Here I am, almost the middle of April, finally posting my goals progress for March... Time just moves too fast these days! We had a very busy March, you can get a better recap over here where I talked more about all the different things we have been doing.
Why am I discussing my goals on my blog?
These monthly check-ins are going to be where I show you my successes and failures over my seven areas I'm working in. Those being:
Spirituality
Career
Family
Financial
Intellectual
Physical
Social
I feel that by setting goals in each area of my life, I'll be working on my whole person instead of just one specific area of my life. I think when we focus on our whole self, we will be less likely to sabotage ourselves due to getting over excited about one area or another and we will see some great balanced growth through the year.
2017 Goals: Spirituality
Read the Bible in one year devotional
This month's Bible reading has been very slow due to me not getting up as early and us being so busy. I can definitely see the difference. I don't feel as centered and at peace about the situation as much. I completed only 14 days this month. And that was mainly due to quite a few days of playing catch up where I was doing double devotionals.
I'm going to have to build time into my schedule to get this to work. I think I've let this one slip through the cracks and haven't made it as much of a priority lately and it's showing.
17.8% complete
Altogether, I'm now 65 days into the 365 day plan.
2017 Goals: Career
Take a writing course or two.
One of the courses came up and I didn't even try to make it fit yet... Will have to keep working at it and try to schedule some time to get this one in as well.
Increase my online connections to over 10,000.
In March, I saw some decent growth, but not as high as last month. I grew by almost 10.9%, or 365 new connections. I also added a new connection avenue in Blog Lovin'. Give me a follow over there if you use it and it'll automatically update with our content here when we post.
My biggest growth came from Twitter again this month and my worst performer was my email subscription where I actually lost a few people. This was most likely due to me starting to email out my updates there on a more consistent basis. Before this month, I hadn't really been emailing the list.
44.98% complete
With this growth, it puts me at almost halfway to my goal of 10,000 connections!Here's the chart for the numbers and how they broke down:
Hit 50,000 page views.
March wasn't quite as good as February as I came in 502 views shorter even with the longer month. Overall, I had 2,513 page views for the month. Overall, the biggest decrease in traffic came from referral traffic, as it dropped by 55% this month. Last month was amazing with some of the guest posts that I published and being linked to them from the guest bloggers for the inbound traffic. My traffic from social media grew by about 14.7% month over month, which is great since I've been working towards growing my connections. My biggest growth month over month was my organic search growth, coming in at over 70% more than last month! I love seeing that!
Overall, I'm around 16.4% of the way to my goal in my first 3 months. Although a little behind, I think it's still a manageable goal to hit for the year and should see growth over the next nine months from my efforts.
16.4% complete
Here's my chart showing my page views from March:
2017 Goals: Family
Preschool Home School Course
We were able to knock out another 3 weeks this month on our course work. We had fun doing this in addition to the two "story hour" classes we attend at different libraries in the area. I would highly recommend checking out this program as it's had a tremendous impact on our girls. It's amazing to see them grow and transform with these great activities. Prep is very easy going and everything is printable from the web site or you can order the books. Evelyn has actually memorized the New Testament books of the Bible up through Ephesians (that's 10 books!) at this point.
One date night per month
As far as dates go, we had a nice date night where we got to go out and see the new live action Beauty & The Beast at the theaters in 3-D. It was a pretty good movie. It's insane how good CGI has gotten these days. After the movie, we met up with some friends for dinner and margaritas at Pepe's. We love their food and drinks!
4 Vacations
In March, we got to take our first vacation! We went up to Wisconsin to visit the Dancing Horses Theater. We had received buy one, get one admission tickets, so we were able to make a whole weekend out of it! I even wrote a reflection post on how it went and some tips I learned from the trip here.
If you want to check out the video I created, you can here:
2017 Goals: Financial
Contribute 15% of gross income to investments
No real news to report here. We were able to put the extra $45 that we saved from canceling Netflix and Sling into our Roth again this month. On another note, my wife did get a nice extra contribution into her Roth 403b this past month because her company was profitable and it was a thank you gift based on years of service and a share of a nice gift from the board. So, that was nice to have added unexpectedly too. We are not quite there, as we are still going to need to find an additional $3,677 still although I haven't factored in the extra 2 paychecks that we'll have for our three paycheck months (June and November for us) this year.
Grow Net Worth to $120,000
In March, we saw another stellar month, adding another $2,196 onto our net worth. This brings our current worth to $107,176. The roof purchase ($8,000+) won't be reflected in our net worth until April though as the roof didn't get finished until April. Still, it's nice to have that beautiful upward trend line going for the last few months!
25.64% complete
2017 Goals: Intellectual
Read seven educational books
Link to book on Amazon. (affiliate link)
In March, I actually finished another book, although it wasn't on my list for my books to read. The book that I read was called "Be The Parent" by Kendra Smiley (affiliate link). I attended a workshop called The Parent Challenge where they were the main speakers and found them to be quite inspiring, so I grabbed a few of their books. I hope to have a review of the book up soon. If you are looking for some great pointers on how to parent more effectively though, this is a great primer.
This puts me at three out of my seven books for the year!
42.8% complete
2017 Goals: Physical
Lose 20 pounds
I had another great month this month in this area as I was able continue towards my goal. I started the month at 228.9 lbs and was able to get it all the way down to 224.6 lbs as of March 31st! That's another 4.3 pounds.
82.5% complete
This was my first full month on Herbalife and I did pretty good with sticking to the diet although I cheated for a couple weekends since we were on the road. I'm looking forward to continuing along the process and breaking through my first goal at the 20 pound mark. Then, I'll start working towards my stretch goal of an additional 20 pounds!
Go to the gym 3-5 times per week
For March, I was a little lower than the past couple months as I ended up with about 15 workouts for the month. My plan that I setup last month for my weekly routine seemed to fall through a bit. I'm back to just getting my workout in as I'm able. I've done a little bit of lifting and have had some nice results from it in that I've been able to burn as many calories as if I was just doing cardio. I'm hoping to boost this up again in April though.
2017 Goals: Social
Staying In A Small Group
I made all five meetings for my March small group! I love working and connecting with this group. They provide a great way for me to get some great fellowship and to help encourage others as I get encouraged!
Making Time For Fun
I've fallen back into my trends of checking my social media accounts regularly again. I will need to work to get this under control again in April, but I haven't been posting as much lately, so that's helping me stay off a little more and stay in the moment more.
Wrapping up February 2017 Goals
March turned out pretty good, despite having a few setbacks. I'm looking forward to growing more in April as well!
How did your March end up?
Don't neglect your goals if you've felt like you're getting beat up by them! You can always start fresh today!
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I love the goals and keeping us updated. Giving some good ideas to have for ourselves.
Thanks Jared! The key is to stay consistent! Hope your goals for the year are coming along well as well!