January 3, 2008 – New Years Resolutions

New years is as good a time as any to make a few resolutions. Most the productivity talk focuses on small goals and constantly re-evaluating them. I tend to make a lot of general goals, so I’d be interested in trying to make things smaller and accomplish them.

So rather than “complete site x”, set some resolutions for the month and go from there. So what’s on my mind for January?

* Work on getting my office in the house up to a usable state. I’d like to work on one room a month, and try to get it into a nice state while not dumping things into other rooms. At this rate I should have things pretty cleared out by the end of the year.

January Goal: Have office setup and working. Look into getting some Ikea Galant desks for the setup. I have a source i should be able to get a few used from that looks promising if they’d get back to me.

* Simplify as much as possible all around. Less stuff in the house, more automated billing, less sites I have to visit, less things to spend money on, less mail, less email. Basically clear out as much clutter in my life as possible. I still have so much stuff I inherited that I just want to go through and clear out of the house. Need to take it one step at a time and get rid of things. There are a lot of things I think could help simplify things quite a lot too I’d like to start using when appropriate: Remember the Milk, iPhone, Google Notebook and Google.

January Goal: clear out at least a few boxes of stuff, get any and all bills automated that aren’t, organize Gmail more clearly to save time using filters for common behavior.

* Continue working on web passion projects at least a few days a week. Most of this will be messing around with Ruby On Rails at this point, although some of it might be on ColdCourse which people still bug me about. We’re leaning towards Ruby at work (well, jRuby), so should have some opportunities to use it there eventually as well. I’ll continue going to/running usergroup meetings and barcamps because those are just fun. No need to include those here.

January Goal: Just as long as I’m actively working on projects a few days a week I’ll consider it a success.

* Try to post at least once a week on here and on AdamFortuna.com. I’ve been really lazy about both in the recent months. Mostly because I’ve shifted from a contributor to an observer in both the programming blog world and on LJ. These should be fun though.

January Goal: At least 4 posts from this point on on both.

* Fitness/Health Goals aren’t really too necessary here, but good a time as any to have them. I’ve been going to the gym with two friends from work 3 times a week (give or take) for quite a few months. I’d like to keep this up while not having it interfere with whatever else. I don’t mind missing an occasional day (say once every other week) so long as I get back on track. One thing I did get out of track on was doing cardio in the morning. For a while I was jogging 5 days a week before work for 40 minutes — that was early last year actually. Now cardio is a thing of the past. I’d like to start jogging in the morning more — at least 2 times a week to start. Also, there’s an iGoogle ap for tracking weight which is really handy (if you use igoogle). January Goal: Jog at least twice a week and track weight a few times a week using the iGoogle ap.

* Financial goals are a bit iffy at this point. I’d like be actively in control of my funds rather than doing it through a money manager (damn 1% cost). This will mean more time to read and act, and I’m not sure where I want to go with this. What I want through is more liquidity to my funds as well as more control so I can shift things around when the markets fluctuate (as they have been recently). Basically I want to be in something where I can control where some of the money is on a short term, while having most things in (year+) long term investments to bypass capital gains penalties I might otherwise face… Pretty much I have read what I want to do next.

January Goal: Maybe add a few podcasts and find a few blog feeds that are on the topic. Aside from NPR Marketplace, I don’t think I listen to anything in this category. Pretty much everything on here is things I’ve already been working on with the exception of posting more and doing cardio — both things I was doing at some point during the last year.

There are some general things I’m wanting to do but not quite as sure how to go about measuring success. I’d like to watch less TV and play more (beatable) video games. When I say beatable I mean ones that don’t take 100+ hours to complete, with a lot of leveling up. While playing Oblivion through I had a lot of fun, but looking back I didn’t get 1/100th what I got out of Portal.

I guess I enjoy playing video games for the story more than multiplayer or leveling up or general character manipulation. Funny to say that when I’m such a music games fan though and those have absolutely no end. They aren’t addicting in the same way though, and can pretty much be dropped at any time. Another would be spend more time with friends and family (online and off) which I’ve been lazy about. Any random other new years goals you’d recommend? I’m not a fan of knitting just so you know.