Whenever I consider whether or not I should be doing something, I ask myself a very simple question.

Is this moving me towards my goals?

The outcome of that question casts a strong light on the activity at hand. Sometimes, it’s a positive light and it encourages me to move forward. At other times, it’s a negative light, and it makes me back off a bit.

It’s a very simple and very effective litmus test for everything that I do. Let’s break it down a little bit.

First, you’ve got to have goals
For this question to work, you need to have goals for the future. Almost always, I have a bunch of goals going on at once. Some of them are very short term, to be accomplished within a week. Others approach a lifelong journey.

Here’s a snapshot of a few of my goals, just to show you what I mean.

By March 16, I want to have the house prepared for a nearly weeklong visit from my sister-in-law and her soon-to-be spouse.

By the end of June, I want to have about three weeks of articles banked for The Simple Dollar so that I don’t have to worry about content production when I visit Seattle for the aforementioned wedding (and give myself a little bit of breathing room on either side).

By the end of 2011, I want to have “Project X” completed. What is Project X? I’ll tell you about it in the future, but it’s intended to be a fully passive revenue stream.

By the end of 2013, I want to have our home’s mortgage completely paid off.

Four goals. Four different timeframes. Four different sets of influences on me.

So, when I’m looking at what I’m going to do right now, I keep those goals in mind.

An example: I was out running errands earlier. I was near the local gaming shop, so I stopped in. There was a game there that I knew that Sarah and I would enjoy playing. Should I buy it?

Well, Sarah and I play a lot of games together – it’s one way we spend time together in the evenings (a positive towards the goal of being a good husband). On the flip side, we have several games on our shelves already that we’re itching to play (negative toward being more diligent about using stuff we already have), plus the game would cost $40 (negative toward every spending goal). I could also definitely afford to go home and research the game a bit more and perhaps buy it online at a later time, saving some cash.

So I move on, knowing that such a choice is not really taking away anything I might enjoy, but also knowing that it is yet another step towards goals that I have.

Does a bad answer always mean no?
Now, it would be easy to perceive this as being a reason to never indulge in anything that doesn’t take me toward a goal. Abandon fun, all ye who enter here? Not so much.

Yes, if something is a negative towards every goal that I have, I won’t choose to do it. Drug use? It’s not going to happen, because it’s a negative towards many of my goals (savings goals, being a good parent, etc.) and a positive towards none of them.

On the other hand, when a friend calls me up and invites Sarah and I over to do something fun, I’m almost always going to say yes. Sure, that time spent might be a negative towards some of my goals – I certainly could spend my time getting prepped for my sister-in-law’s visit or working on “Project X” – but it’s also a positive towards other goals, such as building key friendships and enjoying non-idle leisure (my friends don’t just sit there watching whatever’s on television).

Sometimes, I’ll even go ahead with things that are contradictory to more goals than are benefited by the choice. For example, I might decide to buy a new boardgame out of my personal spending allowance for the month. Yes, I could save that money for another goal and yes, there probably are games on my shelf that could be played instead.

But I recognize that such a choice really is a rare splurge. It is not something I do every day – or every week. Occasionally doing such a thing not only maximizes the fun of doing something so frivolous, it also reminds me that doing this every day would not be nearly as fun.

Doing something like that is a fun occasional splurge, but it’s not nearly as fulfilling over the long term as making consistent choices that take me towards my goals.

The big win
Of course, the best options are ones that simultaneously bring me deep enjoyment and move me towards a number of goals.

A period of writing where the pressure is off is a great example of this. I thoroughly enjoy writing when I’m not under some sort of time crunch, plus such writing almost always carries me towards lots of personal goals.

Planting the garden is another great example. It’s often a goal in and of itself, but beyond that, it’s a very frugal activity that gets me outside and gets some exercise (using the hoe, etc.). I enjoy every second of it, too.

Going to thrift stores with my wife often hits several things at once, as I’ll sometimes find things we’re looking for at a huge discount, plus I’m bonding with my wife without spending much money at all.

