At the beginning of 2017, to help me stick to my goals, I created a weekly todo list using the iOS Notes app and it looked something like this:

While I’ve created thousands of todo lists over the course of my todo-driven life, this was the first one I opened up for shared editing. At the behest of my daughter Sarah, who needed some help to stick to her own goals, we both contribute to this shared note on a weekly basis.

Does it work? Well, the answer to that is the ubiquitous: “it depends.” I think the idea of a shared note is (or was) that we could encourage each other to complete goals: especially stretch goals, such as “finishing cleaning the garage” or “buy groceries” or “get out of bed in the morning.”

What hasn’t failed is our ability to keep it up. We’re now two thirds of the way through our second year of doing this and we haven’t missed a week yet.

Sort of.

As you may have seen from my last two posts, I was a little preoccupied this year. (More on that next week.) As the day job gradually reduced my life to little more than a work-sleep-eat cycle, my weekly goals were reduced to:

• Work
• More Work
• Even More Work

This went on for longer than I care to discuss until — at long last — the project ended. And with a renewed sense of purpose and hopeful outlook on life, I created a real todo list:

Not too long after I edited it, I got a text from Sarah along the lines of, “Wow! That’s a lot of goals!” To which I replied:

However, the astute reader may have noticed that list was dated August 6: about one month ago. Clearly the “Write a blog post” task didn’t happen and, by definition, neither did “check off every item on this list.” Let’s just say it took a while for me to mentally recover enough to do anything, let alone accomplish stretch goals like, “remember my WordPress password.”

Therefore “Write a blog post” has remained on the list every week since, as each week I continued toward the primary goal of “get my life back.” And now, as I press the Publish button on this post, I shall bask in the knowledge I can finally change the “Write a blog post” item to this:

See you kids back here next Friday.