We’re Just Two Lost Souls Swimming in a Fish Bowl Year After Year

Tuesday. Well everybody, I'm back from vacation all rested up and excited to get back to work (yeah, right). I had a good time off. I got to spend some quality time with the fam, caught a couple of movies, and pretty much cleaned out the whole house including the garage. Not bad. What did I not do on my time off? Schoolwork!

Today I am catching up on all of the paperwork that I missed out on the past week or so that I was out. Fun times. I did have a little bit of good news awaiting me on my return. At the beginning of last month the Big Boss Lady had set a goal for me to bring in $760K on two accounts as part of an effort to reduce our overall yearly DSO to less than 50 days (I know 50 days isn't that good, but that's down 15 days from this point last year). After tallying up the receivables for those two accounts this morning, I brought in just under $1.2 million so I pretty much smashed that benchmark (and that's with me being out almost 2 weeks last month). So, I was pretty happy to hear that. Unfortunately, though, according to the Big Boss Lady sales were down in December, which threw off the DSO and brought us in at 50.4. Still, not too shabby. We're getting there.

So, this is a new year (2006 for those not paying attention) and as tradition dictates, I must come up with some resolutions for the upcoming year. However, resolutions tend to imply curbing a negative behavior such as quitting smoking, losing weight, stop huffing paint thinner, etc. Since I am a non-smoker and I'm not ready to give up my paint thinner habit quite yet, I decided to set goals for myself instead. First, as I have been saying for over a month now, I plan to learn HTML to the point I can design my own website from scratch. I bought a HTML book awhile back, and now that school is over I plan to devote my brain cells to this project instead of letting them go completely dormant. In the behavioral department I am going to start seeing some of these ideas and projects that I come up with through. Two of those projects in particular are the aforementioned website design project, and my writing project that I got about 50 pages done on before I stalled out. By the end of the year I would like to have my website up and running, and my writing project done. The writing may be a tough one since it will be competing with the website design for my free time, but stretch goals are supposed to be out of reach by nature. Realistically, I would like to get over 100 pages down on paper but we'll see. I am telling you all this because after studying personal performance goals extensively in grad school, I've actually become to believe in their effectiveness. One of the key steps to goal achievement is to share your goals with others. In theory this is so you can build up a peer support network that will help you obtain your objective. Personally, I think by letting everyone know your intentions you are much more likely to work towards achieving your goal so you aren't publicly embarrassed when you fall flat on your face with failure. Either way, that is what I plan to accomplish in 2006. Well, that and cutting down my paint thinner habit to only weekends...

This morning I listened to Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here on the drive into work. I had planned to discuss the merits of this phenomenal album along with some personal testimonials about the two times I saw Pink Floyd in concert, but this post has already exceeded its recommended length for reading ease so I will end it now. Happy New Year everyone and best of luck to you all in 2006.