Playing with my kids, reading a challenging book, preparing dinner at home – these all fall under that umbrella.

When those things happen, when I hit a bunch of goals and do something deeply enjoyable, then I truly feel like my life is headed in the right direction.

I want to run for mayor of a large city.

I want to publish a series of fantasy novels that appear in every bookstore in the country.

I want to pay off the $300,000 in debt that I owe.

I want to start a restaurant chain.

I want to visit 100 countries by the time I’m 40.

I’m a fan of overly audacious goals. Setting a huge goal for yourself can shock you into action and sometimes make you go beyond what you believe you’re capable of.

In 2002 and 2003, I worked on a software development project that was far, far over my head. During the course of that project, the technical advisor (the one helping me figure out the actual specs of the software) essentially quit, leaving me to not only write all the code, but also design the interface of it based on what the customers would want.

Waiting around for additional hires was not an option. I either had to move forward or the project went under and I would be looking for another job.

Add on top of that the fact that I was writing all of this in a language that I was largely unfamiliar with (as I was under the impression I would have plenty of room to learn on the job).

When I realized the scope of what I had to do, it was almost overwhelming.

Not only did a two man team manage to pull it off (myself and a database expert), the project is still in existence (albeit in very modified form) to this day, using largely the same code I wrote in 2002 and 2003.

How did this happen? There were three real factors involved here, in my opinion.

First, a big part of this project was the personal challenge. I wanted to show myself that I could do this and, in the end, I was really the person that I was accountable to. If I failed without really trying, that sense of failure would hang over me for a long time. If I failed with a sincere effort – or better yet, succeeded – that would stick with me as well.

Second, a spectacular failure was worth far more than no action at all. I realized pretty quickly that if I gave this project my all, I would still get something out of it even if it failed. I would learn a great deal of domain knowledge. I would learn some significant skills. I would have an entry on my resume and a good story to tell. I would also learn some lessons from failure.

Finally, I had supportive people in my corner. The people up the food chain from my project were pretty supportive of what we were working on. They wanted us to succeed. They cheered us on when we needed it. They took care of peripheral things that would have just distracted us. They gave us carte blanche to use our own judgment, but were willing to provide input when we asked.

To be sure, not every big, audacious goal works. Any enormous goal you set for yourself needs to have a few key elements.

It must not seriously damage your life if you fail. No goal is worth risking the key things you need to have in your life. No goal is worth sacrificing your childrens’ needs or the well being of your marriage or your closest friendships or your career. If the worst case scenario of a goal is apocalyptic, it is never worth it. If you’re setting a big goal, spend some time teasing out the worst case scenario and make sure that you can roll through it. Often, this means that you need some advance planning before you leap into your big goal.

Ideally, you gain some degree of benefit if you only partially succeed – or even if you largely fail. For example, if you want to travel to 100 countries by the time you’re 40, but you only make it to 80 of them, you’ve still succeeded big time and you have a huge warehouse full of stories and memories for the rest of your life. If you want to pay off $300,000 in debt in seven years but only get rid of $240,000 of it – you got rid of $240,000 in debt. That’s not a bad thing.

It must be met with the support of key people. If you’re married, this always includes your spouse. It can also involve your coworkers, other family members, and close friends. The people you rely on most need to be in your corner when you approach something audacious.

The real fire has to come from within you. You’ve got to want it so bad you can taste it. If you don’t have the fire to make something happen, it won’t happen. Think of those moments in your life when you’ve most wanted something. That’s what this goal needs to feel like within you, because without that fire, you won’t go beyond what you think you’re capable of to reach that goal.

Set a big goal for yourself, something you’ve always wanted for your life. Throw yourself into it. You might be surprised at what you find along the way and on the other side.

This year, in addition to my three yearlong resolutions, I’ve decided to take on a series of month-long goals and projects spread throughout the year. Here’s my schedule of projects as they read right now, which covers the first five months of the year.

