2021: Quarter 2 Review and Goals Looking Forward to Quarter 3

It's already time for another quarterly review.

This year I started setting Quarterly Goals, and the plan was to track every quarter to keep a check on the progress. And now we are at end of Q2!

Here's a short recap of the last 3 months.

2020: What Went Well, What Didn’t and Goals

A short recap of the year that is gone by and looking forward!

Rahul NathRahul Pulikkot Nath

Review of Q2, 2021

If you're wondering what my Goals were for this period check out my Quarter 2 post here.  On a high level, my focus was on 4 Areas of my Life.

Each of these Areas, had associated SMART Goals set, which was mostly measurable. This enabled me to come up with a percentage progress. Even though some of these items where either a done or not done case I ended up coming up with some figures to account for my progress.

Here's a high level percentage progress for each of the Areas..

Let's take a closer look at each of the Areas and see how I progressed with it.

Improve Family Experience ████▓░░░░ 52%

We were almost close to getting a home, but missed it by a few thousands. Brisbane property market is getting hotter each day and it's getting more and more as a first home buyer.

Otherwise things went as planned in this Area - Did more than 3 day trips to local parks and beaches and also did an overnight trip to Toowoomba, Brisbane.I averaged around 80-90 mins for screen time, which is slightly more than what I originally intended it to be.

Learning █████████░ 90%

Main focus was to learn AWS and improve my overall content generation skills. Both these went exceptionally well. I now have a basic understanding about the AWS concepts, especially around Serverless aspects, that I use at work. As part of my learning I published 5 blog posts and 5 videos to my new .NET on AWS Series.

I did the Ship30For30 May Cohort, which involved publishing 30 essays for 30 days. You can check out all my Atomic Essays here. This was a great learning experience for me and I plan to write more Atomic Essays in the coming months. At some point I would love to write a short e-book.

Improve My Fitness ███████░░░ 70%

Like last time I did not meet my goal I set for myself. But at least there has been some improvement with my overall fitness. I was able to do a few long runs over 10km and slowly getting back into shape. I completed half of the 'Back To Fitness' Zwift Training plan. However I did not meet my time and distance goals.

Grow Audience ██████████▄ 95%

Focus was to grow 2k YouTube subscribers and gain 100 followers in Twitter.

Below is a snapshot of my Content Calendar for the last quarter. I published 8 blog posts, 10 YouTube videos and 30 Atomic Essays.

With the YouTube videos, I missed out on 3 weeks, mostly because a lot was going on with the Ship30For30 Course.

Goals for Q3, 2021

My high-level Areas of focus remains the same - Fitness, Grow my Audience, Learning and Improving Family Experience.

I am looking to improve my Notion setup and the way I track various tasks and activities. Having a good streamlined system is essential to maintain the flow of things.

Check out my December Newsletter if you want to learn more about Goal Setting!

Some of my main Key Results for the second quarter of 2021 are

• Gain 3000 YouTube Subscribers and 150 Twitter followers.
• Improve my CSS Design Skills & AWS Serverless Application Development
• Run a 10k in under 53 minutes by mid of August.
• More family trips and Buy and Move to a House (Yes Again!!)

I am aiming high here with these Goals and would be happy to hit 80% of them. I will do a follow-up review towards the end of September 2021 and see where I stand with these Objectives and Goals.

How's the year been going for you?

Cover Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash