2008 goals

January 10, 2008

I noticed Cal Evans had put up a list of goals for the 2008 year.  It got me to thinking about my own, and then I realized pretty much everything on his list is something I’d like to do as well.

• Lose 30 pounds (I’d be fine with losing 10 this year, but close enough!)
• One blog post per week – I tend to do more than that, but occasionally slip for more than 7 days without, so I’ll likely keep on top of that more.  And keep them more focused.  I may end up splitting in to two blogs.  OR migrate WebDevRadio to Wordpress and use that as a combined ‘tech’ blog and podcast.
• Write one new article per month – I’d like to write more in-depth how-tos than I do (which right now is almost 0).  Focus will probably be grails or groovy, but I’ve got some PHP ideas I’m working on.  Documenting those would be a good start.
• Another book in 2008.  Funny enough, I did a book in 2007 – well, 2/3rds of one after the publisher reviewed it.  It *may* come out this year, which would be nice.  I have two other ideas I’m putting together, and I have interest from publishers on them.  The issue is time to write, and I’ll work on making that happen.
• A picture a day in 2008.  I don’t think I’ll be doing this one.
• Learn a new language.  I was inspired to try to learn Chinese this year.  I have a tiny bit of the spoken down, but the writing is what I’ll need to concentrate on if I do this.  When I was in China, I couldn’t *read* anything, so trying to look it up in a dictionary was pointless.

A couple others I’d add to the list outside of Cal’s are:

• Get better @ Java – doing this mostly via Groovy, but may focus some on straight Java itself
• Work on business development ideas for current job
• Get Grails open source project(s) out the door before April(!)
• Get through “Getting Things Done” (a bit of irony there) and try to adapt that to my life and work
• Run a marathon.  Considering I don’t run *at all* right now, this might be interesting to pull off.

These aren’t ‘resolutions’, and I won’t beat myself up over these if I don’t hit them all, but having some written goal posts to measure things in a year will be good to have.  If I deviate from these, it’ll probably be because something else better presented itself.

Posted in Diet, Personal