Photo credit: Crativity103
Last year has passed us, and the new one has slowly but steadily started rolling. You can argue that new years celebrations are little more than fireworks to celebrate that we’re moving from one day to the next, but I see two distinct advantages of the festivities.
First of all, they give us a quite distinct deadline for reviewing how things are going. Any major changes we would like to do, and so on. Perhaps one of the more famous reviews is the one that Chris Guillebeau (of Art Of Non-Conformity fame) runs.
The second, and most important, advantage is of course that parties are fun. We should all be better at enjoying life. But, I digress. I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how I would like to spend the year we have just entered. I should admit that I am somewhat surprised by the result. Like many others, I did find a list of distinct, quantifiable, goals – but these are not what’s striking me this year.
Instead, I found myself spending time at what I guess you could call ideals. Unlike goals, where you should attempt to be ridiculously specific, these ideals are visions on how I would like to see myself acting through workdays, volunteering, and other parts of my life.
For many years I have had a hard time accepting some fairly straightforward principles. For instance that you won’t get 10 times as much done just because you have 10 projects running at the same time. Or that it better to be really good at a few things, than just plain participating in many areas, and not particularly good at any of them.
During 2011, some of these things sunk in. I should note that blogs such as Study Hacks, Art of Non-Conformity and Blog of Impossible Things have helped tremendously – I am just aggregating some of the very sensible ideas from these great guys, trying to improving on their already great philosophies, finding the middle way between them all and adapting to my circumstances.
The ideals I mentioned are reminders to myself on how I should strive to act from day to day. There are quite a few of these, but there are two big ones that stand out:
- Pushing myself to conquer challenges, even though I might not be confident going into them.
- Doing as few projects as possible in parallel. As much as possible, complete one before moving on to the next one.
The reasoning behind these goals should be self-explanatory. They simply describe some areas where I feel I have been the mostly lacking what some would call “common sense”.
Along these goals are three or four other categories, depending on how you count:
I have a few areas of focus for 2012:
- Working out, training for Oslo Marathon late September, which I want to run at 03:30.
- Launching my first webapp
- Improving craftsmanship in my daily work. Inspired by the brilliant Cal Newport – I wish I would have managed to put focus on this by myself.
- Learning French
- Buying, improving, and renting out an apartment in Oslo – my original home town.
I have quite a few goals of the more common “things to do” format. Such as some things that I would like to do to my apartment, and trips to go on, and places to see.
Finally, I have my “bonus” list. At the beginning of the process, I listed anything and everything, knowing very well that I would need to remove things. You know – brainstorming. I kept this list, mostly as inspiration for more challenges. I can always grow and push myself to more. I kept this list to remind myself of which focus to keep this year. Seeing what I am not doing is also seeing what I should rather be doing.
What about you, what kind of goals do you have for this year?
