Year In Review

Roadmap:
1. I take stock of 2008 "The Year of Responsibility"
2. I talk about what I did learn this year, which was not what I had planned
3. I set out my goal for 2009, "The Year of Accountability"

If anyone is reading this, you may want to skip ahead, part 1 is not very exciting, it is just for me to take stock of my performance.

1. YEAR OF RESPONSIBILITY CHECKLIST


I have been putting this off for a long time, but it is time to own up and take responsibility for "the year of responsibility." The original point of this blog was to start writing on a regular basis. It was a resolution as part of my goal for the "Year of Responsibility." I think the idea was that I after having learned self-discipline the previous year, it was time to put use my newfound powers for good and to share my thoughts with the world.

Like many of my goals for this year, the blog did not go as planned. I did not write in this blog once a month this year, nor did I accomplish many of the other goals that i set for myself. Let me take stock of how I did:

Blog - Did not write regularly. Did write some thoughtful, but rambling, posts that helped me organize my worldview, and helped me think about the big picture.

Community Service - I volunteered a few times at the library but it fizzled out, and once at my synagogue back in Dallas. I also ran in a breast cancer 5k, however, I did not achieve my goal of once-a-month regular service projects.

Shabbat - Started the year strong with this one, but faded away after the high holidays. I didn't always find the times that I went to synagogue rewarding, but i did enjoy the shabbat exercise, so the act of cooking dinner and lighting candles and trying to be mindful of the fact that it is shabbat was really nice. I think I will try to do this again.

Donations - I should be able to accomplish this one. I have given a good deal of charity and also raised money for the holidays.

Finances - The one stand-out success of my resolutions was that I have kept up with recording my finances every month. Next year I will take the next step and develop a formal budget.

Weekly review - Fail.

Write to people I care about - Fail :-(

Do the dishes - I seriously ended up doing more than planned on this one because i moved into my own place and it has no dishwasher so I have washed all of my dishes by hand. I have kept up with the dishes pretty well I would say.

Floss and take vitamins - Started out ok but failed pretty quickly into the year.

2. WHAT DID I LEARN/ACCOMPLISH THIS YEAR?

So, judging from part 1, I can't call the year of responsibility a success in the way that 2007 was a success for the year of discipline, but it turns out I did accomplish a lot this year, just not what I set out to do.

On Jan 6, 2008, I started dating an amazing, beautiful, fiery young woman. Very soon we will celebrate our one year anniversary, making this the longest relationship that I have had in a long time.

In 2007, I became my own person and figured out how to take care of myself and be the person that I wanted to be. This year, I turned my focus from taking care of myself and improving myself to taking care of a relationship. Clearly, bringing another human being into one's life is much different than making decisions alone. It requires having less control and giving more communication. It requires patience, listening, and sacrifice. A healthy relationship demands a lot of time and energy, but there are also great rewards. I have learned so much about how to understand someone else, and how my actions can appear to others differently than I intended them (and that I need to think about that more). I have learned a great deal about another culture, and learned once again how valuable each moment is.

In the course of being in a relationship, and also figuring out what is important to me, I have made some big changes in my life this year:

- I quit drinking
- I quit smoking pot
-I stopped eating meat (except seafood - try to do sustainable seafood) - this is due to my relationship, but also due to the fact that eating meat is a huge cause of global warming and also drives the corn subsidies that degrade the nutrition of our food and enable the obesity problem.

I haven't worked out as much as I would have liked to, but I have for the most part stayed in shape in 2008.

My grades in the PhD program have been surprisingly good. Lucky is in good health, and my fish has so far survived longer than any fish I have ever had.

I also gave away a lot of my old possessions and I am trying to clear out more and live more simply. For example, I don't subscribe to television anymore, I just have a rabbit ear antenna to watch a few events. (gasp, no tivo!)

So, I am very thankful for all that I have learned and grown in 2008 and all of the blessings that have been bestowed upon me.

3. 2009 THE YEAR OF ACCOUNTABILITY

Ok, last but not least, this brings me to next year. I do feel like I could have accomplished more in 2008, but it has become difficult to manage my time with so much going on in my life. Being an accountant, I immediately realized that before I can take full control of my time, I have to be able to measure it. So, the goal for 2008 is to keep track of everything I do. Here are the basics:

- Record what I do with my time every day (Hour by Hour, like when I was a consultant)
- Record what I spend (already doing it for the most part)
- Record what I eat
- Record my exercise

The idea is that is if I force myself to look at how I really spend my time, it will inspire me to use my time more wisely. For example, it is easy for me to get carried away playing video games, but if at the end of the week I have to look at a report that says I spent 20 hours (exaggeration, hopefully) playing video games last week, I will think "Wow, I didn't realize i was wasting so much time, that is too much video games." Again, the first step towards control is measurement. If you don't know what you are spending your time and money on, you don't know what to change.

If I get really ambitious I may post all of this data publicly. I'm not sure that anyone would be interested, but it may help me get organized, or at least feel some pressure to get my act together if i feel like I have to answer for my time in public (even worse than seeing that I spent 20 hrs playing video games is thinking that other people will know that I spent 20 hrs playing video games).

So, that is the main goal. I am using quicken right now to track my finances and I have looked into some free software for time entry with a iPhone app plugin. I will post more next year about my system when I get up and running.

Here's wishing myself good luck on a new year of accountability, hopefully I will have to take a real hard look at what I am doing with my life and find the best way to move towards the goals I left unfulfilled in 2008.