2014 Review

So now that 2014 is over I wanted to look over my goals that I wrote about last year and see how I did at meeting them.

1) Blog more / Become a better writer

Pretty big failure here. I only made 38 blog posts in 2014 which is far below what I’d hoped to do. That is only 10% or one blog post every 9.6 days. I’m hoping to raise that this year.

2) Stop forgetting things / Avoid interruptions

This I did much better on, but not perfect. Basically on days when I was good about using my journal, I wouldn’t forget things. Surprise!

So this year I definitely want to keep using the journal in order to not have anything fall by the wayside. The main technique of bullet journaling is going over your jounral and moving/prioritizing/dropping items based on what’s going on now, or in the coming weeks. This process does really work. When looking at the last week of work many things I wrote down are either complete or not important. Both can be either checked or marked off. At least nothing is forgotten.

As far as avoiding interruptions I did ok. I did turn off most phone interuptions and I do feel like I avoided distractions a bit more. I focused on what I wanted to do that day and got it done way more often. I will definitely continue this in 2015.

3) Continue learning / Work on side projects

This is the easiest goal. This year I dived into javascript and node.js as well as learning Angular.js and Ember.js. I liked Ember so much that I decided to make my raid scheduling site an ember app powered by a back end rails api.

I worked on Emacs and Vim plugins throughout the year as normal. I didn’t do a much learning about Java as I probably should have… but that just reflects my current interests.

I learned a lot about scrumm and kanban this year which is good for future growth at work. I definitely will keep this up. Learning about managing techniques is next.

4) Plan for parenting later on / Don’t lose myself

I haven’t had to do too much in this regard yet. The baby didn’t take up enough time to make myself want to plan around it. I will probably drop this as a goal until it becomes needed.

5) Read more

Another failure. I did finish some books that I started but I didn’t read a lot. I don’t know how praticle this goal was considering that I can’t read during my commute. I read a lot online when learning about new programming languages or techniques and I’ve read a few manager/process books, but other than that a lot of reading didn’t really happen.