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.)

By late October, I can look at my goals for the year and feel relatively confident that ones I haven’t touched won’t get completed. With only about eight weeks left before December 31, if I haven’t even started, I won’t have time to catch up.

Early-November goals review brings the start of my annual assessment of what went sideways when it came to accomplishing my annual objectives and why it went sideways. Often, I realize that I thought I should do the thing—but I didn’t really want to do the thing.

“Should” alone rarely convinces us to act, especially when we have other things we’d rather do.

In short, this is the time I look at my goals for the year and wonder what the heck I was thinking at the time I wrote them down. Sometimes, I must have thought I’d evolve into someone else over the course of the year. In other cases, I simply had ideas bigger than the number of hours to hold them. For example:

• Why did I think I’d somehow have the time to give multiple new sports a real go in only twelve months, especially with everything else on my plate—including getting settled in a new country, learning a new language, and working at the same pace as ever?

• How did I think I would manage to do even more travel than I did, especially given the aforementioned obligations? And how did I think I’d have so many more people coming to Europe to play with me in my first year here? (Hint to friends: Please visit!)

• Again, given other commitments, how did I think I would achieve all these writing goals?

Whereas I think the multiple-new-sports idea slots onto the “should” rather than “want” shelf, I know the travel and the writing ideas really do slide into the “wants.”

A little streamlining of expectations and objectives in the year ahead will help. Always, I have so many things I would love to do, and yet life gives me so little time to do them.

Typically, I draft my goals for the year ahead in November, over the long Thanksgiving weekend. As we don’t have such a holiday here in Switzerland, this rhythm may change. These late October and early November reflections help set the stage for the planning ahead. What will 2020 bring?