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Yes. Believe it or not it’s a composter!

Hi guys! After a pretty manic March which culminated in a stag do to Berlin (yes I made it back alive!) it’s time to weigh up if I found any time to hit any of my goals. For brevity I will only comment on goals that I’ve either made progress on or think I should have made progress on but haven’t. If you want to read the full list of goals you can do so here.

I’m going to use a Win/Lose/Draw to denotation how well I think I’ve done on each goal, should be fairly self explanatory!

Let’s get stuck straight in shall we?

Financial Goals

  • Set up a bank account for my new company (ASAP) – No progress at all! There was a Natwest next to my work which I was going to use to go in and do this one lunchtime but I’ve procrastinated so long on it they’ve actually closed the branch :)! So now I’ll have to find time on a Saturday morning and drag myself into town 🙁 Lose!
  • Learn about and submit a tax form (April) – Not done this yet as it’s only just gone into the next tax year, this one I’ll be looking to tick off this month! Draw!
  • Increase Net Worth by £20K or ~30% by end of year bonus paycheck (July/August) – This has gone up 12% since last month according to my March financial update but this is mainly because I am estimating some things and also my method of calculating it has not been consistent. Also I didn’t really give a start dat on this one, was it from January or from when I wrote the Goals post?! I will get a post out asap to clear up how I will calculate this going forward and exactly what this goal entails. This is now a short term goal so if I haven’t done it by the next goal update… unleash hell. Draw!
  • Achieve overall savings rate of 60% (First Half) – With a savings rate of 43% last month I could call this a fail but it’s really early days, and with my bonus due in July I am expecting this to make up a lot any shortfall. If we can hit around 50% up to then, we should hit 60% in total! Draw!

 

Home/Garden Goals

 

  • Make my own composter (Imminent!)Done! See picture at the top of the post! I’ll write up a post on exactly what I did asap! Win!
  • Garden spruce up (March/April)Design and create new garden layout – Remove stones and put down small lawn, build up flower beds and create vegetable patch(es). Half done! We have done a lot of work and also managed to bag a decent garden furniture set for £100 off eBay and have been cleaning and treating that to get it looking good again. Win!

 

Physical Goals

 

  • Running goals – According to my running App I’ve done one run this month so I think we can safely call this one a huge… Lose!
  • Improve general body strength – Do at least 2 x 10 minute Sworkit App body strength work outs per week – I did 5 workouts which is pretty lame, but with all the gardening which is far more of a workout, I think I’ll call this one a Draw!
  • Get my golf handicap down to 20 – Played a few times, one good round and 2 bad ones! Handicap hasn’t budged though but I can feel a low one coming soon. Draw!
  • “Get better at squash” Hard to quantify but I played three times and won twice, so I guess that’s pretty good. Win!

 

Blogging Goals

 

  • Write on average 2 posts a week for the whole of 2015  – I made 5 posts in March, I have got quite a few in draft to post in April so I am hoping to catch up on the average this month!

 

Productivity Goals

I have acquired a new shiny notebook from work and am using this for my TODO list. It’s working ok so far and I definitely feel more productive and am just getting on with doing the things on the list rather than just having them loosely floating around in the back of my head, causing me unnecessary stress. So we’ll call this one a… Win!

 

Overall a mixed bag of wins, draws and losses, but I’m very happy with progress so far considering I felt like time was short. April looks to be a bit less manic so I’m hoping to tick off the rest of the garden goal, and get back into the blogging.

 

How was your March in terms of goals!?

 

Finally here is some more visual proof we are working hard on the garden goals 🙂

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Building up flower beds with old sleepers

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Pebbles! Everywhere! The bane of our lives!

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Starting to make a dent into the pebbles…

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About half way through… Chaos!


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Looking much better… still work to be done in April though!