Category: Goals

Categories
Goal Setting Goals

Aiming to Run 1,000 Kilometers, and Other Goals for 2025

My weekends already look quite different than they did in 2024.

One of my favorite things about the Christmas holiday season is the opportunity to reflect. To take stock of my life. To zoom out and re-imagine things.

Where am I succeeding?

Where am I growing?

Where do I need to realign my investments of time and energy?

An annual tradition that anchors me

An important part of this annual reflection is a goal-setting session that my dad and three brothers complete together. It usually takes us 3–4 hours to discuss each domain of life, and because we love and trust each other, we get pretty real.

This year was our twelfth annual meeting of the minds, and as always, I’m fired up for more growth in 2025.

One of the most significant changes I’ll be making in 2025 is to hit pause on weekly livestream interviews with educators. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this hobby, but it’s taken 7–8 hours a week (mostly weekends) to get through each step of the workflow involved.

It’s actually quite painful to hit pause on these episodes, because I enjoy the activity and weekly rhythm. But freeing up this time allows me the margin to create other forms of content that I’m passionate about, including this blog post.

Why share these goals publicly?

Fair question, and I know most of my acquaintances would be horrified by the idea of sharing their own personal goals on the web.

I’m posting them here for three main reasons:

  1. When we write them down, our goals become a little more real.
  2. The power of public accountability is REAL. People may ask me how I’m doing on these goals this year, and that awareness pushes me to stick with them.
  3. Even if I don’t reach every goal, I believe that aiming for a goal is better than playing it safe and not aiming at all. Some progress is better than none.

I’m not afraid of failure.

Here they are — my goals for 2025

Physical

  1. Run 1,000 km. This will be tracked automatically on Strava.
  2. Complete daily mini-workouts (push-ups, squats, curls, stretches) for 300/365 days.
  3. Check blood pressure numbers weekly (52 times) and push my averages below 130/80. My BP numbers have always been poor, but 2024 was especially worrying.
  4. End 2025 at 189 lbs. I ended 2024 at 195 lbs.
  5. Complete the Vancouver Sun Run (10 km) in under 53:48 (my 2024 time).
  6. Complete 10+ chin-ups in one set by end of year.
  7. Bench press 135 lbs. x 20 reps (recorded PB is x 12 reps) by end of year.

Financial

  1. Invest in S&P 500 ETFs within my TFSA. Single stock-picking has been fun for the last few years, but my results haven’t kept up with the S&P. When it comes to investing, boring often wins over the long haul. It’s time to get more boring.
  2. Earn $240+ from blog posts on Medium.
  3. Earn $1,200 from AdSense on my YouTube channel for teachers. To get there, I’ll need to publish more tech tutorial content — that’s what teachers around the world find most helpful.
  4. Give successively more to charitable organizations each month than the month before. This is a trend that my wife and I have followed since marriage in 2015 and we would like it to continue indefinitely.
  5. Give spontaneously to family, friends, or those in need once a month. This often takes the form of treating another couple to a meal, but it can take other forms as well.

Marital

  1. Continue to connect with my wife on Friday Family Fun nights, Saturday date nights, and Sunday afternoons. She needs lots of quality time together and I am grateful that she doesn’t ever seem to get sick of Tim Time.
  2. Create some new travel memories together in July — location still to be determined.

Parental

  1. Connect with our younger son (he lives at home with us, but the three of us have different schedules) over a meal at least once per week.
  2. Continue to match him dollar-for-dollar on his university tuition. His mother and I share finances, so this is a shared goal.

Professional

  1. Improve my contributions to my elementary team, students, and parent community. I’m happy with my current mix of teaching and administrative duties.
  2. Support my still-to-be-hired new principal (my seventh principal in nine years) this fall.
  3. Obtain my BCCT certification. I’m currently certified to teach at all schools in Manitoba, but only independent schools in BC.
  4. Publish 50 blog posts (and matching vlog posts) about my education practice.
  5. Increase my proficiency with AI-for-teachers tools. This one is difficult to quantify, but let’s say that by year’s end I want to be leveraging AI tools in my work more than once per day.

Self-Improvement

  1. Complete daily goal tracking consistently (as in: charting my progress virtually every day) using the Strides app.
  2. Finish 12 books. I read almost every night, but I hop around a lot, so the word ‘finishing’ is important here. If you’re a reader, I’d love to connect with you on Goodreads.
  3. Publish 26+ personal interest blog posts (and matching vlog posts) like this one.
  4. Complete 24+ bedtime journal entries.
  5. Complete 24+ morning reflection and prayer journal entries. These are profoundly centering and give me great peace when I actually do them
  6. Complete 6 BC hikes and 6 paddleboard trips in the summer.
  7. Publish 12 long-form videos on each of my Vancouver reviews channel (in 2024 I published 2), travel channel (in 2024 I published 3), and my hiking and paddleboarding channel (in 2024 I published 10). The long-term goal here is to have 4–5 monetized YouTube channels by the time I retire from teaching.

Social/Relational

  1. Meet weekly with other couples from our church community to share life, learning, and friendships together. This is a life-giving practice for me and my wife.
  2. Organize and attend 10+ monthly father-son Zooms (we live in different parts of the country).
  3. Complete a first-ever camping and hiking trip with my brothers and some of their children in August. I’m dreaming of an overnight trip to Landslide Lake on Vancouver Island.
  4. Meet six times with three other male teacher friends in my area. We aim for monthly get-togethers, but about half of our meetings get knocked out by life.

Final thoughts

There you have them — most of my goals for 2025. They’re as specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timelined as I can make them.

What do you have in mind for this year? Whatever your goals, make sure they are quantifiable.

And if you DO make yours public, tag me below and share a link to your work. I’d love to check them out and cheer you on.

Let’s GO.

Standing near the peak of Brunswick Mountain in Lions Bay, BC

Categories
Career Entrepreneurship Gig Economy Goals

Why I Won’t Tell My Sons to Just Follow Their Passions

IMG_7449

Ignore the money and just follow your passions.

This is the career advice offered to students by some teachers today. It’s an appealing and romantic message, and these educators mean well.

What they mean is this. Don’t allow yourself to be pushed into a professional track not of your choosing. Don’t enroll in a 5-year university program and take on the burden of student debt due to the dictates of society. Don’t enter the proverbial rat race of corporate America for some vague promises of security and stability. Just because your parents want you to become a doctor or lawyer doesn’t mean that’s the path for you. Instead, identify the areas that you feel most passionate about and work in those spaces.

Fulfilling Work

I agree with all of those sentiments. And I agree that the most fulfilling work we can do as human beings is the work that doesn’t feel like work. The most fulfilling work is that which best aligns with our natural curiosity, competencies, and interests. This is work that adds value to the lives of others and energizes our own souls in that process.

An Economy of Opportunity

It should also be said here that I’m also quite in favor of no “job” at all — at least, not in the traditional sense of working for an employer. Though I’m not living entirely in this space myself, I’m a big admirer of entrepreneurship, self-employment, and creative work. Unlike some of my peers across K-12 education, I’ll actually defend and support a student’s ambition to adopt “professional YouTuber” as their career track of choice — keeping in mind the tremendous amount of hard work and sacrifice required to bring dreams of that sort to fruition. It’s the 21st century and a global internet economy, after all. The secure career jobs of yesteryear are vanishing in the wake of a rapidly evolving and responsive marketplace. Work is free for the taking and creating more than any time in history.

Meaningful Learning

So yes: explore and develop natural passions and inclinations. It is precisely this ideology that is at the heart of some of the most exciting trends in education today, including inquiry-based and project-based learning. These are practices that produce deeper and more meaningful learning because students are freed to direct the focus of their own learning activities instead of merely following traditionally narrow parameters as prescribed by the teacher. Education is rightly becoming more and more about following curiosities and exploring natural interests — learning to learn instead of memorizing large bodies of content of very dubious long-term value.

Dollars Matter

What I’m not a fan of is the idea that as educators we should coach our students to completely ignore dollars. Because in a world of expenses, dollars matter. They just do.

As our young learners mature and progress through the system, I believe we owe it to them to offer them some frank advice about the financial implications of the work they choose to pursue. That’s a controversial suggestion in some circles, but I stand by it.

My Story

I graduated from university in 2001. Fresh-eyed and full of ideals, I signed my first contract at an independent school in an urban area of a large city. Tuition was intentionally low so that lower class families could attend, and as a result, my first salary was a whopping $24,000.

The mission and vision of the school shaped its culture, its tuition, and therefore its salaries, and I was completely on board. But the reality was that after deductions, my bi-weekly paychecks ran in the mid-$800s. Working hard into the evenings as a rookie teacher, I was hard-pressed just to spend within my means — let alone pay off my $12,000 of car debt or start to put any savings away. I worked at that school for the first six years of my teaching career, and although my salary grew incrementally each year, the marginal increases weren’t significant enough to alter my financial picture very much.

In today’s world of rising housing costs, gas costs, and grocery costs, I would be a little concerned if one of my two stepsons took a job paying $24,000 annually at 21 years old. That’s just not the kind of income that will allow them to save up to buy a car, a ring, a wedding, a property, provide for children, or attempt any number of other rites of adulthood that we might hope for them in terms of building a future for themselves and their families.

