Resolutions for the New Year

For me heading to see my family for my vacation is not a vacation. I don’t get any real work done and I don’t really relax in any sense of the word. Owing to that and seeing as how school starts back up in a week, I’m going to do a light and more than likely dull post tonight – my resolutions for the new year. As per this article in New York Times, resolution need to be engineered in such a way as to both make them viable and specific goal.

My general goals are to learn to organize time better, work better at classes, improve my performance at my new job, blog consistently, write more programs on my own time, and try to cut my current debt load.

The organizing time better is more to try and get back on the bandwagon of reading again. In high school I used to read multiple books in a week and since starting college this has gone further and further down, to where I am lucky to read a book a month. The working better at classes seems to be already benefiting from my change in jobs, with my grades and time able to devote to classes improving substantially since starting at the T-STEM Center. Blogging has both been something that I enjoy doing and something that I actually do sporadicly at best. I wish to do it consistently to both gain the practice writing, promote my online presence, and further edify myself. The writing programs and improving performance at my current job can hopefully be tied together to write web applications to both expand my horizons and help at work where I am mainly dealing with web development. The cutting my current debt load is of course always a good thing and a pretty general one that probably 90% of the public also tries to do.

So to quantify my goals:

1. Read 1 book a week

2. Within 3 months buy my own domain and website hosting

3. Within 3 months of domain being purchased, move blog to this website

4. Blog every weekday – 1 post most weekends regarding the status of the Library program

5. Push out Version 1.0 of my Library program by mid-summer

6. 15% of income to savings/retirement accounts

7. 10% of income to debt elimination (minimum)

8. Have a 3.75 or higher GPA for this semester – basically only allowed 1 B

   To make this goal reachable:

   1. Consistently redo notes from classes

   2. Take practice tests

   3. Do not finish homework the night before it is due

   4. Plan CS projects

Here is hoping I can improve myself in the new year.