January 2011: Rearrange my office with shelving
February 2011: Reorganize the laundry room, getting a better laundry system in place
March 2011: Reorganize the garage and closets, identifying stuff for a spring yard sale
April 2011: Plant a great garden and harvest springtime foods (like morel mushrooms)
May 2011: Set up a family computer workstation (and the required rearragements)

I have some vague ideas for the second half of the year, but I haven’t put them all together as of yet.

Let’s take a look at the features each of these have in common.

Each of these projects will take about twenty hours of work (by my estimation) to fully complete. Some of them sound easier than others, but often the easier ones have some additional constraints that will add significant time to the equation. For example, the office rearrangement requires me to dismantle my current (overly large) desk first, which will take time. I also have to move a significant amount of computer equipment, and when the office is rearranged, I have to move some items from the basement to the new shelves.

Each one can be done in small batches, so I’m not required to set aside entire days to work on these projects. My life doesn’t afford me large blocks of time that I can devote to projects like this – it just doesn’t happen. On the other hand, projects that can be subdivided into smaller pieces tend to work very well because I can simply work on the project for an hour here and an hour there until it’s complete.

I want to work on these projects steadily, so setting a clear deadline for myself encourages that. Although I am quite busy, I do want to actually move forward with and complete such projects. Setting a deadline puts me in a position where I consistently put time aside to achieve these goals – an hour here, an hour there, and then they’re completed.

Setting Your Own
Of course, you can do the same thing in your own life. Using monthly goals to accomplish such activities is a great way to keep yourself moving forward on the smaller yet still significant things you want to accomplish in your life. Here are some tactics to use for doing just that.

Make (and keep) a big project list. Spend some time making a list of all of the projects you want to take on in your life. Include everything, from enormous life-changers that could take years to any small thing that you can’t quite accomplish in an afternoon. Once you’ve made that list (I recommend using a word processing program), save the document and return to it regularly, adding new items and looking for things to accomplish.

Create time estimates for these projects. They don’t have to be perfect time estimates, just enough to help you get an idea of how many hours of work it will take as well as any other length requirements.

Seek out projects in the twenty hour range. Generally, such projects are perfect month-long goals for you to set for yourself. They require some significant time, but can be accomplished with an hour or two a day or a few full weekend days.

Come up with a month-long plan of attack. How will you accomplish this goal? What needs to be done each day? Sit down and define exactly what you intend to do and how you intend to accomplish it.

Flip the calendar… and get started. It’s as simple as that. A calendar month is a perfect period and timeline for accomplishing such small goals.

Twenty Ideas
Here are twenty ideas for such projects to get your creative juices going. Good luck!

1. Walk/run 100 miles.
2. Cook 25 meals in advance and freeze them for future use.
3. Thoroughly clean and rearrange a room.
4. Create a complete grocery “price book.”
5. Have a yard sale.
6. Make a “recipe box” containing 150-200 recipes you can just pull out and rely on.
7. Prepare and plant a garden.
8. Air seal your home and improve your attic insulation.
9. Open up an account at PaperBackSwap, then list and ship fifty unwanted books.
10. Learn some basic home repair and fix a few minor problems in your home.
11. Repaint the trim of your home.
12. Organize and host a block party to get to know your neighbors.
13. Attend meetings of several civic groups to see if any click with you.
14. Calculate your net worth and set up a spreadsheet to make it easy to calculate it in the future.
15. Contribute to a large-scale volunteer project, like a “speed build” of a Habitat for Humanity house.
16. Read four books – one per week.
17. Deeply investigate a topic you’ve long been curious about.
18. Prepare a batch of homemade wine or beer (for gifts, if for nothing else).
19. Repaint a room in your home.
20. Find new checking and savings accounts and migrate your banking to them.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book or other book of interest.