If we’re being honest, $24,000 a year is much closer to a recipe for living cheque to cheque and serving the masters of Visa and MasterCard. That’s not an automatic scenario, by any means — disciplined financial stewardship should happen at any income level. But incomes below the poverty line trend in the direction of very challenging financial realities.

Money Isn’t Everything

Don’t hear me extolling the glories of money too highly here. Money is simply a medium of exchange. It doesn’t have the power to produce happiness — and happiness can certainly be found outside of the American Dream. Money doesn’t have the power to create passion for work activities where that passion didn’t exist before. But it does have the power to create options. To reject that reality is intellectual laziness.

Free to Chart Their Own Course

Ultimately, my stepsons will still be free to choose their own career tracks. And their parents won’t be pressuring them in any one direction. The reality is that one of them may choose to work for an NGO that builds sewer systems in Haiti, with a subsistence income similar to my first teaching salary. My wife and I wouldn’t shut that down — we’d be genuinely proud of their attitude of service and their contributions to our world.

A Call for Some Coaching

What I do intend to do is simply coach them along the journey. Help them to think about the implications of their work and career choices. Recognize that the financial decisions that they make in their 20s will reverberate in some ways for the rest of their lives.

Here’s the summary of my message — my advice to my stepsons and any high school student who will listen. Dream big dreams for your life. Yes, explore and develop your creative passions. Find fulfilling work.

But in that process, keep an eye on the dollars. Because dollars do matter.

Categories
Goal Setting Goals Productivity Self-Actualization Wellness

You Hate New Year’s Resolutions Because You’re Doing Them Wrong

There’s one part of SMART goals that still doesn’t get enough love.

1__l4jZqqPaci120vl08R8zw

“80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by February.”

“Only 8% of New Year’s resolutions are successful.”

Like me, you’ve heard these depressing and oft-repeated statistics. Quite possibly, you’ve joined the ranks of the intellectually enlightened who scoff at the naivete of annual resolution-making rituals and pragmatically embrace their deficiencies instead.

And then there are some among us whose hatred of New Year’s resolutions seems almost visceral. The mere mention of resolutions is enough to produce a scowl of disgust and a healthy rant to boot.

Why all the hate?

I believe the main reason is that at one time or another, these cynics tried setting resolutions themselves. Lose weight. Work out more. Save more money. Spend more time with family. Be a better human being.

At the outset of these resolutions, there was hope. There was optimism. There was the promise of real and lasting change. Often, the resolutions were announced with fervent passion and great fanfare to family and friends.

And then inevitably, the resolutions failed. Old habits crept back in. Resolve weakened. And before they knew it, the ways of December had returned.

Disappointment, humiliation, and frustration followed. So, like a jilted lover, these resolution-makers vowed “Never again.” Never again will I set myself up for such personal disappointment or public humiliation. Never again will I waste time with this foolishness.

I can’t fail if I don’t attempt, goes the subconscious logic. It’s a form of emotional self-defense. It’s what Carol Dweck calls the fixed mindset, when we allow the fear of failure to prevent growth.

I have good news for these doubters, however. The good news is that New Year’s Resolutions can and do work. You only hate them because you’re doing them wrong.

“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.” — Zig Ziglar

A quick note on semantics. If you’re a resolution hater, try replacing resolutions with goals. For some, resolutions are more easily associated with the sorts of vague, nebulous platitudes that inevitably end in failure, while goals align better with targeted, specific growth or change.

Now that we’re clear on language, we need to address the most underrated and yet most powerful part of goal-setting: numbers.

You’ve likely heard of SMART goals, so let’s begin there. You’ve heard that effective goals must be:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Realistic & Relevant
  • Time Limited

It’s a fantastic formula, and I do believe each piece of that formula is critical. Yet there’s one bullet that — based on personal experience — dwarfs the other four in importance.

Measurable is EVERYTHING.

If your goal doesn’t have a number in it, it’s worthless. If you have no way to quantify your goal or check for success at the end of your timeline, you are literally wasting brainpower even thinking about it.

I believe this needs to be shouted from the rooftops. Stop wasting your time setting goals — any goals — that don’t contain numbers.

Instead, set goals that are measurable, quantifiable, empirical. Start obsessing about data. Track your life in every area that’s important to you.

