Most goal tracking focuses on either inputs or outputs.

Output-focused tracking centers on a result. How much weight did I lose? How much revenue did we make? Input focused revenue centers on behavior. How many calories did I consume? How many sales calls did we make?

But tracking only one or the other usually isn’t very helpful.

At the beginning of the year, I set some big goals for 2019:

• Writing – I committed to writing at least 100 words a day, every day, in 2019.
• Exercise – Every weekday, do as many pushups, squats, and seconds of planking as the current day of the year. My team at Hipmatic is also doing this, so it makes it fun.
• Health – Lose 15 pounds.
• Financial Challenge – Save 55% of my post-tax income (up from about 40% last year).
• Get My Wedding Planned – Enough said.

Here’s what I accomplished in February:

Teams are a tough one.

It’s difficult to accomplish anything significant without a team. Big projects demand more skills, talents, and ideas than any one person can provide.

But teams take energy, time, and care.

Sometimes success is about that sudden moment of insight. The brilliant idea you wake up with in the middle of the night. The vision that comes in a flash.

More often, though, success is about persistence.

Friction gets a bad wrap in the business world.

We seek to reduce friction in our funnels, and minimize friction in our interactions with teammates.

But when you’re building something new, sometimes embracing friction is key.

The Great Facebook Decline is bad, and it’s only going to get worse.

According to Inverse, 74% of American Facebook users have taken at least one step to curtail their Facebook usage.

While privacy breaches and ethics violations are certainly contributors, there’s a hidden root cause of Facebook’s anemic user engagement lurking beneath the surface.

The WordPress team released a new editor called Gutenberg in version 5.0. It’s a fantastic step forward for WordPress, which sorely needed a new text editor.

Already Gutenberg has saved me countless hours where I no longer have to wrestle with unnecessary markup or strangely-persistent formatting issues.

I don’t think it’s overstating things to say that tech has an ethics problem.

The factories that produce the devices we use have inhumane conditions. Facebook’s moderators have PTSD, and the company doesn’t seem to care. The self-driving car industry is cutting corners left and right.

I was out sick for over a week my freshman year of high school.

I was worried about all the classes and activities I was missing. Track practice. The biology test. The lines I was supposed to have memorized for the school play.

The day I got back to school, my math teacher gave me some important advice I wouldn’t understand until much later:

You’ll never catch up. And that’s okay.