For my first book review of 2011, which will pop up on the site on Sunday and appear in subscriber’s mailboxes early in the morning of the first working Monday of the year, I thought I’d take a look at one of the best books out there about defining and setting goals, since so many people start out the year with goals and resolutions of all kinds (and I’m no exception to that).

Goals! is one of a pile of self-motivation and self-improvement books written by Brian Tracy. I’ve read several of them, but the only one that really clicked with me was this one because it offered so many good pieces of advice about setting personal goals and working towards them. It worked for me because so much of the advice was actionable – I could actually do the things in the book and apply them immediately to my own goal-setting habits.

As with most of my book reviews, the things I share with you below just scratch the surface of the content. Instead, I usually try to seek out a key highlight or two from each chapter that really had an impact on me.

1. Get Started: Unlock Your Potential
Everything you have accomplished in your life up to this point is mere preparation for what is to come. You now have a pile of skills, experiences, and motivations to draw upon that you’ve accumulated throughout your life, and you should use those as constant fuel for the fire to move towards whatever you want in life. Think of the biggest things you’ve accomplished in life. Are the things you want in the future really that out of reach compared to what you’ve already done, especially considering all of the things you have at your disposal now as compared to then?

2. Take Charge of Your Life
You are responsible for everything you do in your life. You make the choices of how to spend your time, how to spend your money, how to spend your energy, and what you spend your time thinking about. Those things are up to you. Don’t blame others or make excuses when you make choices related to how you spend your time, money, energy, and thoughts. Instead, focus on using your thoughts, money, energy, and time to achieve the goals you have in your life. When you spend an hour idling, you’re not just losing an hour of time. You’re losing an hour of energy. An hour of thought. An hour of forward progress on the things you really want.

3. Clarify Your Values
What do you really believe in? What do you truly care about? If you’re trying to work towards goals that aren’t fed by those beliefs and cares, you’re going to have a very hard road with regards to achieving them. Spend some time clarifying what you care about and believe in before you even begin to set goals for yourself.

4. Analyze Your Beliefs
What do you believe with regards to your own abilities? What do you believe about the world around you? Is it holding you back or is it a giant pile of opportunities? It is these beliefs that will drastically constrain – or leave wide open – the goals that are available to you. Most of what’s possible is defined within your own head.

5. Create Your Own Future
Imagine that you could progress towards the goals you have in life with no obstacles preventing you from doing so and you had all of the resources you needed. What would your life look like? I often call this a “five year sketch,” in which I draw a picture of what I would like my life to look like in five years or so.

6. Determine Your True Goals
What do you want to accomplish in every major part of your life? Your finances? Your professional life? Your relationships and family life? Your health and wellness? What about other areas of importance to you? Think about each one and figure out what you most want in that area. This builds upon a foundation of your beliefs.

7. Decide Upon Your Major Definite Purpose
Often, when you look at the main goals you have for your life, it will become clear that they actually all point to a singular goal that rules them all. For example, in my case, my singular goal is to be a great father – it really does overlay every other goal and mission I have in my life. All of my significant goals are at least in part connected directly to my desire to be the best possible parent.

8. Start at the Beginning
What is your starting point for each of these goals? Where are you at right now? The more honest you are about your current situation, the easier it will be to create goals that actually work for you instead of goals that are completely out of touch with your current state. The more in touch your goals are, the easier they’ll be to accomplish.

9. Set and Achieve All Your Financial Goals
Tracy spends this and the next few chapters focusing on goals people typically have in certain areas of their life. His financial suggestions are straightforward: in essence, he suggests making a net worth calculator in order to get a full view of your assets and debts, then look for specific ways to improve both areas (as foundations for goals).

10. Become an Expert in Your Field
You’re better off being the best around at a very specific area than being just one of the bunch in a larger pool. Focus on getting to the very top in a specific area so that you can gan reknown for that expertise rather than being just one of a hundred people that throw their resume towards yet another essentially identical job.

