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.

  1. 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.

  2. Limit my spending. Pretty darn good here. Spending was waaaay down.
  3. Scan my Bagwells. Hmm, not so good here.
  4. 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.
  5. Keep that TTM train rolling. Plenty of action here, but my time has tapered off a bit, so these have slowed down.
  6. 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.
  7. Follow your blogs more! Doing this! Could be better, but doing this.
So, what are my goals for 2018?

  1. 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.

  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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

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