2008 Year in Review, Part 1

Just about a year ago I was discussing my annual goals on an Oovoo call. Among the attendees were Sherman and Sean, and we were discussing what we planned to accomplish, and reporting back on it.

So here are my results. The diagram above is generated from MindManager from Mindjet (although I am a good two versions back it seems). It’s a great tool for brainstorming and organizing information that tends to run all over the place.

The Rundown:

• Family – This tends to revolve around health and taking care of the people around me, 1 for 3 here, some room for improvement, the one I completed was critical while the other 2 were forward looking so things are actually going well enough here.
• Personal – The 25% hit was to work on Photography, which I did by spending a long weekend at photocamp. You can check out the results there on Flickr. The other 75% was 10% weight loss, and I’ve kept 5 pounds off for almost all year, but nowhere near where I wanted to be. My workout routine went through some radical changes. I spent the first half of the year doing my normal running, which was doing next to nothing for me. I switched to Crossfit, which gave me huge strentgh gains, but the muscle gained outweighed the fat lost. Great for power but no gain for my back or knees. By Q4 with another dog I’ve been walking every day and that is working well. There’s also the tale of the negotiation with my old gym, but that’s another post. After the New Year’s rush (I give it 1 month for the resolution crowd to crumble) I’ll be at a new gym by the office.
• Financial – The big goal here was to double charitable giving, and that was a big success. Of course many will note that any goal to spend more money is not much of a challenge and I’d have to agree. The other goals were to clean up and organize my investments – no problem there. The last goal was a savings target, and I only got to 30% of where I wanted to be. The backbreaker here was 5 weddings all over the US. I wouldn’t have traded those trips for anything, but they did make a financial impact. The interesting part is that after weddings and the cash spent on the charitable goal there’s no other category of spending alone that could have hit that traget.
• Professional – As you can see from the results this was weighted to the day job, and it was a strong year. Like any VC backed company, an “event” is always on the list and there was none this year, but otherwise a very strong year, even with the ecomomy being unpredictable. Locking down my name as a domain was done and important, I also had networking events there because the only time to network is when you are not in the middle of a career change, but I chose to spend free time on M Show Productions (made up of Marketing Over Coffee, The M Show and the best marketing blog) rather than random networking. It seems to have paid off, I’m meeting great people and the podcast is growing quickly.