A dad's advice to himself and his kids.

December 1st is tomorrow.  And that’s makes tonight my “new years.”   For 7 years I was in the real estate business.  I watched people piss away the time between Halloween and Christmas in a stupor, going to title company luncheons, builder opens, and other nonsense.   See–there’s a decoupling in Real Estate.  You get paid NOW for the work that you did 2 months ago.  So often, inertia carrys Realtors/LOs through the winter and they coast.

Then January hits and they do 0-1 deals, and the deeals that they do are carryover from December–fallout.

Then Feburary hits and they start to panic.

Well, I’m not in that boat–i’m not a full time practitioner anymore, I still am in the RE cycle.  And i still need business both now and in January.   So, I decided to do something fun:

I’m counting December 1, 2008 as my ‘fiscal year.’  I want to start a month early, while I’m focused and motivated so I hit my goals….starting this month, not wanting to dig a hole is a kludge to make sure I get what I want to get done, done.  I created something in Google Docs to hold myself publicly accountable.  Since I switched from being a Realtor->mortgage broker->freelancer…I needed to do this to make sure I do what I say I’m doing.

I made this scorecard to make sure that I stay on task & on target:

I’ve got 21 planned work days so that generates the calculations that are going to show what pace I’m going to be on/etc.  The workouts that I do will either be ahead or behind because I do one at a time, and that’s OK.   The rest of it tracks me.

It has some oddball goals: to lose 4.5#/week through the holidays is to be fun, and much easier this year…but the way it usually works is that suddenly I find myself 3# lighter, after staying the same weight for 2-3  days.  Anyway, that’s produced the idea that I’ll be losing 63# in December based on the fact that I weighed in on a ‘high’ weight day.  it’ll normalize when time passes and I don’t have extra days.  Still, kind of fun.

In 2009–which starts tomorrow–I’m going to have a good year.  My primary goal is to get myself to 160#.   That’s not going to be easy by any means, but it will certainly happen–of this I have no doubt.  The next goals are to finish the rewrite of Subprime, to get F–therapy up and out, and to have a practice that rakes in $225-250k in consulting fees.  All while continuing to enhance my character and work out my relationship with the Nazerene.  I’ll codify a little bit better tomorrow, at some point.

Right now, I’m overdue on about 400 deadlines cause I was fighting a war maiahost.com  (great company for 1-5 blogs, needs help for more than that).  So extricating 25++ blogs I manage for people to my new host is a PITA.  I can thank Laura for that stuff.

Anyway, as is always the case, more to come.