11. Improve Your Family Life and Relationships
A big part of your life consists of the people around you, and the better your relationships are with those people, the better your life will be. Put effort into patching up rough relationships, eliminating unfixable ones, and putting continued focus on the relationships most important to your life.

12. Optimize Your Health and Wellness
Having a high level of energy and fitness makes it possible to enjoy many avenues of life that are difficult to enjoy without these attributes. You can cultivate these attributes in your life if you so choose, and the best way to do that is to take a realistic assessment of your current fitness and health and chart some goals leading you to where you want to be so you can tackle anything in life.

13. Measure Your Progress
For any goal, define a goal that has a clear way to determine if you’ve achieved it or not as well as a clear way to mark your progress. Then set milestones along the way so that you can constantly check and make sure that you’re moving in a reasonable way towards your goal. “I want to lose weight” won’t cut it; try “I’m going to lose 25 pounds this year” and have milestones each month that include losing two pounds that month.

14. Remove the Roadblocks
What are the biggest obstacles you can see that will keep you from achieving the goal? What can you do to remove these roadblocks? Goals are much easier to achieve if you don’t have things working against you with regard to those goals. Seek out ways to remove the roadblocks, then actively remove as many as you can so that you’re open to achieving the things you wish to achieve.

15. Associate with the Right People
The people you most closely associate with often set the standard for what you want out of life. For example, three of my four closest friends in the world at this point are very frugal people, and their frugality often rubs off on me with regard to my personal choices. Surround yourself with people who embody what you want to achieve. Make an effort to build relationships with them.

16. Make a Plan of Action
What is your plan for achieving your goal? Write your goal down, then write a detailed plan for achieving it. The more detail, the better. Can you boil that plan down to daily steps or individual actions? The smaller the pieces, the easier it is to just grab ahold and pull yourself towards your goal, one bit at a time.

17. Manage Your Time Well
Time management is key – if you don’t have time for the things in your life right now, how will you have time to add the behavior changes that you’re suggesting? One route is to focus on your time management and implement a better system for you, like GTD. Another route is to simply identify time you spend inefficiently in your life and free up the time needed for your new goal, as I did for exercise in 2011.

18. Review Your Goals Daily
Take time every day to review the goals you’re working on, and do deeper reviews of it every week. I do this by writing in a journal and keeping tabs on a few key goals every single day in that journal. I literally have a daily section in my journal where I write “Goal #1:” followed by a sentence on my progress, then “Goal #2:” followed by a sentence and so on. It forces me to think about that goal every day, and I feel ashamed when I have to write “no progress.”

19. Visualize Your Goals Continually
When you find yourself daydreaming, daydream about what success in terms of your goal will look like. It’s actually great to fantasize about a world where you’ve found success with your chosen goal because it keeps that goal central in your mind throughout the day and the week.

20. Activate Your Superconscious Mind
Tracy uses the word “superconscious” to refer to flashes of inspiration or brilliance, when a great idea comes into your head seemingly out of nowhere and helps you solve a particular problem. I usually refer to this as being “in the zone,” and I find it very worthwhile to spend time cultivating periods where such flashes of brilliance happen on a regular basis, which is exactly what Tracy advocates here.

21. Persist Until You Succeed
You absolutely can’t give up on a goal because of one or two small failures. A step backwards isn’t a call to quit. It’s a call to keep marching forward, perhaps seeking out a slightly different path through the woods.

Is Goals! Worth Reading?
Goals! is perhaps the single best book I’ve yet read on goal setting and goal achievement. It offers an enormous collection of advice on how to figure out what you want, articulate it into a clear and achievable statement, then move toward that statement, improving your life along the way.

Yes, much of goal-setting is common sense, but it’s the type of common sense that many people have a great deal of difficulty with (hence the huge numbers of failed New Years resolutions). This book lays the entire process out as clearly as can be.

In an effort to talk about the power of goal-setting along with some methods of setting and achieving goals, I’m going to discuss my three resolutions for 2011 this week.

