2024 Goal Accountability January Closeout/February Kickoff

I’m a bit late on my closeout/kickoff for the goal accountability but here we have it. So how did I do with meeting my goals for January and what are my plans for goals for February?

Methodology

This is a quick refresher of how this works. The “Goal Accountability” method is to give myself five focus areas each day which help contribute to longevity. Technically it can be any five things but for me these have historically always fallen into the categories of: diet, sleep, cardio movement, strength movement, and mind exercises. For each day one is given a numerical grade like in school from 0.0 (F) to 4.0 (A). By keeping track of those things we can see how we do by week and over the year. To give myself opportunities for feeling the “new years resolution” type psychological prodding more than just once a year the whole year is broken up into four week “phases”. Therefore I can see how things are going over the year and at an approximately one month interval have an opportunity to start with a clean slate and “get a good grade”.

January Closeout

As I wrote in the 2023 Annual review , I had a lot of momentum leaving last year, except on diet and things where were they needed to be. I was therefore keeping my goals pretty much in line as well. The one tweak I was making was to brain health, where I wanted to drop back to something buildable on the meditation or doing something brain flexing education wise. That left the goals for January as:

Therefore the goals for January’s Goal Accountability was:

• Goal 1 (Diet): Eat a plant dominant Mediterranean diet averaging at least 90 grams of protein a day
• Goal 2 (Sleep): Get 7-8 hours of sleep a night
• Goal 3 (Cardio Health): 30 minutes of focused cardio exercise (indoor cycling, running, swimming, etc), with one hard session per week minimum and a stretch goal of two hard sessions per week
• Goal 4 (Non-Cardio Health): 20-30 minutes of weight training, calisthenics, or yoga
• Goal 5 (Brain Health): 15-20 minutes of meditation or alternative learning, stretch goal of 15-20 minutes of meditation and alternative learning or a second meditation session.

First lets look at the aggregated daily grade. Overall I maintained a pretty high daily grade in aggregate. There was a huge dip in mid-January due to some travel for a family event. On those days I didn’t get none of my cardio, non-cardio, or brain exercises in. My diet was very indulgent as well so that was a goose egg too. Sleep on one day was solid but on another it wasn’t so great. So that was a good sized hit. But for the rest of the month things looked very solid, near or above the 3.7 (A-) level. Looking at the per-goal grade though we see some areas of improvent.

By far my weakest category is Goal #1 (Diet). I have some manufactured and legitimate excuses for this. The biggest excuse, a mixture of manufactured and legitimate, is that I’m still eating through the holiday leftovers. I hate wasting food so was pretty quick to freeze leftovers from Christmas and New Years. As we tend to do we had a lot. I probably have another 2-3 weeks of them to eat through them for the rest of the year. But I wanted to get the bulk of them eaten down in January since even frozen these things don’t keep forever. In there is also the family trip which I don’t care about throwing indulgence days in for. In that mix though is also not being as fastidious about my late night snacking, choices in restaurants et cetera. These were giving into cravings with no greater purpose rationalizations like a unique dining experience or anything like that.

My second weakest is Goal #5 (Brain Health). I similarly don’t have good excuses here. It would usually be I intended to do a meditation “later” and then before I knew it I was in bed and forgot. I still got a good amount of meditation time in but I did have some whiff days there.

Sleep (Goal #2) was the last one that was a bit weak, but not by much. Most of the dings were just slightly slacking on planning bed time when I knew I had to be up at a certain time the next day. However a few of them were also my brain just turning on at some point and being unable to fall back asleep despite not getting near enough sleep.

Overall this performance isn’t bad. I had all B’s and a final grade for the month of 3.46 (B+). I originally thought this may be one of my strongest starts of the year but going through the old data it is clear that actually this is a strong but not uncommon performance. The big difference between this year and previous is that I never had such a strong amount of momentum for so long going into it.

February Kickoff

With my relatively strong performance and things dialed in pretty well I’m going to continue on with the goals from the last month. One tweak I’m making is to the brain health one. Meditation is still the core goal but I have a stretch goal to want to be reading more rather than wasting time on social media. I’m not giving a strong quantification of that quite yet because I haven’t decided how I want to do that. It’s something I want to experiment with through this month.

Therefore the goals for February’s Goal Accountability is:

• Goal 1 (Diet): Eat a plant dominant Mediterranean diet averaging at least 90 grams of protein a day
• Goal 2 (Sleep): Get 7-8 hours of sleep a night
• Goal 3 (Cardio Health): 30 minutes of focused cardio exercise (indoor cycling, running, swimming, etc), with one hard session per week minimum and a stretch goal of two hard sessions per week
• Goal 4 (Non-Cardio Health): 20-30 minutes of weight training, calisthenics, or yoga
• Goal 5 (Brain Health): 15-20 minutes of meditation, stretch goal of 2x 15-20 minutes of meditation; increase reading time by decreasing TV/YouTube/Social Media time