To show you what I mean and how I’m applying this, here are some of my measurable goals for 2018:

  • Financial: Reduce the amount owing on our HELOC by 25%. (End of February: +10%.)
  • Marital: Complete 36 ‘State of the Union’ update discussions with my wife in 2018. (End of February: 6/36.)
  • Paternal: Complete 12 monthly stepdad summits. (End of February: 2/12.)
  • Physical: Complete 45 push-ups in one set. (End of February: 35.) Earn a time of under 50 minutes in a 10 kilometer run on April 22nd. (Result to come.) Work out at Anytime Fitness 156 times. (End of February: 26/156.) Run a total of 156 km. (End of February: 9.8/156 km.) Record less than 120/80 BP. (End of February: 125/86 was best reading.)
  • Professional: Complete year 1 of MEdL degree. (End of February: 7/12 months completed.)
  • Self-Improvement: Finish reading 12 books. (End of February: 1/12.) Purge 52 items of clothing. (End of February: 8/52.) Complete 52 bedtime journal entries. (End of February: 25/52.) Write and publish 52 blog posts. (End of February: 6/52.)
  • Social: Complete 10 father-son conference calls. (End of February: 2/10.)

I lay out all of these goals and more in a spreadsheet, and now check these goals more often than I have in five years of following the practice. They keep me grounded, focused, and motivated. I press on in each of these areas partly because I can see progress. I feel momentum. I see reasons to be encouraged.

Think back to some of the classic New Year’s resolutions we’ve all set for ourselves in the past. Lose weight. Get in better shape. Save more money. Spend more time with family. Be a better human being.

Those goals have little chance of success because they’re difficult to track. You’re not going to stay motivated to make better choices for 365 days based on eat healthier. But you ARE going to stay motivated so long as you can measure and track incremental progress.

So start journaling everything. Obsess with data. Take five minutes each morning and update your life’s activity in all the areas that matter. And I promise that you’ll see results like you’ve never seen before.

There’s no time like the present to stop hating resolutions. Embrace goal-setting with all you’re worth. And if you care about success, make them measurable.

Categories
Goals Mindset Morning Routines Self-Actualization

9 Daily Actions That Create Greater Self-Actualization

Some day. Some day very soon, we like to tell ourselves.

Some day soon I will pull it all together. I’ll invest in the relationships that matter most. I’ll journal and meditate. I’ll set clear goals every morning. I’ll read the books I’ve been meaning to read. I’ll get into great shape and eat better. I’ll brush up on that musical instrument. I’ll start to write, design, and create things of beauty or utility that others will value.

Some day very soon. Just as soon as life settles down and becomes a little more manageable, I’ll make my move. And it’ll be awesome.

Yet, if we’re honest, we know what comes next. Life doesn’t slow down, and it doesn’t become more manageable. Or if it does, another challenge appears on the horizon. Family obligations increase. Work pressures loom. Health issues complicate.

The prerequisite state of equilibrium that we demand before we move forward has been disrupted again, and ‘some day’ remains as elusive as ever. All the future tense talk that friends and family hear from us about all the great initiatives on the way remains just that. Talk.

The reality is that ideas and intentions are absolutely worthless. The only thing that counts, that makes an impact, that produces real results and lasting legacy is action. That’s it.

Everyone dreams. Everyone has a concept — however vague or ill-defined — of their best life and best self. But sadly, this maximal manifestation of one’s passions, abilities, and creative energies just never takes shape for most people.

It’s not for lack of vision. And it’s not for lack of desire. The reasons we don’t step out and express our truest passions and purpose usually amount to uncertainty and fear — fear that the changes we want and the achievements we imagine are just too difficult and overwhelming.

We fear the failure that might follow the shock of a giant leap or an abrupt change in life direction. And so our fear keeps us in a state of paralysis by analysis. And nothing changes. Nothing happens.

We fail to see that the only thing lacking is simply action — any action at all. We miss the fact that even tiny, daily habits represent momentum and progress in the right direction. Taken over time, things start happening.

Impressive Progress Can Happen in Small Increments

One of the biggest lessons I learned in 2017 was the incredible power of incremental progress. Fueled by influencers like Brendon Burchard, Tom Karadza, and Brian Buffini, I finally understood that some of my life’s most precious dreams and ambitions would never be realized until I started to actually invest in them every single day.

“How you spend your days is how you spend your life.” — John Lee Dumas

The idea that each day is actually a microcosm of my life really got my attention. I had all these visions for change, for growth, for things I wanted to accomplish across the grand narrative of my life. But if they weren’t showing up in my day to day, they weren’t showing up in my life. That was a brutal reality check.

And so, in 2017 I decided to make intentional growth and greater self-actualization a goal of every day. The results have been gradual, steady, and ultimately transformative. What follows is a sampling of what happened … and continues to happen for me on a daily basis.

