Home Improvement Zeitgeist – Managing Your 2007 Resolutions
Zeitgeist: “the spirit (Geist) of the time (Zeit)“
Do you have Home Renovation Resolutions for the New Year?  According to myGoals.com, about 7% of us do. This is up from last year and reflects an increased interest in improving our homes over buying them.
The home improvement and real estate category’s share of resolutions jumped from 5 percent for 2006 to 7 percent for 2007, according to myGoals.com. But for 2006, 30 percent of all real estate-related goals were to buy a home and 45 percent were to improve a home. For 2007, that has shifted to 9 percent focusing on buying a home and 64 percent on improving a home.
– Greg Katz, Desert Morning News
So how do you stay on track with your home improvement and other resolutions? According to myGoals.com, planning is the key. You need to:
- set & record your goals
- create your plan within the next couple of days
- record your plan
- stick to your plan (work that baby!)
- be ready to deal with unplanned events as they arise
Now that’s not news, that’s just common sense. But why do so few of us succeed at something that seems so simple? It’s because most of us don’t record them or come up with a concrete plan. Without the recording and planning in the next few days, you won’t remember to “revisit” those goals and work the plan on a regular basis, you’ll likely just forget your resolutions entirely.  This is where a service like myGoals.com can help you stick to your resolutions by providing pre-built planning templates to get you started and by “providing email reminders that arrive when it’s time to work on a given task”. The service is not free but it’s a lot cheaper than the project management software I use routinely (BaseCamp) to basically do the same thing. The question you have to ask yourself is “What is the value of achieving my goals?”.
Are there any alternatives?  Well, there’s 43things.com, the fab free Web 2.0 / Generation Y version of this concept. I couldn’t find any lovely (read: boring) stats about home improvement goals but the related tags on the home page were “buy a house” or “buy a home” and they were pretty small, proportionally reflecting the concerns of the younger demographic overall. As for the service, you get the reminders but the planning ability is limited in terms of organizing and ordering your tasks under your goal.  I am also concerned about the presentation of a straight list of “43 things” which is a bit much from a managing complexity point of view. 2 words people: “Mickey Mouse”.
The most telling thing about this site? The link to “Share insights about how to use 43Things to best advantage, how it can be an aid to accomplishment, not a distraction”. The key word here is distraction.
In looking at the options out there, as much fun as 43Things.com could be, a service like myGoals.com is the better bet for getting results with your resolutions, especially if they are complex and require multiple steps.  myGoals.com offers planning templates, constructive advice, practical tips, and few distractions. If anything, I think the site would benefit from a social networking / support angle but it isn’t necessary. Social networking may be trendy, but if you’ve got enough on your plate balancing home, work and family and plenty of friends in real life, it’ll just get in your way.
Happy planning (not Best of Luck) in 2007!
This entry was posted on Monday, January 1st, 2007 at 10:57 am and is filed under Manage Your Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
