New Year’s resolutions I have a good chance of not completely ignoring
A fool’s errand: trying to squeeze all that you want to become onto a full plate of New Year’s resolutions.
Instead, I’m taking a more measured approach – choosing things I know how to take baby steps to get to, or have already begun. Such as…
Surf’s up, more often
A bad day of surfing beats a good day of anything else. But why is my board so clean? Where is the sand and the wax mess? Time to roll with those waves.
A wise man once told me that your hobbies are like rooms in a house. If you neglect them, the dust and decay make it difficult to comfortably re-enter and hang out. And on that note, more writing more often. (And this resolution is why I picked that spiffy typewriter as the lead image. Love it.)
If ($code_not_done) { echo “<p>Get that project done, woman.</p>”; }
As part of my continuing education, I’m learning PHP (thanks, Codelesson!). I have one project in particular I’d like to get done within the next two months. I hope to brag about it shortly.
This resolution is also a “I eat my own dog food” ploy: I’m a big advocate for getting more women in STEM careers and educational tracks. For instance, I recently worked with the Level Playing Field Institute to help spread the word about why so few women stay in these fields (we were covered by a few outlets, including Venturebeat). I seriously doubt I’ll ever go full time as a developer, but I want the power to say that I can build, that I can create projects on my own without the hassle of courting a technical cofounder.
READ ALL THE BOOKS!!!
I’ve steadily accumulated far too many novels, non-fiction readers, short stories, graphic novels, and even a cuneiform tablet or two. An incomplete list of unread books currently on my shelf:
- A Fire Upon the Deep
- Accelerando
- When Genius Failed
- Ender’s Shadow
- Stranger in a Strange Land
- Children of Dune (and consequently, the rest of the Dune books)
- The Crying of Lot 49
- The Satanic Verses
- Maus
Feel free to make additional suggestions of what to cram into my mind. Amazon and Barnes & Noble have been great friends lately.
Keep up with my Inbox Zero status/Maybe I should start using this “unsubscribe” thing.
I don’t need my dentist’s monthly e-newsletter. And I guess I could live without the updates from social media networks I don’t visit. Looks like it’s time to do a mass “Mark All As Read.”
- Search “is:unread”
- Select “All”. From there, Gmail gives you the option to “select all conversations that match this search”
- Mark all as read
- Feel a slight sense of accomplishment
The one thing I won’t do anytime soon: Figure out my voicemail password.
I could frame this as a personal battle of determination – a small ascetic vow, a bit of suffering I endure for greater spiritual awakening. But truth told, texting and caller ID killed voicemail for me.
Yes, I spent more time writing about it than you’d think I’d need to fix this. No, it’s not part of another resolution to not sweat the small stuff. I embrace sweating the small stresses. Those tiny pricks in the back of your neck (e.g. taking out the trash, framing that picture, calling the doctor’s) can stab like a knife when accumulated.
But this one, this little prick, this pain point, can stay for now. I’ve already let him crash this long.
I wrote some vaguely interesting resolutions; now you can too!
Nick Crocker arranged a nice talk on how to handle the process of change. This video, from Web 2.0 Expo New York’s Ignite this past October, sounds a bit like a mashup of top-selling self-help books, but if you’re wondering why you’re unable to “improve” yourself, it may be worth a watching.