9 Daily Actions that Build Progress Toward Self-Actualization

  1. Journaling and Meditation. Through handwritten journaling, meditation, and prayer for just 15 minutes a day, I feel more spiritually connected and centred than ever.
  2. Goal Setting. By taking two minutes each morning to set big goals for the day, every day feels more focused and intentional.
  3. Creative Writing. Always a joy but rarely a reality in years gone by, I now push myself to write at least 100+ words a day. By lowering the bar from an essay to a paragraph, I’m now producing more written content than ever before.
  4. Working Out. By visiting a gym close to my house for just 25 minutes every workday morning, I’ve never been fitter or stronger. It doesn’t require an hour for me to break a wicked sweat and push my body to the max. Quick and efficient is the new name of my exercise game.
  5. Eating Better = -3 +2. Besides cutting out three of my vices (chips, fries, and sugary drinks), I’ve given myself a small and simple daily eating challenge: eat two green things. The first is usually the kale or spinach that goes into my morning smoothie, so finding a second green food somewhere in my day is relatively easy. By subtracting three items and intentionally adding two, I’m now leaner and meaner than ever. Instead of subscribing to some paradigm-shifting diet plan, I’m just taking a few small steps in the right direction. And I’m 12 pounds down from last year.
  6. Side Hustle Income. Although this is definitely not a passion project, my goal is to list or mail at least one item on eBay per day. This simple 5-minute activity keeps a few extra bucks flowing our way. It’s surprisingly encouraging and motivating.
  7. Piano Practice. My parents gave me the option to quit my lessons at age 15 or so, and predictably I’ve lived to regret it ever since. By learning and practising just one piece for a few minutes each day, I’m warming up that old muscle memory and reigniting an old passion.
  8. Reading. Every night, I make sure I read for at least a few minutes from two books on my Kindle: the first a book for my Master’s program, the second a work of fiction. By making sure this happens every night — even if it’s just a few pages from each — I’m staying solidly on track with my degree and projecting an all-time personal best for number of books finished in a year.
  9. Eyeball Time. Since Apple claimed FaceTime as its own, I use ‘Eyeball Time’ to refer to the kind of quality screen-free time required every day to cultivate intimate and meaningful relationships with my wife and stepsons. As a result, we fight hard to protect the weekday dinner hour and bedtime from screens. It’s not a ton of time. But it’s the minimum needed to keep the most important relationships in my life healthy and vibrant. If I’m not making progress on this front, nothing else matters.

Between my marriage, two adolescent stepsons, my teaching career, and Master’s studies, I’ve got a lot on my plate right now. In past seasons of life, I’d have seen this as reason enough to put my hours on cruise control, dissolving into Netflix at each day’s end and waking up lazily to the snooze button.

“So many choices to make today. And each choice I make … makes me.” — John Stackhouse

But I’ve spent enough of my life on meaningless distractions and diversions — as Jim Gaffigan so elegantly describes it, the McDonald’s of life — waiting for conditions to ripen, the waves to calm, the proverbial dust to settle perfectly before taking action and realizing my full potential as a human being.

Those days are over. I’ve discovered the exhilarating power of daily progress— the truth that small actions, taken over time, have the power to yield truly transformative results. And I can’t wait to see what’s in store.

Categories
Goals Morning Productivity Routines

7 Keys to Winning the Morning

I’ve never been much of a morning person.

I like the snooze button. For most of my existence, I’ve chosen to hurry through morning routines, cut corners on lunch prep, and eat a small snack on the run rather than wake up 30 minutes earlier.

Of course this pattern of behaviour defies common sense. It lowers quality of life. It adds unnecessary stress. But I lived this way for many years — presumably to make the most of those midnight hours and squeeze every last waking moment of productivity or amusement out of my evenings.

I’m just a night owl, I used to tell myself. This is how I’m wired.

It was in the late spring of 2017 that my thinking on morning routines finally started to evolve. Maybe it was my commute, the demands of parenting, or the growing awareness of the cognitive dissonance between the life I wanted and the life I was choosing. I wasn’t exercising consistently. I wasn’t reading or writing the way I wanted to. I often felt behind and stressed by work demands. When mornings begin with running around and a general lack of intentionality, the day tends to follow suit.

In short, my core values and life goals were suffering from a poor rhythm of life. Ultimately, the weight of my shortcomings ground into me the inescapable truth that something significant needed to change.

So it was that after years of subconscious dialogue, the radical prospect of reshaping my mornings finally became reality. In the end, it took an inspiring colleague’s example and some compelling Medium articles to get me to the tipping point. But once I was in, I was in.

I’ve set my alarm for 4:30 a.m. for just about every weekday morning since. And I seriously love what it does for me.

Of course when I tell people I wake up at 4:30 a.m. on weekdays, I often get the sort of look that considers my sanity an open question. Yes, it’s a bit extreme for most people. But I’m thoroughly sold. And I think if you give it a chance, you might just be sold as well.

