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Goals are now set, we are getting ready to kick this year off in style and it is time to start working towards those first set of milestone targets. Ringing in the new year is always fun and I for one can say I don’t always make it to midnight. Still, the changing of the year is a time to celebrate both what has passed and what opportunities lay ahead.
As a Developer, I have developed a fondness for data in all of its forms, from tracking the changes made, to tracking how far we have come on any and all aspects of a project. As an artist, I tend to leave that all by the wayside and try to take a “devil may care” attitude to my creative endeavors. This year I am changing that for two reasons:
When I was defining the set of Goals that I wanted to work towards this year, I paid particular attention to how to measure the progress and what the end state of that goal would look like for 2023. As a byproduct of that focus, the goals that I have set are more concrete in definition and criteria for success, two things that have been very vague in the past, and I have worked to bring them closer to specifics.
Several of the Metrics I have settled on are:
Now, I know that seems vague and it can be when looking at it out of Context, which is why I am setting up a Goal Tracking page to help me keep track of each of the targets on my 2023 List.
As referenced above, progress will be posted on the Goal Tracking page and updated weekly or monthly as time allows. I have already set up a reminder to complete this task along with my regular review routines.
I believe that for progress to be made, you need to know where you stand. Having a way to see where each of your efforts is at a given moment is extremely helpful in this regard. When I am unsure of where I need to prioritize my efforts, time, and energy I can look back here and see what needs to be addressed next.
One word, Accountability. While I am confident in my ability to make progress, adding the external layer of people that can be watching as well as positive pressure on the process makes it all more real to me.
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It is easy to say that seeing all of my goals completed would be a measure of success, however, that seems too simplistic of a solution. I would consider myself successful in 2023 if I have made measurable progress toward my goals and see the requisite progress in my abilities and skills. I would expect that means that a significant number of the goals that are laid out would be completed, but that I would also be adjusting the list throughout the year to add more and adjust the vectors of the ones in flight to be conducive to my long-term plans.
The best place for me to be in a year is in a better position than I currently am. What am I willing to do and sacrifice to get there will be the deciding factor on where this leg of my journey will end up.
Each and every year, I sit down to do a final review of what happened and determine how I want to improve in the year to come. While I use this time to frame out some general goals, I do not hold any stock in New Year’s Resolutions, they are notoriously unreliable. This is a time of reflection, a chance to center yourself back onto the path you have been traveling, and should be taken with the seriousness that should entail. After all, we are all striving for something, moving from point A to B and figuring out all of the steps in between.
Previous Years:
This year has been very impactful for me, with the birth of our second child, significant changes in the professional arena, and also some remarkable strides in the development of my art. They say that one of the only constants in this world is change, and I have never heard anyone able to disprove that, so we must take that variability in life and circumstance into account for everything we do. The thought that anyone could ever become so complacent as to be comfortable is hard for me even to fathom.
The environment that we live in is too complex and dynamic with all of the different content sources and technologies working to grab and keep your attention it forces even the most stagnant of people to realize that change is constant all around us.
While I am sure you could choose to ignore it, which seems detrimental to your personal growth, the choice to lean into the changes and see what opportunities await is by far the more desirable choice. So it comes down to this, What are you going to choose to do?
Personally, I am focusing my efforts in several different directions so as to take many small steps towards improvement in as a well-rounded approach as I can.
Starting with skill improvements, I am going to continue to develop my writing practices and abilities, improve my digital art skills and of course, use this as a medium to share my progress in all of those arenas.
Personal growth areas, finding new ways to connect with people is a goal of mine in the upcoming year, finding a way to deepen connections and work to further my cherished relationships.
I think almost everyone these days is looking to establish additional financial income streams and I am no different in that, so spending some additional time working on items/services to utilize will be a large focus item for me.
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Faith has been a very important part of my life and deepening my understanding and keeping myself on the path will also get more focus in the upcoming year.
While I am sure there will be many more goals, large and small that organically develop throughout the upcoming year I will be working on these four main ones as a roadmap for my improvement activities.
Most of the challenges this year have been external, though I can be sure that not all have started that way. Home repairs and maintenance are expected, the amount that we have had to do this year was excessive. We were fortunate enough to line up the work and get it all done, or at least all of the major items, and are now lined up for the next set of projects in the new year.
Personal creative efforts have been up and down this year. Sheer personal motivational challenges are where the fault lies here, I know that it is completely within my control to manage that part of the endeavor. All I can say to that is that I failed this year in this regard. I am going to strive to do better this upcoming year and am actively planning on how to improve my efforts in this regard, so I am marking where I am currently at this year and seeing what progressive milestones I can set for myself on a monthly basis.
Professionally, it seems that I have been slowly burning out with all that had been asked of me, so this recent change in role is going to be a time to reflect and improve on situations that I struggled with before. I feel the drive to be better and do better, which has not been this strong in years and I am excited for the new challenges ahead, even the political ones. No, I am really serious about that part.
I am typically an optimist at heart and lately I feel as if I have a cynical filter on the world. To that I am going to make a concerted effort to assume “positive intent” on the actions that I don’t have evidence of to the contrary, this is to not only lighten my personal outlook on the world, but hopefully also temper my responses that result.
Making this another transformative year and working towards the goals I am setting for myself, leveraging the data and metrics to validate the progress as the year moved forward is what I am committing to, Time to Get Creative!
What would you imagine a writer’s life to be like, someone that is endlessly toiling away at a keyboard, a typewriter for those older or hipster enough to imagine? Or with pencil and paper in handwriting and rewriting sections of a novel? For me, that is only a small part of what I envisioned when starting my journey but was only a fraction of the ideal that I was imagining.
With the closing of one chapter, the story continues on to the next. What lies in store is what we will have to find out together as we journey into the New Year.
Challenge Day 24:
These are exceptionally important and are as varied across the world as you could possibly expect, but at the heart of all of them is the importance to recognize the connection that we have to our fellow humans. To acknowledge how grateful we are for the blessings that we have and that as the year is coming to a close that we are prepared for what comes next.