Goals and plans for 2013

I didn't work out any goals for 2012, but I am going to for 2013 - we have a third child on the way and many things need to be done prior to that.

My overall goals for 2013 are:

  1. Improve my health.
  2. Become more productive.
  3. Do more with my family.
  4. Be happier.

Breaking these broad goals down into smaller pieces, I have the following more specific goals:

  1. Exercise at least three times per week - five times would be better, but I'd be happy with three to start with; we have a family membership to the YMCA that is only a mile away from our house, along with multiple exercise routines on DVD, so I have no excuse not to do this.
  2. Improve my diet by stopping eating high carb / calorie snacks at night, focus instead on more filling & nutritious foods, and get out of the instinct that I can randomly munch on things when I'm hungry rather than having a discrete snack.
  3. Drink more water, less tea.
  4. As a result of the above, fit my size 38 pants better by the summer, rather than feel like I should be looking to "upgrade" to size 40's. I'd really like to fit my size 36's again, but making the 38's fit correctly again would be a good start.
  5. Be in bed by 11pm every night - critical work-related or critical family-related things may bump this, but seriously aim to avoid being up past 11 when there's no good reason to.
  6. Reduce "wasteful" social networking, mainly Facebook and Twitter; with Facebook I've added far too many people that I can interact with via other means, thus creating duplicate content I feel a (albeit mild) compulsion to keep up with on, with Twitter I've a tendency to get into many conversations that I don't need to. Both of these lead to reduce productivity thus less family time. The first task for this is to reduce the number of Facebook contacts I have, the second task is to stop checking Twitter so often (will take some time to break the habit).
  7. Learn how to do minor maintenance on our car; I was able to change the brakes on our previous car, I can learn how to do the same with our current one, especially now that I picked up a repair manual for it. The first specific task for this will be to change the low-beam lights as one of them stopped working over the holidays.
  8. Have our (current) two children help more with "thing" maintenance, including the car and DIY tasks around the house - it'll mean spending more time with them and they'll learn how to do lots of day-to-day things.
  9. Stop whining & holding onto grudges, learn to let go.
  10. Blog more, tweet less.

It's going to be a busy six months until our third child is born, but I'm determined to become a better person, husband and father by then.

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