Calendar of Goal Tracking 2012 wrap-up

 

Happy New Year’s Eve!

Since it’s the last day of 2012, I thought I’d take down my Big Bang ‘Calendar of Goal Tracking’ to see how I did. (I took pictures of every page, though, to share with you, though it’s a little hard to make out the letters from the photos.)

Some overall thoughts:

1. Counting hundreds of little letters from a calendar is hard! I’m sure I’ve made some counting errors, but I’m not worrying about 100% accuracy tonight.
2. This has really been a good experiment for me, and a great way to motivate myself to do time-slices, especially for things like exercise and cleaning that I have a hard time motivating myself for otherwise.
3. There were quite a few letters missing that I was able to work out from other evidence, including several R’s, one E in March, a D on a Sunday in November when I know I went to a write-in, and so on.
4. I’m definitely going to try something of the sort for 2013. Since I’m trying to save money where I can, and I got a decent looking ‘Muscle cars’ calendar free from the oil change shop, I guess that’s my goal tracking calendar for next year!

Details about the goals I tracked:

• B for Blogging: I marked a B to indicate a day that I posted a new blog post 297 times. This seems low compared to my WordPress.com annual report, even taking into account that I never went back and updated the calendar for the 2 weeks I spent in Kansas (and at Polaris, the weekend after I got back from Kansas.) I suspect that several times, I did a blog post last thing in the evening, went to bed, and never went back and marked my B.
• C for Cleaning: I got 166 Cs for a timeslice of at least 20 minutes cleaning, tidying, or organizing things around my apartment. Occasionally this was a double C in a single day, if I was feeling exceptionally cleanergetic.
• D for Driving. 197 days got the letter D for days that I drove, either driving practice before I passed my licence, borrowing a family car, or just driving in Ghost once I’d bought my own car.
• E for Editing. I have 251 of the letter E marked in the calendar for working on my own editing. 50 of them are in March, where I was using one E to indicate one hour logged for National Novel Editing Month. Otherwise, it’s any significant amount of time, at least 20 minutes or so, one E per day.
• L for Losing.  Each letter L represents a half-hour time slice of walking around outside or other cardio exercise. Could be double Ls in a day. I got 335.
• O for Outlining. I said that I’d use O to mark for a day when I worked on an outline or otherwise planned a story before diving into writing it. I got a grand total of 3 Os.
• P for Posting. This tracks visiting somebody else’s blog and leaving a comment. Generally not marked multiple times per day, but once in November I did give myself a double P to  make up for having missed the previous day. Overall I reached 336 of P.
• R for Reading. This tracks having spent at least 15 minutes on reading fiction, whether a print book, an online zine story, an ebook or even a graphic novel. I marked an R for every single day that I was keeping track on the calendar, 352 days. (I was reading every day when I wasn’t keeping track on the calendar too.)
• W for Writing. This is for writing on a new project, or significant rewriting new material in Block Revision of an old project, at least 200 words for the day generally. I marked 303 letters W on the calendar. Out of these:
  50 were in April, where I was giving myself a W for each 2 pages of screenplay for Script Frenzy.
  50 were in August, each one standing for 1000 words in Camp Nanowrimo
  67 were in November, of two different types. 62 were ‘high Ws’ that represented 1000 words logged. 5 were ‘low Ws’ for days when I didn’t reach a multiple of 1000 words, but I wrote something to stay engaged with the book.

So, those are the numbers, or as close as I’m likely to get to them. And here are the photos of the calendar pages, if you’re interested at all.