Interesting how people plan for the new year

Dec 29, 2008 | blog

I’m catching up on feeds and have run across a number of posts and articles on personal plans, goals, or predictions for 2009.  It’s a good exercise, and one that I’m working on for this week as well.

However, I’m amazed (nay, dismayed) at the number of people who either do not understand what a goal should be or at the goal that they’re fixated on. Especially in relation to blogging.  There are a number of great posts around outlining what people are planning to do, but I’d like to see folks really focus their energies when writing them.

For example, I’ve seen a number of people taking about increasing their blog posting schedule, or about getting 100, 200, 300 RSS readers, or hitting 1,000,000 page-views.  This doesn’t tell me what they’re purpose is, however.  It doesn’t tell me why I should come back tomorrow to read a post. It doesn’t tell new readers why they should spend time reading their blogs.  This is simply a lack of understanding of what makes a good blog – in short, numbers don’t count. It’s about the quality of information rather than the numbers of clicks you can run through Google AdSense.

Another theme I’ve seen in some of these planning post for the new year are more lower-level task specific items rather than broad visionary goals for an individual. New or casual bloggers who are interested in growing their blog should look at things that bring value to themselves and their readers.  An example of this would be something like "Revise and rejuvenate my blog’s theme to reflect it’s focus, and for easier reading" would be better than simply wanting to "get a new blog logo".

These more far-reaching goals help us stretch outside our comfort zones for the year.  It gives us something to strive for, something to attain… hence "goals".  I hope more folks take the time and really go through a good personal growth exercise for 2009. It doesn’t have to take long, and if a person allows themselves an hour or two to really think about what they want to accomplish in one year – and what just may be possible in one years time, they may surprise themselves and really accomplish more than they think they can.

So good luck to you on your goal quest for 2009! Watch for my 2009 goals post in the next day or so.