Today is January 1–a day typically known for goal setting and resolutions. For me I have been thinking about my 2015 goals for a couple of months. First let me tell you about 2014 (which I did not blog about my goals for the year). Then I will get into 2015’s goals.
2014 — A Year of Consumption
No, not a year of tuberculosis. That is a different kind of consumption than what I did in 2014. I made 2014 a year of reading. I know some people read a ton more books than I do; but for me, setting a goal is helpful to keep me reading. I did something similar in 2008 and 2009 when I had a goal of reading 800 pages a month. In 2008 the goal was an average for the year and 2009 was an attempt to not let any month drop below 800 pages.
For 2014 the goal was not a certain number of pages, but a certain number of books. I wanted to read 50 books for the year. My final total was 57 books. Total pages read was 13,275 (for an average of 1,106 pages a month).
I will go into much more analysis about the books in upcoming posts. Mainly I am breaking the analysis into smaller parts because of what it has to do with this year’s goals.
2015 — A Year of Creation
I have a big content creation goal for 2015. Of course I will still be reading through the year. I plan to write down each book I read (which I did better in 2014 than I have ever done before). It will be interesting to see if I actually read significantly less when I don’t have a specific goal.
Writing
The bulk of my content creation will be in the form of writing. I plan to create at least 4 pieces of writing content per week. That will be spread over several websites. I have identified 8 places where I should be regularly creating content. That means that the 208 new pieces of writing won’t all be here. So it may not look like as much writing is going on if you just follow this one blog. This just happens to be the best place to talk about this and the place that can catch any random thoughts I have.
This is a total goal for the year and not necessarily a week-to-week or month-to-month goal. So if I don’t have 4 each week or 16 each month, I am allowing myself to catch up towards the end of the year. It is also possible that this goal is too meager. I will re-evaluate later and see if I need to increase the number as the year goes along. Based on the last couple of years, I don’t think this will be too low. I need to get back into more consistent writing.
Evaluation
Along with a writing goal, part of my creation will be evaluating my different websites. I want to seriously look at all the themes, plugins, functionality, and overall design of each one of my major websites. So each site will get an honest evaluation.
I want to standardize many of the plugins I use. Because I have built my various websites over the course of 15 years–with about 9 years focused on WordPress–I found the best plugin at the time for a particular job. But, that means that I am using about 4 different caching plugins and 3 different backup plugins (with some sites having no automatic backups at all). I want to unify my maintenance routine on the sites which will best be done by standardizing the way I work with each site.
Personal Goals
I have some other goals related to Bible study, health and ministry. Though I probably won’t post my Bible study goals explicitly, the fruit of those goals will show up on Genuine Leather Bible. BTW, in 2014 I was able to buy the .com domain for that website. I will probably keep the main content on .net, but now the .com will point traffic to the site. That has become, by far, my biggest source of traffic.
I had thought about having a minimum number of words that are needed to be considered a “piece of content,” but I never have problems writing too few words. I am tracking everything with the knowledge that if there is ever anything that is considered too short (300 words or less) those will be balanced out by the many blog posts and articles that will approach the 3,000 word mark throughout the year.
Happy 2015!
