Tomorrow is 2014 so today I’m doing a recap on my goals of 2013.

Recapping 2013

You can see my 2013 goals here. At the beginning of the year I was doing monthly income reports but they stopped after a couple months. Truth is, it takes a long time to get them done and I just didn’t make the time. Nor did I get a bunch of good feedback on them and my motivation tailed off.

• January Income Report
• February Income Report

I was well on track to hit my financial goals for the year based on those 2 months but then the slow times hit. I had 3 months well under my income goals of $8k the lowest being July at just shy of $3k.

I also had some huge months like November which was in excess of $18k and February which was just over $14k.

I’m happy to say that I did hit my financial goals for the year by invoicing just over $105k this year.

I did not bring in 25% from products/other (affiliate) though. My product income was around 5% for the year.

Anothe goal I didn’t hit was having enough work to need a full time contractor. I’m a bit on the fence about this even now. One one hand I really want to have a bit of a team and even input in to a newer developer.

On the other hand I’m not sure that I want to kill a bunch of time managing.

I have increased my ‘hourly’ rate this year to $150/hour. Remember I don’t bill hourly almost at all though so $150 is my effective hourly rate. That means that if I charge $1000 for a project and take 10 hours to do it I made $100/hour which is under my effective hourly rate.

I strive to make all projects over my effective hourly rate.

My final 2 items were more personal in nature:

1. Take a week off a month for personal projects
2. Spend more focussed time with my family

I didn’t really take off a week a month to work on personal projects. I just never made the time for it. This year I do need to be intentional about getting on personal projects.

The second item was spending intentional time with my family. For the first time in a number of years I’ve taken some proper time off at Christmas. Today I’m working from 6am till lunch at the latest and I worked yesterday for the morning.

That’s it for the last 2 weeks. Sure I’ve tacked away at some personal things from the kitchen table (hopefully a new agency site in January) but during those times my wife is reading on the couch 5 feet away and I’m choosing coding instead of reading.

I’ve had my kid out in the snow a bunch. We have been running together, working out, taking walks, shopping, and a myriad of other things that include my daughter in my daily life.

You’d have to ask my wife for the final word on how active I’ve been with my family, but I’m pretty happy with the dad I’ve been this year.

photo credit: Mechanekton via photopin cc