You’ve heard this one before: Win the morning, win the day. Call it cliche, but it resonates powerfully with my experience. By 7:30 a.m. I’m now accomplishing a whole lot of goodness that has me feeling productive, settled, and prepared for the day. That wasn’t the case in the past.

What follows is my now-typical weekday morning before I’ve left my home for work. No, I never sat down to neurotically scheme the timeline that follows. But without watching the clock obsessively, this is reliably the way my morning unfolds:

4:30 wake up, get dressed for gym
4:35 stretching
4:40 organize office, file docs, review mail
4:45 drive to Starbucks
4:55 review goals for the day, journal
5:00 review and respond to email
5:15 evaluate assignments, plan lessons
5:45 creative writing
6:05 work out at Anytime Fitness
6:30 return home, wake up boys
6:35 make fruit smoothies, listen to scripture or inspirational content
6:45 empty dishwasher, clean sink/counter
6:50 make lunch
6:55 make bed
7:00 shower, shave, dress, sort laundry

With a start like this, this day is already well on its way to a win. All of those healthy routines and productive activities are finished — done by the same time that in past years I was just rolling out of bed to begin my normal harried scramble.

Not only am I now getting stuff done, I’m building the sorts of consistent daily routines (taking a few minutes to organize my office, sorting a few items of laundry, etc.) that prevent clutter from creeping into my world and into my brain. I’m identifying goals for the day. I’m thinking creatively. I’m working out. I’m doing so many of the things that I want to be about. And it all happens before 7:30.

It’s been an awesome experience. Now that it’s been in place for over half a year, I feel safe in saying this is going to be a permanent life change.

Clearly, there’s a price to be paid for waking up at 4:30 each weekday morning. After months of functioning this way, I’ve learned a few things about what is required to make early mornings happen. Here are 7 keys that define my formula for success.

  1. 6+ Hours of Sleep. Let’s start with the obvious. In order for me to wake up at 4:30 a.m. for five days straight, I need to be asleep by 10:30 at the latest each night. My goal is actually to be in bed with the lights out by 9:30, but six hours of sleep per night is manageable. What I have found, however, is that if I cheat on the six hour minimum for consecutive evenings, waking up early becomes very difficult indeed, and my health starts to suffer.
  2. Smarter Evenings. Since our two middle schoolers aren’t always in bed before 8:45 p.m., I only have 30–45 minutes to finish the day well and start winding down for bed. That makes the 8:45–9:30 window crucial. Ideally, it consists of turning off my phone and parking it in my office for the night, cranking out a few push-ups, showering and brushing teeth, completing my 10-minute journal, doing some reading, and connecting with my wife. Again, it’s not about watching the clock obsessively. But it is about treating this window like the precious commodity that it is.
  3. No Netflix on Weeknights. This little detail is basically covered in the previous point, but it’s such a significant sacrifice that it deserves its own item. I’ve made a few digressions on this one — like the time my wife decided to watch Saving Capitalism (I still think she was baiting me). But in general, spending 30–120 minutes watching a screen will basically guarantee a sleep-in the next morning. So I try to avoid it. Save the couch time for the weekends.
  4. No Snooze Button. To get up at this time, there’s no room for hesitation or an internal debate when the alarm sounds. I would lose that conversation and cave in every time. Instead, I quickly roll out, get to my feet, and leave the bedroom in one motion. By the time I get down the stairs to our main floor, glimmers of consciousness are starting to appear.
  5. Leave the House. After spending a few minutes in my office, I actually get in my car and drive to a Starbucks just two minutes away. This is the critical step, because it deals a death blow to any lingering temptation to go back to sleep. By heading off-campus, I’m burning my boats. There’s no sleeping at Starbucks with a fresh coffee on the table. The day is on and that is all. Twyla Tharp makes this point well in The Creative Habit.
  6. Recharge on the Weekends. To sustain five straight nights of 6–7 hours of sleep, I’ve found it’s essential to recharge on the weekends. If I can get 8+ hours of sleep on Friday and Saturday nights, I’m fully revitalized and feeling ready for another five days of 4:30 a.m. wake-ups. Or, if 8–9 hours of sleep doesn’t happen on one of those evenings, I might take a Sunday afternoon nap. The goal here is to make sure I’m not carrying any fatigue into a new week. A full recharge is essential.
  7. Go Public. Let others know of your morning commitment. As I put this audacious new habit into place last year, I quickly realized the power of accountability. By telling close friends and family of my morning routine, I was giving myself a powerful motivator to keep it up. There’s a certain satisfaction in being able to tell people that months after announcing a new resolution, you are in fact sticking to it. Harness that sense of personal pride and dignity by letting others know of your plans and then following through.

