My writing/professional goals for the month were:
- Finish writing up my plan for how I will meet my institution's criteria for the upcoming year. I finished this
- Continue note-taking and outlining a conference paper and a journal article. I have been making progress but I still don't have a full outline or a complete first draft of either. I'll be carrying this into October.
- Make inquiries about reviewing another book for an academic journal in my field. I have sent out a couple of emails out to book review editors but have yet to hear anything back. If I haven't received a response by the end of next month, I'll make a further inquiry as I puzzle out all that's come my way in September.
Health/Fitness Goals
- Do something at least once a week to cultivate my risk-taking abilities and my ability to deal with things not going quite as planned and/or failure and rejection. Risks included exploring chiropractic treatment for my injury, taking panda shots, and a couple of pedagogical and professional experiments that met with mixed results. I won't go into the detail. Failing is not fun and rejection stings more than I would like for it to, but I'm glad I'm pushing myself to take more chances.
- Run 130 miles in the month of September. Of course, with my IT band issues and my decision to DNS Chicago, my mileage came no where near the mark. I only ran 44 miles in September. Instead of September being my highest mileage month of the year, it was my lowest so far of 2011.
- Continue to cross-train and do yoga 2-3 times a week. I have been good about doing yoga at least 2 times a week - often more. I have been trying to ride my bike to and from campus whenever the weather is nice so that I feel like I'm getting at least a bit of activity.
- Maintain my food journal. I pretty much failed at maintaining my journal this month. This was not planned as a means of cultivating my ability to deal with failure.
So while I had only mixed success with my goals, I've been working plenty of hours and and will refocus my energies in the month to come.
How was your September? Was it a straight line or a knotted up squiggly?
I haven't reflected on September yet, but my week hasn't gone as planned with regard to my running goals. I just posted about that. Sometimes plan b isn't so bad....
ReplyDeleteI spent much of September gathering documents and writing RPT cases for my co-workers. It actually felt like a squiggly downward arrow and made me dislike my job greatly. I did not want to come to work at all any day while it was going on and have been arriving late and leaving early. If it hadn't been for this, September would have been fine. I'm teaching a new undergrad class and it's going well, we submitted a paper and got (respondable) reviews back on a second. Definitely a month of mixed results colored by worry and tension.
ReplyDeleteMine was definitely knotted and squiggly. When are they EVER straight!? PS. I haven't reached the end yet! My to do/goal list keeps growing and growing and I just transfer it over to the next month. It is kind of scary really. I think I am right in the middle of one of those tangles now!
ReplyDeleteI loved this post so much, I "starred" it for future reference. I don't set month-goals, but I do set year-goals, and in September I made quite a bit of progress on two goals that had been lagging (but I see 3 months left in the year and ZERO progress on another two).
ReplyDeleteI finished, and submitted, one of my conference papers... only to open it the following week and find A TYPO. *gasp* So that's one of my squiggly-line issues this month. I had to remind myself (repeatedly) that no one dies because of a typo in a conference paper.:-S
It's always good to have a plan B or C or D. Now I just need some time to put a back-up plan into action....
ReplyDeleteI think I kind of felt like August was a straight line with a lot of forward momentum, so getting snagged up as all hell in September threw me for a loop. My list keeps growing to, but we will both cross things off of them!
ReplyDeleteEveryone makes typos. I just saw a glaring one in the first sentence of an excellent essay in an edited volume that I was reading the other day. It's when there are typos in every paragraph that there's a problem.
ReplyDeleteYou know, September was a challenging month for me. I found out that I have exceeded my limits in terms of my schedule. I am exhausted now and sick and I have myself to blame. I am not complaining or asking for sympathy as i did this to myself - it's just one of those times when I step back and say, 'ok, we can not do this again.' What can i say, I am a work in progress! So I totally hear you on the jumbled path towards success. That is how it is for me, too. Esp the last 2 years!
ReplyDeleteThat is a very accurate figure, at least with regard to my life! I love it. It seems like your injury really derailed your month, which is totally understandable. The one serious running injury I've had derailed me at a time when I was running my very best in my whole life, so it was really disappointing.
ReplyDeleteSeptember was a good month for me, though I'll confess that I'm feeling more overwhelmed and stressed out right now than I'd like. Success, for me, always feels like your figure, at least with regard to work. I think I need to work a bit harder on making my at-home routines more relaxing. I'm spending too much aimless time on the internet when I should be getting ready for bed, and I think I need to get more sleep. So this month I think perhaps in addition to my star chart, I need to focus on some other health-related goals.
You always inspire me to think more about my goals, which is one of the reasons I love your blog :-)
I love that line graph. It works for everything! I too have starred it...
ReplyDeleteDefinitely a knotted up squiggly! I DNSed a bunch of races, but I'm actually ok with it. I also didn't get the results I was hoping for (because we couldn't start the experiments on time), but that's what October is for!
ReplyDelete