Another update on the personal improvement front

From Ramit Sethi's blog I Will Teach You To Be Rich comes a list of "Ten Things About Yourself That Would Surprise You".  They are:

1. How much $ you spend per month

2. How long you spend talking to your family per month

3. How much time you spent working on the thing you say is your "passion" last month

4. How far you walk every day

5. How much you read NOT from a computer

6. How much time you spend organizing your life (bills, etc)

7. How many calories you eat per day

8. How much time you actually work at work

9. How much time you spend watching TV per month

10. Which of your goals you accomplished last year

This was a pretty interesting exercise for me... as a habit, I'm not very introspective -- I'm more of a "live life on fast-forward" person.  So, with that in mind, here are my answers to the questions:

1.  All of it.  I do track my finances with Quicken (for register and reporting) and a spreadsheet (for budgeting and planning).  I've never had a problem with spending money, it's the saving it and figuring out where it goes that's always given me trouble.  I did just come up with an idea that might work... take a monthly calendar (we always seem to have those laying around), and when a bill comes in, mark it down on the due date, and how much to pay.  Also mark paydays, and then on payday, pay all the bills due before the next payday.  That's probably the oldest system on the planet, though. :-)  One more thing I'm planning on doing is, instead of having 58 million folders for creditors, etc, just go through and file bills by MONTH -- and not just a month, but the month indicated on my bank statement (which I think runs from the 25th to the 24th).  This way it will be easier to track monthly expenses, especially since we're going to be in this house with two children next year... also, we can file receipts by month, too.  But I digress.
2.  All the time, except for most of the time I'm at work.  I'm talking about my immediate family here.  Mom I talk to on the phone once a week, and a couple e-mails per week as well.
3.  The equation for this would be Total Time Awake - Time Spent at Work - Time Spent Mindlessly Surfing the Internet.  Unfortunately, that third variable is the biggest time suck, probably.  See answer #8.
4.  I walk at least two miles every weekday, as that's the distance to the bus stop from home/work.  Plus the time I spend walking around the office socializing, it's easily two miles.
5.  I read at least 10 minutes a day not from the computer.  All hail the scripture reading project of extreme excellence!  I also do some reading on the bus/at the bus stop as well, and of course at least 5 minutes of "personal time" reading every day.
6.  See my answer to #1 (which probably should have gone down here).  I spend adequate time organizing all of that stuff, however, I think it's actually applying all of the planning I'm doing which is the biggest downfall to this.
7.  I think I'm getting all my calories, what I'm NOT doing is drinking enough fluids.  I'm in pretty decent shape, although it couldn't hurt to trim down a bit.  The walking and heat is helping with that.
8.  Um... I could be doing better at putting in a full day's work at work.  I guess a credit to me is that I am not actually writing this at work. :-)  The real solution is finding a way to compile all of this stuff offline (or somewhere), so I don't have to be sitting at the computer to be writing all of this.  Maybe it's time for me to dig out the old PDA, and just start going that way.  Who knows?  I can also stop living my life based on what new RSS feeds have come through, or constantly checking my e-mail to see who has or hasn't written me.  That's something I can work on (as I prepare to load the RSS feed from this page to my Google homepage... it's a neverending loop).
9.  That's easy... I probably spend 15-20 minutes a day just with my wife, because if she's watching TV and I'm sitting on the couch with her, she counts it as time spent together.  Other than that... how often is baseball on?  I watch a lot of baseball.  Other than the occasional Food Network or HGTV show, that's it.  I'm planning on turning the spare computer into a DVR (today, even) so the TV shows that I want to watch can be recorded.  Not too shabby.  Well, actually, it will probably be better to turn THIS computer into the DVR, since it's got the 200 GB hard drive and all that. :-)
10. Another easy question, but for the wrong reasons.  I didn't really become overtly goal-oriented until this year, so last year, I can say I didn't accomplish any goals, because I didn't set any goals.  This year, so far, has been pretty good.  The only goals I've set aside for being unreasonable or unrealistic has been the weight room goal (which has been turned into the "walk myself every day" achievement) and the novel goal (which wasn't coming together at all).  I think everything else is working out, though, it's just that some goals get refined along the way, which is actually a good thing, right? :-)  Oh yeah, and I WILL OWN A RESTAURANT IN SEVEN YEARS.