Goals

My last post promised talk of goals, and I had fully expected to write this post much sooner. Appropriately enough, one of my goals just so happens to involve blogging. While the idea may have been inspired by the beginning of a new year, I don't quite believe in New Year's Resolutions. I have made my fair share of these self-promises, and I don't think I've ever followed through on them. A large part of that can be attributed to lack of a plan of attack. Simply stating that I want to do something only gets me so far. It is important to have your goals clearly laid out with the steps you plan to take to achieve them. It is also important to have a realistic timeline for achieving your goals. This applies not only to duration but also to the starting point.

The number of books I've read since my last English class is appallingly low. I enjoy reading, and there are countless classic works of literature in the world I have yet to enjoy. I have been doing a good job keeping up with my subscription to Scientific American as well as keeping my RSS subscriptions in check, but I have barely touched the world of fiction or a technical book in quite some time. I don't enjoy reading multiple books at once, so I'll keep this goal to making some progress each week on one book for enjoyment and one technical book.

My second consumption-related goal is to pick up where I left off with my study of mathematics. I've always enjoyed math, and I would have liked to double-major (or at least minor) in it. My situation and opportunities dictated that I couldn't do this, but that does not make me love math any less. I picked up The Princeton Companion to Mathematics for a song when joining the SciAm book club, so this will be my starting point.

There is a lot of cool research being done by people with different skillsets than me. The best of this research shows up at TED. I have some TED talks downloaded already, but I'd like to make an effort to actually watch them. Watching at least one TED talk each month will suffice for now (some of them are quite lengthy...).

I love to play chess, but I've never really had a large pool of readily-available opponents. There is an upper bound on your skill acquisition when playing the same opponent(s) repeatedly. Luckily, there is GameKnot. I plan to keep at least one chess match going on GameKnot at all times. Want to play? Find sarumont and challenge me!

I'd also love to learn Go. I know the basic rules, but that barely gets your foot in the door. The rules are simple, and the strategy is endlessly complex. I don't feel I can allocate any time to Go presently, but it will be on the back burner. I feel like Go and chess can both help to hone my critical thinking.

I think bloggers can be separated into two camps: those who keep a schedule and those who do not. I sit firmly in the "those who do not" category, and I agree with this mentality. Keeping to a schedule will inevitably lead to more quantity and less quality. I want to blog more and regularly, but I do not want to sacrifice quality, decreasing the already abysmal SNR of the Internet. I think the solution here is to strive for a reasonable schedule. What's reasonable? For me, at least once per month should do. I would like to think that, in ideal circumstances, my non-blog contributions to the world are of greater value than the other way around.

That being said, I would like to have a blog which is a neutral force in the world, at the very least. My self-improvement motivations behind blogging are to improve my writing and vocabulary skills while purging certain thoughts and ideas from my overly full mind. Back to striving for a schedule, I think the big challenge is becoming your own editor. When you can say to yourself, "I don't have any new, interesting or useful ideas to share this month," you can preserve a high SNR. To these ends, I plan to try to post at least monthly by taking on a project of some sort which could result in a useful post at the end of said month.

My primary function in the world is that of a software developer. I happen to enjoy what I do, but I have not had the time or energy in the past years to sharpen my saw in my free time. Too many things interest me in the computing world, so I have no lack of interest. Working at a start-up does, however, drain your energy (both physical and creative). I want to start siphoning off a bit of that energy into writing code that is in no way related to work. I would prefer this code be using different tools and a different language. This will help me discover new tools and methodologies which I should be able to bring back to work, enriching our codebase with renewed vigor and creativity.

I know many geeks who share the problem I have: too many interests and/or hobbies. I enjoy cooking, baking bread, roasting/drinking coffee, brewing/drinking beer, cycling, and almost everything about computing. Even before my lovely wife, there were not enough hours in the day to devote to all these hobbies. I'm now roasting my own coffee beans, brewing my own beer, baking my own bread and cooking most meals. These hobbies detract precious time from computing, and I feel that is where my energies are best spent when it comes to paying the bills.

With the exception of my most recent (brewing beer), these tasks have become well-learned and routine to a point. The next step is one that, I think, many people do not take: optimization. With my hobbies, there are two forms of optimization: optimizing the task itself and optimizing the task's integration into life. I think that optimizing the integration promises the better ROI, so I will be focusing on that shave time away from these hobbies to apply to my goals.

Now this evil meta-post is out of the way, it's time to move on to productivity. Until next time.