Am I a morning person? Frankly, I still don’t think so. But I’m pleased to say that I’ve finally put together the pieces necessary to win my mornings, and I’m seeing incredible benefits across all areas of my life. If your inner dialogue is prompting you to try something similar, there’s no time like the present to make the change.

If you’re in the process of making a similar shift in your mornings, I’d love to hear about your experience. Share your fails, tips, and tricks in the comments below.

Categories
Connect Time Goals Growth Mindset Productivity

My 2017 Goals in Review

2017 is breathing its last, and as it comes to a close I look back on the goals I set for this year. Goals that were met and surpassed encourage and motivate me to aim higher in 2018. Goals that were left unmet give me cause to evaluate my habits, decisions, and personal routines in order to determine where things went awry and where I can grow further in the coming year.

At the end of the post I also reflect on some of the biggest highlights that fell completely outside of my goal-setting and made 2017 a memorable year.

Financial

✓ Goal: Earn at least $1,200 in supplementary (side hustle) income. This goal was easily achieved by selling collectibles and currency coins on eBay. I expect this to continue through 2018.

✘ Goal: Sell 365+ items online. Even though I listed as many as 10 items in a single day, the average of one listed item per day was just too difficult to sustain this year. I’ll be downgrading or eliminating this goal entirely in 2018.

✘ Goal: Reduce HELOC balance by $300/month or $3,600. My wife and I have held a balance on our HELOC ever since buying our home in 2015. Unfortunately, our balance on this account went the wrong direction this year. The biggest culprits were new hardware tools, three weeks of summer camps for the boys, a week for us at a luxury resort in Vernon, a family weekend in Whistler, a new hot water tank, a semester’s worth of tuition for my Master’s degree, and flights for the family to Winnipeg at Christmas. Some of these expenditures were justified but many were not. The good news on this front is that we’ve successfully tightened our budget for the last four months of 2017 and actually saved more than we earned during that period. I’m confident we can do a lot better in 2018, even though I’ll be paying out another $6,000 in tuition.

Marital

✓ Goal: Make weekly Connect Times happen more consistently. We were able to turn this around well in the last few months of 2017 by conducting our weekly ‘Connect Time’ meetings on Saturday mornings instead of trying to pull them off in the evenings. Reviewing all of our budget areas and comparing calendars for the week ahead really helped keep us on the same page and helped us manage our money more efficiently.

✘ Goal: Plan at least one memorable date per month. I’m sad to say that this didn’t happen. Thankfully, Date Nights did happen regularly, but typically we made it up as we went. I can do better here, but it will require scheduling some planning time into my week.

Paternal

✓ Goal: Read with the boys before bed on a weekly basis. This has gone really well. I’m currently reading to both boys on Tuesday evenings: The Hobbit with Michael and This Present Darkness with Joshua.

✓ Goal: Continue monthly stepdad-stepson meetings. Our monthly dinners at Tim Hortons continued faithfully. Topics included school, friendships, finances, goals, plans, purity, and gaming. I started keeping a journal of notes from these meetings.

✓ Goal: Find more connecting points with the boys. This goal is difficult to quantify, but I think I achieved it. One fun development is that the boys are finally old enough now to handle watching more interesting movies with me. We’re also mutual fans of a growing number of YouTube channels, and we plan to do some vlogging together in 2018.

✘ Goal: Make a baby. Good news here: it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Physical

✓ Goal: Complete 12+ reps of 135 lbs. on the bench press at our annual July 1st fitness challenge. I completed 13.

✓ Goal: Bring weight down from 192 lbs. to 180. By fasting completely from chips, fries, and sugary drinks from spring break forward, I actually saw 179 on the scale one day this fall. As of this writing my weight is back in the low 180s.

✓ Goal: Work out 104+ times in 2017. I broke 104 recorded workouts, most of them taking place at Anytime Fitness locations.

✘ Goal: Do 42 pushups in one set. My max this year was 35. Two shoulder dislocations in March didn’t help, but that’s no excuse. To elevate this number further, I think I need to start doing push-ups before bed every day.

✘ Goal: Complete the Vancouver Sun Run in <50 minutes. I didn’t run it at all, thanks largely to two shoulder dislocations the month before.

✘ Goal: Reduce meat intake by 14% or more with Meatless Mondays. This started well in the first months of the year but eventually fell by the wayside. I’d like to try to get back on it in 2018.

✘ Goal: Run 3+ km an average of once/week. I only ran more than 3 km a total of six times in 2017. This has got to improve in 2018. Running at 8:00 a.m. on Sundays is the key. Clearly I’m conflicted when it comes to running.

Professional

 ✓ Goal: Begin a M. Ed. program or other certification. I began a MEdL program at VIU which is going very well.

