I’ve always sort of set goals for myself, but I never really write any of them down. This year, after talking to a friend about it, I decided to write down some actual goals for 2015. What really struck me about the conversation was a single sentence he said. I believe the exact words he used were “Write them down and you’ll be amazed at how motivated you can be”. Since it certainly sounded like he was speaking from experience, here’s my list. Some are more subjective which will make them harder to ‘check off’ than others. Some are related to my work/career, some are personal, and some are just sort of for fun.
Run a marathon – Some of you know I made a serious attempt at this 2 years ago. It started with others offering tips and training schedules, continued with me disregarding the training plan, and ended with me doing it wrong and messing up my knee. So this year, I’m going to make a serious attempt at following a training schedule and try and get this done. I’ll aim for the Twin Cities marathon which happens in the fall. I think I’ll need to sign up in the next couple of months though.
Start work on finishing my basement – Our house doesn’t have a finished basement. My office is in that unfinished basement. I live in Minnesota. It gets cold down here in the winter. I want a finished (heated) office.
Start actively contributing to the open source community – If you read my blog you know that Im completely enthralled with open source projects like docker and kubernetes. I bought an intro book to ‘go’ programming (which I still need to read) and I’m hoping to be able to start looking at doing some coding again. It started with me wanting to be able to understand the projects better but if contributing becomes a reality it will be a welcome side effect.
Get better at time management – This one is sort of hard to explain since I think I’m actually fairly good at this in a general sense. My problem is that I don’t do a good job of appropriately allocating my time. For instance, I’ll spend every free moment I have for a couple of days straight writing a blog or prepping for one that I’m really interested in. I’ll plan to do follow up blog posts but at the same time decide to start a new project. That new project then becomes my focal point and I lose track of the last project, sometimes for weeks at a time. This stems mostly from my utter hatred of leaving things unfinished. If I start something, I want to finish it. I think this goal boils down into breaking projects into chunks that can be worked on one at a time and interleaved into other project ‘chunks’.
Become a grill master – I’m tired of seeing people post really awesome pictures of amazing looking grilled and smoked meats on Twitter. I think this summer I’m going to finally break down and buy a Big Green Egg and start learning how to be a grill master.
Be healthier – A couple months ago I tried doing two tasks twice a day for an entire week. I failed after 3 days. The tasks were to drink a liter of water and take my vitamins. I’m not sure if its my schedule or what, but all of a sudden its 9pm and I realize I haven’t taken my vitamins or drank all the water I was supposed to. So there’s some basic stuff like that and other things like starting to eat breakfast every day (I just don’t do that for some reason, all I need is coffee) or making sure I get out of my chair and walk around every couple of hours.
Email – I’m not sure when it changed but somehow I lost my battle with email. People who knew me 3 years ago will recall me ranting about email. Usually it went something like “I don’t get it, how can you not get through all of your email by the end of the day”. Now I’m the guy that flags the email for another day and then at some point the flagged email list gets a scroll bar and you lose track of it. I’m going to try and get better about this again.
Waking up early – This is going to be a hard one for me. Its not that I’m lazy, I average around 6 hours of sleep a night, its just that I usually stay up later than I’m supposed to. AKA, I need to stop staying up until 3 or 4 on random nights and start going to bed at a consistent time. Now that we have a child, the only real free time I get is when that child is sleeping. If I could get up at 5 I could have an hour in the AM as well as time at night when she goes to bed.
So there you have it. I look forward to coming back to this post in a year to see how I did!