Back in October, I laid out some focus areas and strategies for the final months of 2018. I intend to do this again for the first quarter of 2019, but before that, it's worth taking the time to reflect on how well I did at meeting my Q4 objectives.
I had major objectives in nine (9) different areas. Of these, I achieved three, did not succeed at two, and made progress on four. Let's look at each of them in turn while considering how the different focus areas interacted with one another.
The most obvious success was selling our old house. That took a long time, a lot longer than anyone really expected—my facetious prediction of 2019 from last January very nearly turned out to be correct. It was correct, if you're limited to two sigfigs. Because this took almost the entirety of the quarter, some of the projects I might have had time to undertake if we had finished earlier went undone.
The other successes are somewhat less dramatic: competing in (and winning) NaNoWriMo and finishing Introduction to Flight. Neither of those went particularly impressively, but I managed to complete them while working on the house and dealing with other aspects of family life.
One aspect of family life that none of us managed very well was organization. I was specifically hoping to organize some of my possessions in advance of the possibility of moving out. (I had wanted to do this at the old house before Mom and Dad decided to move, but they sprung the announcement on me before any significant progress could be made.) I will probably be able to fold my own organization into the process of getting things set up in the new house, however.
Similarly, I did not make any real progress on the possibility of applying for graduate school, because we couldn't really afford it. We'll see about that this quarter, depending on how my continued job search goes.
Speaking of which: I made some continued progress in the hiring process in the fourth quarter, but did not secure employment. (I'm still waiting to hear back on the results of some of my phone interviews.) I don't feel that I submitted the sorts of quality applications I had been hoping to when I set aside Mondays—later switched to Tuesdays—for that specific purpose.
The same goes for my other nonfiction reading goals, and programming. I did well on the latter during October, culminating in an extensive blog post. Since then, however, I've barely touched MATLAB at all, let alone working in other environments. For the former, meanwhile, I managed to work through a few papers and presentations, but still have a lot of material waiting on my desktop.
In both cases, I see this as a failure to allocate time to goals. The problem, of course, was not that the goals were unimportant, but simply that there wasn't time for everything and they fell by the wayside. The lesson here is paring down one's objectives to what's reasonable with the time or resources at hand. This applies equally to the final focus area, nonfiction writing, where I managed to continue pushing out monthly blog posts, but didn't get very far with anything more expansive or frequent.
The high level lesson here remains more-or-less the same as always: set reasonable goals based on your true values while accounting for planning fallacy. I did moderately well last quarter, but could have done a lot better. I will be taking this into account in the coming months and trying to set my Q1 objectives with that in mind.
