2009 is a very important year for me. It’ll be the first where I am completely independent, in (nearly) complete control of my (earthly) destiny, i.e., not answering directly to a corporate authority. This is the year I lay the groundwork for a successful business or lose a lot of material things (or both, but I’m ready). Business failure could mean having to go back to work in another corporate sweat-shop just to survive. But that failure is really not an option since I think it would destroy me. There are other options, but I’m too optimistic about the business to think about them today.
There are some big items here (new home/residence, business model) that may skew some goals, but the following are slightly rough targets. It’s not really far off from the latter part of 2008′s activities, but an ambitious improvement. I’m not including many business goals, since they are separate; but some can’t be excluded here. (Interesting how many of these could fall under “input” or “output”.)
2008 recap: I may still recap 2008 in a personal journal, but it was basically a year of preparation to venture out on my own. I now have a good number of Twitter friends, a second version of a blog, some great local contacts, cash runway to live (conservatively!) for a couple years, some promise for a business model, and a development team cranking away. I also know a lot more about myself, and am extremely happy with 2008′s outcome: a new career/life direction and opportunity for many meaningful possibilities.
This is pretty personal and specific to me, but I’m hoping it’s an outline/perspective that others can benefit from. It’s been a useful exercise to turn my vague expectations into concrete, measurable goals. I plan to tack this on my wall. (I really need to do this for a five year plan, too.)
Reading
- Books: 1 non-fiction, 10 business/self-improvement, 5 programming, 2 spiritual, 1 relational, 1 parenting. Budget: $600
- Participate in GoodReads book-oriented social network(?)
- Blogs: 3 times/week going through GReader, organized/prioritized into areas of importance
- Tweets: 1 hour/day max
Writing
- 1 article/week (on blog)
- 10 (quality/interesting/original) tweets/week
- 10 book reviews (GoodReads, Amazon, Powells)
- 1 whitepaper on my business technology (and present at an Ignite?)
- Hone in on book idea
Watching
- 40- movies (Netflix, Masterpiece)
- 200 TED talks
- 50 TV shows (Hulu: House, Chuck, The Office, Daily Show)
- 10 concerts (Jimmy Mak’s, Oregon Zoo, The Old Church, Festivals, etc)
- Science Friday, more NPR
Development/code
- Write a lot of code, wisely!
- Take uGraph (more info coming next month) from proto to launch
- Stay focused on uGraph without being distracted by 100 other interesting project ideas
- Contribute patches to existing open source projects
- Start one open source project (Twackup, LocalGeoDb, PictureRotator, personal mini-tools, other)
- Learn Processing (needed for some visualization work)
- SICP FP special-interest group, example code in Haskell, learn Haskell mostly for parallelism needs
Financial
- Track every expense (via Xpenser)
- Establish solid business model, buy-in from corporations
- Max 2 consulting gigs, 1 week each
- Get Courtney (wife) making more money, full time?
- Sell house, move into rental
Physical health
- Running: 10 miles/week, 1 running event
- Push-ups: 200/week
- Use uGraph to avoid/find illness
- Sleep 5-7 hours/night
- Softball, basketball season (x3)
- An apple a day, and try to actually eat the green stuff on my plate.
- Max avg 1-2 drinks/night, some exceptions
Music
- Focus guitar performances on Easter, Christmas events
- More guitar/ukulele with church group, 1/month
- Maybe a 1 month interlude with banjo (or saxophone?!) again
Kids/family
(If I can hit these, Courtney will be thrilled and the Wife category will be easily taken care of via these and some of above and not-yet-thought-of entertainment.)
- Chess club (volunteer?)
- Continue Abacus with Maia (daughter) (?)
- Piano lessons with Maia
- Ukulele with Alex/Daniel (sons)
- 20 minutes/day reading/telling stories
- 2+ hours/day being present, almost every day
- 1 day/week (Sunday) of relaxed family time
- Record 100+ video clips of memorable activity
- Gentle/loving discipline/encouragement
- Beaver baseball, Timbers soccer (x4 games)
- Project: convert Geo Metro to electric
Networking (new)
- Get further involved with OEN/SAO/AEA
- Join OTBC (hopefully!)
- Attend my first local Tweetup, and plan for more if useful
- Attend a few more Python Users Group meetings (overlaps a bit with SICP group mentioned above)
- Be more conversant on Twitter, steer Facebook users to Twitter (my company initially depends on openness in micro-blogging platforms)
- 1 coffee meetup/month with new acquaintance
- 2 hacking events (startup weekend and sideproject2startup were awesome last year)
I’m still looking for more improvements, especially in the Kids category, so feel free to add ideas/perspective in comments.
Wow, Micah, this is really well-thought out. One of the things I find about working out of my home is that I miss the social relationships that go along with an office environment. Maybe you’ll want to consider 2 or 3 relationships that you want to cultivate as part of your 2009 list?? This doesn’t necessarily translate to more bandwidth required on your part. e.g. invite someone to read/discuss one of the books you have on your list. I know I’m good for a Beaver/Timbers game or two with Joshua! I’m inspired by you AND your list!
@son Thanks, great idea and really important! I guess that was lurking in my head but didn’t think to include it. I just added a “Networking” section to the post. Looking forward to doing Beavers/Timbers with you this season.
Just wondering how Courtney working full time will affect this list. If that were to happen,it seems to me you will need to modify the list significantly. 2 hours a day, almost every day, isn’t going to be anywhere close to enough if Courtney is working 8+ hours a day. Who’s going to run the household–the shopping, cooking, cleaning, errand running, kid-monitoring, detail-managing? If Courtney’s the one working full time, the majority of that needs to be off her plate. Just giving a wife’s perspective here!
@Karen Nice seeing you here, and thanks for the other perspective! Courtney’s already effectively doing 30-40 hrs/wk and it’s going pretty well time-wise. The problem is the part-time preschool pay. So if she could spend that same time and get a full-time paycheck we’d be in decent shape. Unfortunately, teaching is not a go-home-at-40-hrs profession as you know better than most.
We’ve hit that stage in the kids’ life where they’re going to be in school all day, and it really changes things. Looking forward to it yet? And the beauty of twins is that they’re finally at an age where they will play together all day, with little intervention. So on inservice days (which seem to be many!) I can still get things done. We’ve pretty well optimized the domestic stuff, and I’m involved. So I already consider myself domesticated (shopping, laundry, cooking (pizza), financials), but still having the necessary time to hit the goals. The time thing is a real concern, and in all likelihood, she won’t go back to full time next year. I also hope that this is a 2-3 year phase, after which I’ll again be capable of making money, and she’ll be able to ease up a bit if she wants to. The roller-coaster has already started.