Some time ago I penned a blog entitled “Executive Function” which dealt with, among other things, my years-long attempt to get better at keeping appointments and objectives, whether for Soleares Research or in my personal life.

So, in this post I’ll give an update on how I’m doing. I’ll first say “better” and yet far from where I want to be. At the beginning of each year, I set dates for future meetings but, more often than not, fail to meet on the appointed days. I will say this: the time it takes me to recover and finally have the meetings has become shorter.  But I want those postponements to be rare.

What does that slippage say? That I still have difficulty doing good things for myself. What holds me back? It’s not always laziness; I will admit my mood often dictates whether I follow through on my plans.

For example, I made a resolution this year to post on this blog every month, and was keeping to that, but failed to publish something in September because I was distracted by personal/family matters. With this post I am getting back into my rhythm, and I will not lose it for the remainder of this year.

Another consideration is that so much is happening in the annuity industry these days: RILAs, FIAs and their indices have become increasingly complex, while certain fund types – which have many moving parts and unique considerations – like defined outcome and ESG portfolios, are growing in number quickly. I try to keep up on what’s going on as best I can, but it’s often hard to choose what to focus on at any one moment. All things considered though, it’s not a bad problem to have.

The best course of action is to have a workflow plan and keep to it consistently. I have certain research and writing tasks that I think are going smoothly, more or less on a routine, while others need tightening up. I will work on those over the near term.

So, the bottom line is that, while I have seen some progress since that post of five years ago, I still see much room for improvement. In the future I will provide another update as to how I’m doing.