Articles tagged 'new year'
Looking Forward Jan 3 2010
Following up on my 2009 retrospective post, I think I’ll follow the trend and jot down a few goals and thoughts for 2010.
This coming year I want to continue to get even more productive and organised. Managing a lot of different projects presents unique challenges, and I worked hard this last year to settle on a good workflow, but I think I can probably get more organised still in terms of planning my workload. I’ve come to accept that I’m more of a night owl than a morning person, and embracing that has already meant that I have a routine that better suits me, and that lets me get more done. The next step I think is trying to plan my individual days better, and trying to limit how unexpected events can disrupt that plan.
I’d also like to continue to look at ways of embracing Agile more in how I work with clients, as I feel this will be key to my target of improving productivity and organisation. In December I started doing the one man equivalent of a daily standup each morning, just to spend some time getting straight what I had achieved the day before, and what I had planned that day, as well as potential blockers. I’d like to try and leverage burndowns and retrospectives more this year to give me a better insight into solid project management.
I’m looking forward to working on some interesting projects this coming year, and I’m excited by the potential for new clients, as well as continuing to work with some great existing clients. I definitely want to make time for a few of my own ideas however, and I have a few things I’ve been kicking around that I’d like to get time to flesh out and see where they go. I want to try to set aside a small portion of time each week to focus on this, so that I can progress at least one solid idea and get it launched this year.
I’ve already started on this one, but I want to learn at least one new programming language this year. Usually I’m pretty good about picking stuff up and challenging myself with something new, but in 2009 starting a business and figuring out the best workflow for my freelance work meant that I wasn’t able to spend any time focusing on something as big as a brand new language. I’ve now started learning Clojure however, and so I want to keep chipping away at that and working with it, and get to the point where I feel comfortable writing useful code with it.
I also want to continue to blog more. I was keeping to a post a day for a little while before the holidays, and I’m hoping to keep to around a post every other day throughout this year. I find writing very relaxing and I’m hopeful that what I write will prove useful to others, as well as help me to engage with other interesting people out there.
I’m enjoying studying on my current business course, and once that’s wrapped up in March, I’m going to look at taking on another more in depth course over the Summer. Studying something other than programming is proving to be very rewarding, and it’s a nice occasional break from my other work. By the end of the year I hope to be a good chunk of the way towards my business degree, and should also be part way through another course by then too.
While I want to continue to work hard at all times, I do think that I need to set aside blocks of time for relaxing, and catching up on the other things I love - reading books and comics, playing videogames, watching movies, golfing and spending more time with my wife and puppy. I think being even more organised will help me to complete the work things I need to get done, with spare time left over for other interests. I started this the last few weeks of 2009, taking one night out a week to go to the movies with my wife, and really enjoyed it.
In the spirit of Crush It!
Lastly, I want to do more DIY work around the house - there are quite a few things that have been on hold for almost a year since I’ve been so busy with the business, but tying into the above idea of making time but staying productive, I want to set aside some time for knocking over a few of the jobs that could do with looking at too.
That’s just about it for me I think. I didn’t go with the bullet point list of set targets as I know that a lot of things can happen in a year that might change my priorities, or might direct my interests in other areas. I’m instead hoping that these thoughts will guide my early progress in 2010, and we’ll see what the year holds from then on out.
I hope everyone else has a productive, fun and prosperous 2010!
CommentsLooking Back Jan 2 2010
I’ve been relaxing over the holidays so have only just found time to write a 2009 year end post, but thought I should definitely do it as 2009 has been very exciting!
2009 was the year that I went freelance, and started my own business, mainly focusing on Ruby on Rails work. For the most part there has been plenty of work to keep me busy, and even though it was way back in March that I quit my day job to go full-time freelancer, the rest of the year has flown by incredibly quickly!
Also, I launched my website at the beginning of the year, but as the year drew to a close I was able to find time to rebuild it and rebrand. I think the new design is a lot more professional and represents my brand a lot better, so I’m very pleased I was able to get that done. My initial target was to get it done by the beginning of 2010, but in the end I was able to put it together much more quickly by using Tumblr, and so launched in November!
Working from home definitely suits me, I’m working a lot more hours than I ever was in a day job, but I’m a lot more relaxed, and I really am enjoying what I do. I also get to spend a lot more time with my incredible wife, who is the driving force behind all of my successes. And towards the end of the year I really found my groove for productivity. I was able to get plenty done from day one when I went full-time, but a few months ago I made a conscious effort to improve my productivity and organisation, and it has now allowed me to get a lot more done, and so I’m feeling incredibly positive about the possibilities for this coming year now.
Aside from the business, back in May, two exciting things happened. Firstly, we took a trip to Vegas for RailsConf, and turned it into a bit of a vacation. It was great to finally meet my long time associate and buddy Michael Leung, and the conference itself was decent. My wife and I got married in Vegas in 2007, so it’s always special for us to go back too, and we got chance to hire a Mustang and drive out to the Hoover Dam as well, which was really awesome.
When we got back from our trip, we picked up our gorgeous Dalmatian puppy, Rocky. He’s been absolutely brilliant fun since the very first day we picked him up at the end of May, and he still loves to play like a puppy, even though he’s almost fully grown now! It’s been a lot of fun taking care and looking after him, and he keeps us healthy with daily walks. Hard to believe he’s gone from this, to this, in just 8 months!
In November, I started an openings course with the Open University, a taster course on the long road to getting a business degree. I took on this course to see if I could fit in studying alongside my other commitments, and with some hard work, I can. So far the course is going great, and I’ll be wrapping that up over the next couple of months. I then hope to tackle a bigger course over the Summer!
Overall this year has been fantastic - one of real change and progress. I’m now doing what I love from home and at the hours that suit me, and with a greater variety of projects and code to write. I’m also studying something that’s both of interest to me, and that will also be really useful for running my business. I definitely have a few things I want to tweak though, that relate to my goals for 2010, to keep progressing and bettering myself, so I’m going to do a follow up post focusing on a few of these things next!
I hope everyone else had a productive 2009, and a belated Happy New Year to all!
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