The New Year Begins
Today is the first workday of the year for me. Over the Christmas period I thought about what I want to achieve in business and life over this year. I also looked at what was achieved in 2016 to see where I might have gone wrong and what I could have done better at. There is plenty of room for improvement. Some time was wasted by idling it away. I need to avoid social media through the day as well as news websites.
Although I don’t feel the need to share my specific goals here, what I decided to do was create a list of all things that I wanted to complete by the end of this new year as well as what I want to do each day, month, or year. I quickly realised that all items are far more than I could physically accomplish, but instead of cutting things out, I prioritised what each day would look like for me. Rather than measuring success by the number of jobs complete and the number of tasks marked as done by the last day of the year, I decided that my success this year would be measured by how I spent my time and if I did good things with my allotted time.
Some Goals
There are many things that I want to accomplish such as reading XX amount of books, but I don’t want to get inundated with the calculations of how many pages per day and what books I want to read and how many pages each are. It feels too mechanical. Instead, my goal is to simply read each day for at least a certain amount of time. If I accomplish that then I will read XX amount of books in a year. That won’t matter if it’s 10 or 50. The success will be that I managed to keep the commitment for the year.
Another goal is to create my own apps for the iPhone and Apple Watch as an indie developer. I create apps for others, but when I plan on making my own apps, I always get sidetracked in to working for others again. I have many incomplete apps that could be finished. I want to change that in 2017 and create my own apps. Just like book reading, the success for me will be measured by the amount of time each day I spend creating the apps. I may end up creating just a couple or several, but if I feel I have worked honestly each day for a few hours, then I will define that as success regardless of what the outcome is. Of course, I include promoting the apps to contribute as part of the success although creating them is the first step. I can’t promote something I haven’t created.
Some of the tracking will be done by simply looking at the contributions graph in GitHub. If I can fill Monday to Friday with green, then that will be success. There’s no point me cheating by committing a minor change to turn a square green. I will know if a green is well earned. If it looks like 2016 as seen below, I clearly will have to put a lot more effort in.
I want to become a better writer. For that reason I plan to regularly update this blog, perhaps showing my progress in some cases, as well as put more time in to my iOS tutorial website.
Writing isn’t my strong point, but I expect that writing regularly will help to change that a little.
There are several other things I want to achieve. I want to take my DSLR everywhere I go instead of relying on just my iPhone 6. I would like to learn how to use it by using it.
Family
Also, I want to spend more time with family. I am lucky with working at home but at the same time that brings challenges of not shutting off from work when the children and my wife are around. I need to do better there.
Tracking
While reading MacSparky earlier today I came across an app called Productive which helps track habits. For me I need to make a habit of writing regularly, reading regularly, and creating regularly. I also need to look after fitness as well which I expect this app would be great to encourage me not to break a streak of going to the gym.