C'est fini

Last week was my deadline for my 101 in 1001 goals. It's funny, even though it was a completely arbitrary deadline, I really felt the pressure to get everything done by midnight on December 3, 2015!

I was able to cross off

12. Organize my recipes into a binder

13. Update our will

14. Read "Anna Karenina"

22. Visit Hearst Castle (We did a quick trip one Saturday, and it is definitely worth a visit. I want to go back sometime without kids and do the additional tours we skipped)

52. Begin PAF (So, over the course of these past three years, Personal Ancestral Files kinda ceased to exist. Everything is just on Family Search now. So I altered the goal to find someone to input into our family tree. It helps that one side of Chase's family tree is virtually blank, so I didn't have to go back too far)

80. Take a free online class (I took a class on the psychology of play on futurelearn.com. It was great!)

You're probably wondering, "okay, but how many did you actually accomplish?! What is the final count?!" 

So, without further ado, I give you my final score....

99/101

Not too bad, eh?

The final goals I was not able to accomplish were

62. Learn to do a backward walk-over
To be honest, I never even attempted this one. It was probably over-ambitious.

83. Learn to do the splits
This is the only one that makes me sad, because I wanted to do it SO BADLY! And I really tried. I stretched regularly, and even on that final night spent a solid 2 hours stretching. But I just can't get past those last 2 inches. Yet. :)

I have always been a goal-oriented person, the go-getter type. And it was really quite fun and satisfying for me to be able to make all these goals and then accomplish them. I'm not going to start another list soon, but I would absolutely do it again someday. Some of these goals I would have accomplished anyway, but many would not have happened. I know this for a fact because it took a lot of hard work for me to get them done in time! Putting my recipes into a binder, burning all my home videos onto dvd, scanning my journals, prepare my 72 hour kits, taking a free online class, setting up off-site storage for important photos/documents, and finishing my London album are all things I had been wanting to do for some time, but which took a LOT of time and effort, and would simply still have been sitting on the back-burner were it not for this exercise.

I was also so pleasantly surprised to rediscover through these goals some things that I really love. Number 37 was to go see a musical or play. I had not been to a musical in years when I made this goal. Guess how many I've been to now? Actually, I can't even count, but it's been at least half a dozen. Same with going to the opera and ballet. I love these things! I would so much rather go to this kind of performance than see a movie, and I don't know that I would have remembered that had I not had this push to spend the money and try them out again.

In summation, this was a fabulous experience. If you are at all the type of person who likes to make goals, I would highly recommend it.

It also taught me how important it is to make very specific goals. So instead of saying, "I'm going to get in shape," or "I'm going to exercise more," making goals like a number of push-ups you can do, or how fast you can complete a mile, or being able to hold a handstand for 5 seconds allows you to measure your progress and gives you actual, attainable goals. Not, "I'm going to be a better mom," but "I'm going to spend the last five minutes at bedtime sitting beside my kids and talking to them every night." That's something you can measure. Time limits can be helpful, too: "I will read 3 books by March."

Just something for me to keep in mind as I make my new year's resolutions in a few weeks. :)