Calling myself into the office: August 2010

This series, published on the first Monday each month, is aimed at personal improvement through the public sharing of goals and targets. In this post I look back at whether I achieved the last month’s goals and come up with some targets for the coming month. 🙂

Looking back…

There’s three core things I’m doing terribly with at the moment:

• Biting my nails – well I have done it for about 25 years…
• Losing weight – being away from home so much makes it difficult
• Writing my thesis – I’ve had so many other priorities on this month (although I have chapterized it now!)

My targets for last month were:

1. Go camping with my 3 year-old son, Ben, in our smaller tent.
2. Compose an e-book on Google Earth in preparation for Google Teacher Academy.
3. Comment on at least one blog per day (other than this one!)
4. Play golf with my Dad (who’s back from the UAE for the summer as of Friday)
5. Sort out benbelshaw.com, the domain I bought for my son, with some useful content.

How did I do?

1. Done! It rained more than I thought possible in one night, but we went (Beadnell Bay) and we enjoyed ourselves.
2. I decided against an e-book, but created a Google Earth for #GTAUK wiki and wrote an e-book called #onfire: ignite your productivity. I’m happy with that!
3. I’m certainly commenting on more blogs than I was. Perhaps not one per day, but the idea was to kickstart the habit again.
4. I played golf with my Dad and my father-in-law yesterday (technically the 1st of August…)
5. I’ve only added one thing to Ben’s website as it hasn’t been a high enough priority in the scheme of things!

Looking forward…

July was a busy month work-wise for me. I had several conferences to attend and a number of presentations to make. August, on the other hand, looks like it’s going to be a quiet month. Therefore I’m going to set myself one main target:

• Write 10,000 words of my Ed.D. thesis

If I don’t there’s no way I’m going to get it finished for my self-imposed deadline of 21 December 2010! 😮