Over time, any voracious reader winds up with a list of books that they intend to read someday, but they find themselves reading more urgent things in the interim. They could read this challenging novel, but there’s this great page turner to read instead. This novel is pretty good, but it’s so long that I’ve lost my place in it. Boy, this nonfiction one is really challenging reading.

As a result, I’ve gradually built up a long list of “to-be-read” and “come-back-to” books that I keep telling myself I’ll read someday.

2011 is that “someday.”

I’ve been assembling an actual list of these books over the last few weeks. I’ve mentioned many times on here that I keep a running Word document of books I’d like to read (or, in a few cases, re-read) at some point. I essentially took that list and eliminated some of the chaff, boiling it down to 100 titles that really sum up some of the things I’ve strongly considered reading over the past couple of years, but put aside for whatever reason.

Here’s that list.

The Best American Short Stories 2010, edited by Richard Russo
The Best American Short Stories 2009, edited by Alice Sebold
PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010
PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009
Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
Makers, by Cory Doctorow
The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano
Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson
The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson
The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
Tinkers, by Paul Harding
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell
The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris
Austerlitz, by W. G. Sebald
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon
Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon
Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow
The Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem
Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski
Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami
American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis
Less than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer
The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
2666, by Roberto Bolano
The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb
The Northern Clemency, by Philip Hensher
I Know This Much Is True, by Wally Lamb
Selected Stories, by O. Henry
The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Rainbow’s End, by Vernor Vinge
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
Fragile Things, by Neil Gaiman
Under the Dome, by Stephen King
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett
Shogun, by James Clavell
Ilium, by Dan Simmons
Olympos, by Dan Simmons
Accelerando, by Charles Stross
The City and the City, by China Mieville
The Count of Monte Cristo (unabridged), by Alexandre Dumas
Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence
Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers
The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes
Reality Hunger, by David Shields
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010, edited by David Sedaris
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, edited by Dave Eggers
Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace
The Best American Sports Writing 2010, edited by Peter Gammons
The Best American Sports Writing 2009, edited by Leigh Montville
The Best American Essays 2010, edited by Christopher Hitchens
The Best American Essays 2009, edited by Mary Oliver
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010, edited by Freeman Dyson
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert
The Language of God, by Francis Collins
Belief, edited by Francis Collins
The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan
God Is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens
The First Tycoon, by T. J. Stiles
Lords of Finance, by Liaquat Ahamed
Just Kids, by Patti Smith
The Beautiful Struggle, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlsetin
Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein
The Book of Basketball, by Bill Simmons
The Best American Magazine Writing 2010
The Best American Magazine Writing 2009
A Soprano on Her Head, by Eloise Ristad
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
Play Their Hearts Out, by George Dohrmann
Look Me in the Eye, by John Elder Robison
Fordlandia, by Greg Grandin
The Progress Paradox, by Gregg Easterbrook
Hungry Monkey, by Matthew Amster-Burton
Nudge, by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami
The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
American Sphinx, by Joseph J. Ellis
What the Dog Saw, by Malcolm Gladwell
NurtureShock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky
The Religious Case Against Belief, by James Carse
Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain
Manufacturing Consent, by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman
Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins
Hurry Down Sunshine, by Michael Greenberg
Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, by Geoff Dyer
Bringing up Geeks, by MaryBeth Hicks
The Trouble with Physics, by Lee Smolin

It’s a wide mix. It’s roughly half fiction and half nonfiction. There’s a fairly strong religious theme running through there, with some strong apologetics and some strong atheist writing, too. I could go on and on with the observations about the list.

In the end, though, my goal is to read every title on that list in 2011.

Where will you find time? I currently read just shy of two books a week for personal enjoyment – and this is my “personal enjoyment” list for 2011. Some of the titles are a bit more challenging than my usual stuff, but I plan on coming up with that time by making sure I’m always carrying a book with me when I leave the house so that I don’t find myself idly reading a newspaper at the car repair shop and the like.

