That time again, when we enter a new year and some of us do new year’s resolutions. Mostly by recycling the ones we had the previous year and the year before that and so on and so forth. And trust me when I say that I speak from experience. There are things that I wanted to do and I procrastinated them years. Literally years. To the point that they became irrelevant or they got so far off track that the amount of effort required to bring them to a feasible state is mind-boggling and it makes more sense to just drop them.
This time is going to be different…I hope 
So this year I’ve decided to try something different. I picked my goals following the SMART criteria and I divided them into 2 main categories, as follows:
- one timers – goals that have a relatively short time frame and don’t require repetitive actions, even if they need planning over multiple steps to achieve. Example of such goals would be “Travel to {name-of-country}” or “Pass exam Y”. While they require effort and planning such as study or buying tickets & getting visas, all these steps represent discrete actions
- habits – these goals require me to develop a habit over time in order to achieve them. A good example of such a goal would be the ever-present “get in shape” (wait, isn’t round a shape?), which requires habits such as going to the gym regularly (as opposed to just before I go to the beach and I want to pump the biceps a bit) or eating healthy in general, not just because I have a fancy dinner at the end of the week and I need my suit to fit
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And, given the title, I will try to use a SCRUM-like approach to achieving them by splitting them in 12 one month sprints and review them as they go by. For tracking my burn down chart , I will use Lifetick for the one timers and Loop for the habits (which happens to be an open source project).
I will only include in this exercise only goals that depend on me alone and I intentionally left out professional goals, as some projects may not be public yet. Long story short, my goals for 2017 are:
- visit 5 new countries – visits need to be meaningful, not just checkins in the airport while waiting for the connection flight
- start / contribute to 5 open source projects – these can be anything from minor libraries to CLI utilities and so on
- learn a new programming language – I need to deliver a working project (can be one of the open source ones)
- blog more – write at least one article every 2 weeks
- give back to the community – improve my profile on Stack Overflow with at least 50 points of reputation per week, give 5 presentations at meetups / events over the course of the year
- get an A2 license and buy a bike – it’s clear when it’s done!
- get in shape – improve my muscle to fat ratio by 20% (this will be calculated by a physician)
- read 12 books – and post the reviews on the blog
- meditate – at least 15 minutes 5 times per week
- improve my knowledge of AWS – pass one certification exam
- do 5 dives at 15-20 meters – not that hard to measure
- save money – at least 10% of my monthly income should go in a saving account
- learn Spanish – be able to have complex conversations with native speakers
- do something I never tried before – this will be the bonus round
Wish me luck! I will start…Monday