✓ Goal: Record at least 1+ set of assessments per day during the school year. At the time of this writing, I’ve managed to record an average of at least one set of class assessments per day through the last three months of 2017.

Self-Improvement

 ✓ Goal: Write and publish 12+ blog posts. As of mid-December I had published 18 and counting. I’m dreaming big in terms of how and where to grow my writing in 2018.

✓ Goal: Discard at least one item of clothing per week. I’ve surpassed this one, but the scary thing is that it hardly feels like I’ve made a dent.

 ✓ Goal: Read 3,650+ book pages. This turned out to be a difficult goal to quantify and track, but I think I’ve achieved it. I purchased a Kindle in the fall, and it’s become a go-to before bed on a daily basis. My Master’s program has certainly pushed me in this regard.

Social/Relational

✓ Goal: Go on at least one double date per month. We’ve easily surpassed this, and it’s been great.

✓ Goal: Visit the Cavey families in Winnipeg. After three years away, we made our first family trip to Winnipeg as a married couple in December.

✓ Goal: Connect with neighbours over a meal. In mid-December we finally went on a double date with our next door neighbours. It was great to get to know them and share life stories. It turns out we have a lot in common.

Spiritual

✓ Goal: Read through the New Testament 2x, Psalms 2x, and Proverbs 12x. I was able to follow these reading plans pretty consistently by listening to the audio tracks on these reading plans using the YouVersion app each morning.

✓ Goal: Complete the Freedom Session course. This was a long course, but some valuable healing and introspection took place along the way.

✘ Goal: Complete 12+ prayer journal entries. These are page-long reflections that I write out as prayers and meditations on the state of my life. As of December 18, I had only completed eight on the year.

Home Projects

✓ Goal: Clean vinyl siding on the exterior of our house. We bought a telescopic wand/brush at the home show just for this purpose. It happened.

✓ Goal: Paint the back patio. This was done over 2-3 hot days in the summer. The colour is a bit lighter than I wanted, but our patio looks cleaner, brighter, and better-maintained than it did before.

Other Victories to Celebrate from 2017

✫ No phone at bedtime. For a range of reasons, I decided to ban my phone from the bedroom at bedtimes, leaving it on our main floor. It’s been a great experience. I now read more, engage more with my wife, and go to sleep sooner. What started as a 2-week experiment has become a permanent lifestyle change. See my Medium post about my decision to ban my phone from the bedroom.

✫ A successful change to the diet. Concerned over my rising weight and blood pressure, in the spring I decided to completely fast from my three worst vices: chips, fries, and sugary drinks. I’ve managed to keep to those rules pretty strictly and lost 12 bad pounds in the process.

✫ A new morning routine. In the spring I decided to start waking up at 4:30 a.m. every workday morning. Although there have been times where exhaustion, stress, or poor health has taken me off this routine, I’ve managed to keep it pretty consistently for the balance of the calendar year. My morning hour spent at Starbucks gives me amazing creativity and productivity, and this routine also ensures I get 20-30 minutes in at Anytime Fitness before returning home around 6:35 a.m. to officially start preparing for the day. I hope this will remain a life habit.

✫ A bedtime journal. I started doing some handwritten journaling and reflecting before bed, using the Tim Ferriss 5-minute journal as a guide. Although I’ve only used it about a dozen times, it gives me a starting point for 2018. Eventually I would like this to become an every-night ritual. It’s so good for the mind and spirit.

 ✫ A new canoe. Our family got an amazing deal on a good canoe, and we enjoyed some quality canoe adventures at Widgeon Creek and English Bay. Watching the Celebration of Light fireworks display from nearby on the ocean surface was an awesome experience.

✫ Three days of paddleboarding. While the boys were away at a camp on Vancouver Island, my wife and I spent days paddleboarding at Ambleside Beach, Alouette Lake, and the Burrard Inlet. My favourite experience was paddling down the Indian Arm, exploring islands together and enjoying a still day on the ocean.

 ✫ Best hike ever. In August I hiked Panorama Ridge in Garibaldi Provincial Park (near Whistler, BC), producing some of the most beautiful views of any hike I’ve ever done.

✫ The ISTE conference in San Antonio, TX. At the end of June, I and two colleagues were privileged to spend about six days in San Antonio at the largest education technology conference in the world. It was an awesome experience and I hope to visit the conference again some time.

✫ Books completed in 2017:

  1. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Carol Dweck)
  2. The Tech-Wise Family (Andy Crouch)
  3. The Reason You Walk (Wab Kinew)
  4. Cold, Hard Truth (Kevin O’Leary)
  5. Classroom Management in the Digital Age: Effective Practices for Technology-Rich Learning Spaces (Heather Dowd)