Goals for 2020
It’s already a few days into 2020 so I’m gonna keep this brief: Goals for 2020!
🔗 2019
The following goals are from last year.
🔗 Learning Days
Learning Days were great fun the few times I did it, but at some point last year (I know when, but you probably don’t) things kinda went off the rails. It turns out they are a lot to plan, so I’m gonna plan to do these quarterly, instead of monthly, in 2020. If I find that I have time for more, I’ll do more.
🔗 Weekly Publishing
I didn’t do well with the habit of writing 200 words a day… but I published fifty two blog posts in the year without realizing it till today. I’ll call it good but will do the same thing in 2020.
🔗 Avoid multitasking
Unlike the last one, I can’t measure this quite as clearly. I did close slack to avoid multitasking at work, and started segregating long form reading from time-wasters. I’ll call it good but something to keep doing.
🔗 Avoid Rote Reading
I got much better at this in 2019. I ditched stuff I was reading both by unsubscribing and in the middle of posts. Will continue.
🔗 Family Journal
I did terribly at this and feel bad about it. Want to try again, but need to figure out how to do it. Maybe not at the same time I’m doing other writing?
🔗 Knots
I feel ok about how this went. I could have done better, kept track of more, etc, but it’s a hobby so whatevs.
🔗 2020
The goals I’ll be carrying forward to 2020 from 2019 are:
- quarterly Learning Days
- blog weekly (via 200 words per day)
- avoid multitasking, at home and at work
- drop tasks that are not worth doing, especially reading
- brief, daily family journal (needs more thought put into the habit)
🔗 Health
This year I am intending to exercize three times a week for about thirty minutes at a time. I had been doing two, doing the seven minute workout, but it turns out that it’s supposed to be much more than that, so I’m upping this by a factor of nearly five.
On top of that I am trying to be a little more careful with my diet. Nothing crazy, just more greens, more fish, less red meat, etc.
🔗 Avoid long term monotasking
This is a weird one! While on holiday vacation I concluded that, while it’s best if I only ever work on one thing at a time, it is not good for me to work on one thing at a time for days on end. I am sure everyone needs some amount of variety in their work, or that it’s at least some kind of spectrum.
🔗 Swap Out Habit
Once a week I get to inbox zero, tab zero, etc. I want to try to do this more often. I don’t think I can reasonably do this daily, but I think I can maybe do a timeboxed version. I also want to write a quick note about anything I learned during the day, maybe as inspiration for stuff to publish later. On top of all that, I tend to be sloppy with my various git checkouts and want to do better. I have lost time this year because I had code that was never committed and accidentally blew it away.
We’ll see how it goes. Happy New Year!
(The following includes affiliate links.)
At work I take notes for some meetings. Sometimes that can be a frustrating
task, so in order to keep myself engaged I decided to get some nice pens and
paper. I started with a set of Jinhao 992
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