Ye Olde Annual RTA Goals Check-In
Last year, I did the whole blog goals thing for the first time (I believe). I wanted to take a quick moment to evaluate how I did, and reset those goals for the coming year.
- Get rid of a lot of cards. This one had three parts: get rid of all football/basketball cards (save for a handful of each), get rid of 1000 cards per month, and a stretch goal of getting rid of 18K cards in 2017.
Well, this one stalled out a bit. According to my trades spreadsheet that I started at the beginning of last year, I sent out about 4000 cards, and received about 1200. Not what I’d hoped, but not too bad. There’s still one big box of football/basketball cards, but they’ve been condensed into one box at this point.
- Limit my spending. Pretty darn good here. Spending was waaaay down.
- Scan my Bagwells. Hmm, not so good here.
- Post more frequently. I did alright here, but mainly only because I did pretty good the past two months playing catch-up. I still have a bunch of trades to catch up on, so I’m hoping to knock those out this month.
- Keep that TTM train rolling. Plenty of action here, but my time has tapered off a bit, so these have slowed down.
- Astro-graphs project beyond 50%. Just barely short of this one. Last year I was at 42.86% of players who have appeared in a game for the Astros (plus some coaches and broadcasters), with 38.4% of those in a Houston uniform. I pushed that to 47.23% and 42.74% in a Houston uniform.
- Follow your blogs more! Doing this! Could be better, but doing this.
So, what are my goals for 2018?
- Get rid of a lot of cards. This one still stands. I slowed down on the cards a bunch in order to focus more on family, with our little one, and that’s not changing. This has meant not sending out as much stuff as I’d anticipated, but I think I can double last year’s output and then some. So I’m going to go big and set a goal of 10,000 cards sent off in trade.
Looking at my collection stats on TCDB, I currently have roughly 2000 extraneous football and basketball cards (about 1000 each). I’d like to bring that total down to under 1000.
- Get caught up on my trading backlog. I still owe posts for somewhere around 20-30 trades. My goal is to have these written and queued up by the end of January.
- Astro-graphs project beyond 50%. This one is very much attainable after the progress I made in 2017. I’d need to add about 25-30 in order to do this, and add/convert another 50 or so to get my Houston uniform total over 50% – not completely out of the question. I am starting to run out of easy ones, however.
- Keep a regular posting schedule. I was able to get a good amount of posts up in the past year – 53 in all, which we’ll average out to once a week. I’d like to double that, and to make sure that I keep on track with trade posts and TTM recaps.
- Scan my Bagwells. My collection total is around 1000 at the moment, and I think I can knock this out by my birthday (mid-April) provided I try to do 5-10 a day, given what I already have in my scans.
- Finish my wantlist. I started that thing back in 2013 I believe, and it’s been a long work in progress that I can only ever spend so much time on. I got through 2005, and finished the 2009-2012 run thanks to the shorter list of sets during those years. It’d be great to get it caught up through all the 2017 issues.
I think that’s enough. There are other goals, but I don’t want to over-commit right now.
Here’s to a great 2018.
– Marc
Best of luck to you! Those are some great goals to have. I may have to steal some of those ideas from you.
Thanks Jay! Feel free to plunder as many as you like.