In an effort to talk about the power of goal-setting along with some methods of setting and achieving goals, I’m going to discuss my three resolutions for 2011 this week.

Another of my 2010 resolutions was to learn to play the piano, which is something I feel is coming along very well. For 2011, I’ve been thinking about tackling some intermediate-level pieces and working with them until I can play them very well.

For the moment, I’ve settled on four pieces that I want to be able to play without error by the end of 2011. Two of them are classical and two of them are pop.

1. Scheherazade (piano solo) by Nikolaj Rimsky-Korsakow (listen to excerpt)
2. Beautiful Day by U2 (listen)
3. In the Hall of the Mountain King (piano solo) by Edvard Grieg (listen)
4. Clocks by Coldplay (listen)

My plan is to continue my piano lessons as they are and work through these (at first) completely on my own. As I start making breakthroughs, I’ll then take the piece to a piano lesson and go through it with my teacher, as she’s good at spotting where my problems are. I’ve basically asked her not to pull punches as I’d rather get good than have my ego fluffed.

For this resolution, I don’t have to set aside (much) time that I’m not already setting aside for piano practice. Instead, what I’m doing is setting new goals and renewing my commitment to learning an instrument.

Are these pieces over my head? Maybe. It really depends on the arrangement I wind up working with. I have arrangements in hand for three of them that I can at least comprehend and work through slowly at the keyboard.

I view these pieces as my “challenge” pieces. In a normal one hour practice session, I usually spend fifteen minutes on finger exercises and scales, fifteen minutes on a piece or two I know well, and thirty minutes on pieces that challenge me. They’re complex enough that I can’t just sit down, flop the piece in front of me, and just play it.

Why is this a goal? One, music education is a piece of my own personal education that I feel I missed when I was younger. I’ve always wanted to play an instrument and now I’m learning how. Two, I want to show my children that music is part of a normal, healthy life. Three, I might someday end up playing at my local church as a backup pianist for services. Fourth, I want to show myself that I can do this.

That’s reason enough for me.

In an effort to talk about the power of goal-setting along with some methods of setting and achieving goals, I’m going to discuss my three resolutions for 2011 this week.

As many of you remember, I set a weight loss goal for 2010 that I exactly halfway achieved. I’m happy with that partial success.

What I discovered during the process, though, is that I’m not so much concerned with the weight loss as I am with being in decent physical shape, mostly with regards to an ability to actively play with my children. I don’t want to be winded playing tag with them. I want to be able to grab them all and pick them up over my head without effort. I want to be able to help my children get started in whatever sports or outdoor activities excite them. I want to be able to go on bike rides with them.

In the end, the way to do that is with a set of specific fitness goals. I’ve already had a chat with a personal trainer to talk about some general expectations, mostly in terms of setting end-of-year goals for 2011. With his suggestions, I came up with the following list:

Run a 5K in 30 minutes
Do 100 pushups in 3 minutes
Do 200 squats in 5 minutes
Do 200 situps in 5 minutes
Jump to touch an eleven foot marker (I’m already six and a half feet tall, so this isn’t a tremendous leap)
Ride RAGBRAI (or a leg or two of it) in 2012
Additional specific flexibility and strength goals that I need to discuss with my trainer.

Remember, these are specific goals that take me from where I am (I’m not in the worst shape of my life, but not the best, either) to that place by the end of 2011. I think they’re all fairly realistic.

What will I do to get there? I’ve decided to set aside one hour each day for physical fitness in 2011. (I won’t be completely single-tasking this time, as I intend to get plenty of reading in while walking/jogging on treadmills and the like.) I hope to do this consistently in the morning as part of my morning routine.

What activities will I give up for that time? The biggest thing I’ll give up is idle web surfing. I’ve decided to stop spending time on a handful of time vacuum websites (like this one) and instead devote that time to something more productive, like getting in shape (and hitting a home run on my other two goals for the year). I’m doing this by blocking those websites at the router so that they basically can’t be accessed at home without a lot of difficulty.

