Month-in-Review Highlights: January 2020

Actual French king’s cakes look nothing like the New Orleans concoctions. Lausanne, Switzerland. January 6, 2020.

I postmortem each month shortly after it ends, reflecting on what happened in general and, more specifically, in the context of my goals. Though I don’t share all my insights here, I have made it a practice to share at least one key highlight or insight. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)

When only one month of twelve has passed, I can easily feel “on track.” I’ve just set these goals, after all, and beginnings bring fresh motivation.

Business behaviors? Firing on all cylinders! I’ve so far exceeded all my to-dos for helping FrogDog achieve its growth objectives in the year ahead. (Speaking of which: Need any marketing help? I know just the team.)

Fitness behaviors? On them! I’ve gone all into the high-intensity interval training stuff and the short bursts of yoga. (All of us start January in high fitness motivation, including me.)

Family and social behaviors? Check! With only four weeks of the year behind us, I’ve done a decent job on the people front.

Now the challenge: Keeping all the plates spinning as planned for eleven more months.

Refocusing: Reordering Life Facets

I create different goals for different life facets. In other words, to ensure that I take into account all the aspects of my life that matter (and don’t, for example, set only professional goals), I create goals for each. Also, every year, I order the facets based on their priority for me in the year ahead.

One year, I’ll need to give some life facets more time and energy than others. In other years, these focus areas change. We evolve, our lives evolve, and our emphases should evolve accordingly. I try to consciously address these evolutions each year at goal-setting time.

This year, I did a massive reordering of my life facets.

The past year—and the past decade, honestly—reset so many fronts of my life and my perspectives that simply looking at my life facets and determining their priority for 2020 took a lot of mental focus ahead of even starting this year’s goal creation.

Starting 2020, I’ve grown a little more settled in my not-so-new life and I’ve learned from my mistakes in focus in 2019. Last year, I put too much drive into certain areas, which caused frustration. Also, I had several a-ha moments with my work and interests. When you decide to focus a lot of energy in certain areas of your life and the emphasis doesn’t make sense given other life events, everything feels off-kilter.

For my own happiness and peace in the kingdom in the world around me—and for my own personal goal achievement—I needed to adjust how I spent my time and where I put my energies in the year ahead.

So far, so much better for 2020.

Two of Twelve

The year still feels new—though we’ve already passed more than one twelfth of it. And it will continue to go so fast.