Commitment – Mixing Pods

Checkpoint: How are you doing with your goals and that one word for 2019?

So it’s already March 31st, the last day of the first quarter of the year (dang that went fast!). It’s time for a checkpoint on those goals that we set for the year and how we are doing on that one word for 2019 that we talked about on January 1st.

Commitment. That was my one word for 2019. I also posted a blog in December on why having fun at work would be a top goal in 2019. I’m doing pretty good so far (this blog is still getting posted), and there is always room for more fun.

However, those that know me well (or have picked up on it by reading this blog) know that I am a goal fanatic. I love setting goals, creating sub-goals, grouping goals, prioritizing goals, and talking about goals. I sort of treat personal goals like Wayne Gretzky treated hockey goals.

” You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
Wayne Gretzky

My take is that it costs you nothing to set a goal. So why not put a goal out there if it is something you are thinking about achieving. Goals can be dynamic and might change season to season.

So my 2019 word, commitment, has developed into more of a theme that applies to the goals across 4 categories: Family, Work, Community, and Personal. (Commitment to …)

To measure progress, I take a simple color-based approach to see how I am doing and where to refocus my energy. I score myself as either ‘green’, ‘yellow’, ‘red’, and a new label of ‘blue’.

Green = On Track – Making progress and hitting milestones
Yellow = Need to Recommit – Put more energy and focus on it
Red = Way off Track – Totally Refocus or Evaluate if it was the right goal
Blue = Eliminate = The goal it was DOA (Dead on Arrival)

This past week, I listened to Seth Godin’s, The Dip and he talks about ‘strategic quitting’. So for those goals in red, determining if it is worth persevering get through the dip or if it’s a cul-de-sac, and the goal is a dead end. Should that goal that is in red, be turned to blue? It’s a quick read/listen, so I won’t dive too deep into Seth’s book here, but I highly recommend checking it out.

The good news is tomorrow is April 1st. We have an opportunity to start the next quarter off fresh and it’s a perfect time to do an assessment to determine if you had the right goals to start with or not. How are you doing with that one word you set at the beginning of the year?

Take some time to celebrate your successes and ways to keep the momentum in areas where you are on track. Determine if you need to make some minor adjustments or totally refocus in the areas you aren’t makeing progress. Or lastly, the insight from this blog may be evaluating if it is time to ‘quit’ a goal or think through a word that is a better fit.

There is no need to beat yourself up if you are not on track because no matter how awesome you are, even you can’t change the past. And if you never set a goal in the first place, why not start today? You have nothing to lose.

Addie’s version of writing down her goals!

“Your next blog: Is it over committing or under prioritizing?”

That was the text that I received from Jensen on Friday, November 16th. I had cancelled lunch plans with some of the guys that morning after waffling the day before. I sent a text indicating that I had over committed myself and had to take care of some things at the office.

Sure, Jensen was teasing me and most likely laughing when he wrote it. He knew how much it would bother me.

Getting the boys together is one of those things that gives me a ton of energy. We have a really good crew of lifelong friends and we spark creativity in each other, razz each other for stupid decisions, and do a lot of laughing. Finding the time to get together is getting harder and harder.
My work calendar was wide open when we made the plans and I have been trying to keep personal commitments as much as possible.

Did I over commit or under prioritize? This is one of the questions that I struggle with every day. Balancing activities with friends, family, and especially with the girls; while trying to exceed client expectations, grow an account, strengthen the firm, develop our team, and invest in my own self-development. My word for 2019 is commitment and it applies to all of the above… but has to be handled with care.

One of my challenge is that I’m the king of creating lists of things that I am going to do on a given day (like most of you reading this blog). I have them in categories and usually in the order of importance. However, I seldom apply any constraints to completing them. That means accounting for how long they are going to take or how much time I actually have in the day to get them done. Combine that with the fact that I really like to talk and engage with the girls, it usually results in some late nights.

Unfortunately, it seemes to be the immediate and tactical things that fall into the over committing category. All those things that old people try and tell young people to not take for granted, and say that they regret the most later in life, tend to fall in the under prioritizing category.

Three months later, the question of over committing and under prioritizing hit me in the face again. I actually told Katie that maybe I needed to skip the weekly Sunday night dinner with her family because I have some homework and a few big presentations due this week. I thought it through and after remembering the question, I refocused and shifted the way that I approached the day and made it to dinner.

So even though we didn’t end up having lunch that day in November, the insight and the lesson from one of my best friends made its mark, even if it was just a text.

What is your one word for 2019?

This is the sister blog (if that is a thing) to my Perficient Blog (What is the one word that will define success in 2019!) In that blog, I tied this concept to business strategy and operating model metrics. However, since Jensen makes fun of me for using business speak in the ‘friends pods’, I thought I would tailor this to be much more personal.

I have definitely been in a transitional phase over the past couple of years, making a significant move from being work-centered to family-centered. I think this phase was at its peak towards the end of 2016. Maggie was 2 years-old, and Addie was born that September. It’s not that I was I was a dead beat dad or husband, but I was still getting used to staying present and focused on the family throughout the evening. I used to put in a lot of time in the evenings making sure all of my client and firm deliverables were completed to my satisfaction. I was finding myself gasping at the end of the night when I looked at the clock and realized how tired I was. Things had changed.

Over that Thanksgiving, I read Angela Duckworth’s book Grit, the Power of Passion and Perseverance. She talks about how to build grit and the need for an “ultimate concern”, which is a supreme goal that is so meaningful to you that it provides structure and discipline to everything you do. She described a method for gaining focus by listing 25 goals, circling the top 5 and avoiding all others at all costs, while discovering themes. Her hierarchical approach of rolling up low level and mid level goals to the ultimate concern really resonated with me.

At the time, all of my goals and the ultimate concern at the top of my hierarchy ended up bringing out the word ‘engaged’. I covered my four goal categories in the blog a couple of days ago, Why having fun will be my top work goal in 2019! I could assess everything that I was doing in every aspect to my life in that moment to the word engaged. The best part is that I could quickly get back on track if I found myself not being present or missing an opportunity if necessary.

It started off being something to focus me on work/life balance and being engaged with the kids. But I also found that I was using it to assess if I was engaged with my work, team members, and clients.

I think this approach is way more productive than doing New Year’s resolutions. So I recommend taking some time to think about it. Lay out your goals and see what theme surfaces and the one word that sums it up. There is no right or wrong word, you just have to describe a meaningful word to you. A word that describes how you want to show up every day. Then do it! Everything else will fall into place.

This year, my word is ‘commitment’. I’ve signed up to do a lot and I have some ambitious goals. I’m going to need some serious commitment and discipline to maintain the right balance and get the results that I’m striving to achieve. I’ll need some help. It’s important to engage others in this so that they can be in your corner, help you stay focused, and keep you accountable (not to be confused with judging).

So what will your word be:

Creativity?
Kindness?
Focus?
Discipline?

You may have one for work, one for your family, or it can all be the same. But at the end of the day, it’s kind of like the “one thing” that Curly is referencing in the 1991 movie, City Slickers. It’s your one word.