Hobby update Q1 2015: Miserable Failure (Or: how I learned the hard way to make SMART goals with my hobby time)

It's an Iron Reagan kind of week (hence the title).

As with any responsible hobbyist, when life happens we have to work at balancing our free time and obligations. For me, that balance has been out of whack for the past few weeks. Grants, conferences, and teaching have eaten up a huge part of my schedule, leaving with next to no hobby progress to speak of. Today's post is a lamentation of that lack of progress as well as a plan to get back on track.

Starting out in January, I had a grand vision of three projects that I'd get around to doing within the first quarter of this year: Write a simple campaign for TW, work on my 40k Kill Team, and paint the Axiom. And what came of that? Let's take an inventory:

• Not much was done with the campaign after I posted about it. Turns out doing the hobby is more fun than writing rules for it. 
• I got some sweet looking Fire Warriors for my KT, but the few other models (Stealth Team and Piranha) in my team are still bare.
• Perhaps most painfully, the Axiom is no where near being done.

Here's the last posted picture of the Axiom, not much has changed since.

Sad, right? So what went wrong? Well, in short, I did not make SMART goals for my hobby time. When we're dorking out we tend to want to just enjoy ourselves, but by being SMART with our time we can get the most out of it. This is key since hobby time is usually the first to suffer in our busy lives.

So what's SMART?

Not quite!

I learned this back in college, and it's time that it made a comeback!

Specific: Be sure you are aware of what you are setting out to do. For this, there was room for improvement. I knew that I wanted to finish my 40 KT and Axiom, but I was vague about progressing on the campaign, which led to that project getting dropped first.

Measurable: How do we know that we made progress on a goal? With painting this is easy enough.

Attainable: Is it possible? Juggling three projects and grad school? Nope; I should have known better!

Relevant: Is the goal actually meaningful in the hobby context. This is another tricky one since it's probably more effective to work on one game system at a time.

Timely: Set a deadline. Well, that is why you are reading this post...


So that's how we define SMART goals. Now I should make some goals for the second quarter of 2015. I think I'll start off "small" and make one goal: To finish painting my Great Machine Tier list. What's involved in that?

• Prime Axiom
• Monitor
• Galvanizer
• Mitigator
• Servitors (technically just the bases)
• 2 ADOs
• 1 Optifex Directive

Nine models in three months, that's it. So if I play it SMART, you can count on seeing more updates in the near future!