in for my 2021 goals. Here is where I landed and what worked and what didn’t work.
| Goal # | Category | Goal | Goal Amount | Current Status | % Complete | Goal End Date |
| 1 | Health | Average 10k steps a day to improve physical health | 10,000 | 10493 | N/A | 12/31/2021 |
| 2 | Health | Track mood in Daylio at least four times a week to improve mental health | 208 | 365 | 176% | 12/31/2021 |
| 3 | Health | Drink Water 60 oz of water a day to improve health | 260 | 254 | 98% | 12/31/2021 |
| 4 | Personal | Read 4 Books to increase knowledge | 4 | 3.5 | 88% | 12/31/2021 |
| 5 | Personal | Write 52 blog posts to improve the site | 52 | 26 | 50% | 12/31/2021 |
| 6 | Personal | Update “The Company” Data twice to enhance the data and keep it fresh. | 2 | 1 | 50% | 12/31/2021 |
| 7 | Financial | Invest 10,000 in retirement savings to prepare for future retirement | 10000 | 11301 | 113% | 12/31/2021 |
| 8 | Financial | Save 30,000 for down payment for a house. | 30000 | 32000 | 107% | 12/31/2021 |
Final Update
Health
Overall I am super happy with how my Health goals turned out. The only goal I could not fully accomplish was my water goal, which was still 98% completed.
I destroyed my Daylio tracking goal and tracked this every day this year. This goal was easier to do than some of my other daily goals because I could go back and add a day if I missed it, unlike my step or water goal, which either got accomplished on the day or not.
My step goal would have probably been at a higher average step count if I had not lost all my data earlier this year (see my sad Q3 check-in notes about what happened there).
Personal
My Personal goals were by far my weakest goals this year. I quickly tried to finish a book on December 31st but with no luck. In reality, I did finish four books this year, but I started one of them before the year began, so I did not count it (hence the half). I am also almost done with another book but felt like it made more sense to mark this goal as not completed.
The blog post goal was a big miss. I was completing more posts at the beginning of this year because I had more free time but finding time to write became harder and harder to find as 2021 progressed. I also think I was a lot more hopeful about how motivated I would be to write at the beginning of the year than I ended up being. I am still happy that I am keeping up with this even if it is at a slower pace. Hopefully next year I will be able to stretch this a little further.
As for the company data, I still feel (somewhat confident) I can release new data by the end of January 2022. I hope to work on some new data types and dive into this deeper. I should have done it in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, but my time off during the holidays seemed to slip away from me as usual.
Financial
I accomplished both of my Finance goals last quarter and did not make any further progress on either of them. I adjusted my retirement goal downwards a bit. I believe I originally included company matches to the savings goal, and I feel like that was cheating a bit. That is why the number is now lower than I have posted in my Q3 post. Overall, like my Health goals, I am proud of what I accomplished in this category.
Final Summary
Overall I am happy with what I accomplished this year. I fully completed 50% of my goals. But in reality, I am comfortable saying I was successful with 75% of my goals. Having eight goals is a lot to focus on, and the ball was going to be dropped somewhere. Sadly it ended up being in my Personal goals category. Hopefully, I can put more TLC into this category next year. Below I will share some of the lessons I learned this year. In the next few days I will also share my 2022 goals.
What I Learned For My Next Goals
Automation and Habits are Game-Changers – I could accomplish my Health and Financial goals a lot easier because of automation. My 401k goal just completed itself because the money left my paycheck and went directly into my 401k. There is no work on my part besides setting up what percentage I wanted to be taken out of my paycheck. For my step goal I bult a habit to walked/jogged 4-6 miles first thing in the morning. Making this part of my routine made it a lot easier to accomplish. For my Daylio tracking, I set a reminder every night in the app to do this goal. Without this reminder, I very easily would have forgotten to do this every day. It would also send me a reminder the next day if I did not complete the previous days submission.
Make Sure To Back Up Your Data! – Losing my phone made me lose a lot of data for some of my goals. I was able to recover some of this, but some of it was lost for good. I have learned the hard way always to store a backup!
Publicizing and Giving Updates On Your Goals Helps – I have been tracking my own goals personally for a few years but but I believe setting these goals and tracking them publicly helped me accomplish a lot more than I normally would have. Even if I am just writing this for myself, making my goals public helped push me to achieve more because I knew at some point I would need to follow up with what I had accomplished. The Quarterly check-ins were good for me to see how I was pacing for my goals. If I waited to only give an update at the end of the year I am sure I would have been a lot further off from what I was hoping to accomplish.
Baseline For Next Year – In 2022 I will stop tracking some of these goals and add a few new ones, but I think this year gave me a better understanding of what I can reasonably accomplish in a year and maybe what I need to do to push myself further next year. For example, I think 52 blogs posts will always be a considerable stretch. I plan on having another blog post goal for next year, and I think around 26 is more reasonable.
In the next few days I will share my 2022 goals. I will update this post and add a link here once it is posted.
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