Resolved

Posted 2 years, 8 months ago., on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008, at 3:22 pm

Actually, I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.  I’ve always sort of thought of January 1st as a pretty arbitrary date for making Big Changes in your life that you’re going to forget about a few days later anyway.  So I just haven’t bothered.  If pressed, I’ll happily say that I only make March 25th resolutions, because March 25 is no less arbitrary than January 1 in my opinion.

Still, this year I’ve decided that there’s definitely some room for improvement.  So I’ve made a list of four "Opportunity Areas" (a delightful term I picked up from my workplace’s HR division, a euphemism for "weaknesses") in my life that I want to work on.  In no particular order (and this is just a preliminary draft), here they are:

Geekery. Focus on building my programming, web development, and technology skills by taking classes, playing with geeky toys, taking on projects, and so on. This will enhance my productivity and flexibility at work and at home. This will also involve improving my project management skills.

Sociability. Focus on building, rebuilding, and rebuilding bonds with friends, family, co-workers, and so on, both online and off. Do this by going out of my way to talk to new people, returning calls and emails, and generating new calls and emails, as well as making and keeping commitments to spend time with people and keeping lines of communication open.

Writing. Keep up with my various writing projects, and find ways to spend more time and commit more fully to my writing. Produce more finished works, and submit more often. Read books on writing, read more fiction in and out of my genre, as well as nonfiction of many different subjects, from science to politics to history and so on.  In 2007 I had a goal of maintaining five active submissions at all times, and I did pretty well at that until close to the end.
 
Health. Improve physical health and fitness by exercising regularly, keeping a careful diet, sleeping regularly and good hours, and so on. With my various doctors and family helping out, I can get this issue licked. Also Weight Watchers.  Also dressing spiffy, because I’m not sure where else to put it.

That’s all I got.  There are a couple of great things about this list; first, these are all areas of opportunity that I enjoy anyway, so none of them will be a stretch (well, except for the last one).  These are just areas that I want to focus on more, and I’m pretty sure I can find the time for them by, say, spending less time staring blankly at brick walls.  Or whatever.

Secondly, there’s so much potential for cross fertilization, quite a bit of which I’m doing already anyway.  I hang out with friends who are also writers, and my writer friends and I help each other out with our writing skills, for example.  And I suppose that I could improve both my programming skills and my overall health outlook by building some Java based tools to help keep track of my weight loss.

But these aren’t really resolutions in the true sense of the word, I think.  If anything, it’s a resolution to "stay the course".  On the whole, I like who I am, and feel little need to change it.

 

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