I suspect that with my current dietary changes (I’m currently a vegan, for better or worse) and this regimen, I will lose some weight in 2011, but that’s not my primary goal with all of this. My primary goal is to be in good enough shape that I can participate in athletic activities with my children.

Thus, I have the pieces in place to make this work. I have the motivation (my children). I have the means (newfound free time). I have the specific goals (listed above).

Now it’s just up to me to carry through with them.

As 2010 draws to a close, it’s time to take a look at my resolutions for the year and see how they’ve gone.

1. Lose 40 pounds

Result: Partial success

What do I mean by partial success? I mean that I did lose weight during 2010 and made it halfway to my goal by losing twenty pounds during the year. Best of all, the year ended on a very positive note, with most of the weight loss occurring in the last two months of the year.

I made great progress on this goal early in the year, then it rebounded during the period where I was editing my book and facing other stresses in my life. As summer ended, I was nearly back to where I started, but during the fall, I took control of things again in a positive fashion.

My biggest challenge is getting exercise. I can cut back on my food intake without much problem, but exercise is the continual challenge because my work is largely sedentary, as are my main hobbies (reading and gaming). For me, when I cut back on food, I have to be careful to not cut back too much or I get mentally and physically tired. Diet usually results in about 3/4 lb. loss per week if I hit that fine line of meeting my nutritional needs but not consuming excess calories.

The big difference for me is exercise – when I can get it. This, of course, points straight at a potential 2011 resolution, doesn’t it?

2. Pay cash for a replacement for my truck.

Result: Complete success

If you were paying attention back in late March, our family bought a 2004 Honda Pilot using cash off of Craigslist. We have been extremely happy with the vehicle, as it fits our family of five very well for road trips (meaning we can travel to visit our parents with plenty of room for the needed luggage, plus the safety of a four wheel drive in the winter months).

The only maintenance and repair cost I’ve put into the vehicle since acquiring it is the 100,000 and 105,000 mile maintenances, which I did as one big package at about the 103,000 mile mark. That was a bit expensive, but the vehicle has kept running like a champ.

3. Learn to play the piano.

Result: Success

I wouldn’t say complete success here because I’ve learned that it’s a long, long process to get good at the piano. I can play simple arrangements now and work through new songs by simply sight reading. I am happy with my progress throughout the year, especially considering that I’ve never played an instrument or looked at sheet music before in my life.

I’ve been lucky to have a great piano instructor, Diane Helmer, who really needs to have a website to promote her work. She didn’t just sit down and make me learn things the way she thought I “ought” to learn them, but instead figured out what my goals were and is helping me to achieve them. Diane, get a website and you’ll get a link from The Simple Dollar!

I fully intend to keep up my piano playing for years to come, and my two oldest children are beginning to express interest as well (which was an ulterior motive of this).

4. Reduce my entertainment and hobby spending by 50%.

Result: Middling success

My calculation so far is that my entertainment and hobby spending in 2010 is down about 35% from 2009, which is close to my goal but didn’t quite reach it.

Here’s why I still see some success, though: I took to doing a lot of trading via the internet of DVDs, books, board games, and other items this year. If you do not include the postage for these trades, I’m actually very close to my 50% reduction that I planned for for this year.

My hobby and entertainment spending did go down drastically. The biggest drop was in DVD purchases, which almost vanished. Gaming spending had about a 10% drop overall. Book spending went down about 40%. The only area that went up was a subscription to Netflix.

I’m happy with the changes, and I suspect 2011 will have lower spending than 2010 because right now I actually have a backlog of games to play, books to read, and films to watch.

Overall

I’m pretty pleased with my 2010 resolution performance. It’s not perfect, but I set some very stiff goals for myself during the year and I achieved (or mostly achieved) all of them.

Going through this process has helped me figure out some goals for 2011, which I’m going to share with you in the coming weeks. I tentatively have three of them in place and you should be able to guess one of them if you’ve read this article.