2010 New Year Resolutions
I’ve read a lot of articles over the past few weeks (which I now can’t find and didn’t bookmark and history is really not helping) that have rubbished the idea of the New Year Resolution, saying that you should just strive to be a better person, change your lifestyle, change your outlook… I’m going to conveniently ignore the fact that it all amounts to the same thing and concede that perhaps they have a point. If we take a look back on last year’s post on the same topic we’ll see an amazing 0% success rate. That’s right, I made four promises to myself and have managed to complete zero of them to any degree of satisfaction. That’s quite an achievement!
But as un-encouraging as that may be I can’t help but feel the need to do the same thing all over again. It is 2010 after all! The beginning of a new decade (a period of ten years, any ten years. I really don’t care that 2001 was REALLY the start of the millenium and blah blah blah)! Now is the time to make those lifestyle changes and work toward being a better person, whatever your definition of better may be. My definition of better? Be better at what I do. The overall theme for my plans for 2010 is to improve myself professionally. There’s a lot of web out there to learn. So in no particular order, here are my plans for 2010.
1. Design Something Everyday – As you’ll notice from my previous blog posts this year I’ve taken up the challenge to build something everyday. Fortunately the idea of designing something is all a little vague, so it’s up for interpretation. Unfortunately my creative brain is not as with it as my technical brain. But that highlights the whole point of the exercise – practice. 365 days of design can’t fail to help improve the creative process.
2. Read more – I don’t read enough articles on the web. Simple really. There’s a wealth of information out there and a whole lot of it passes me by, and that has to stop. I’ve started work toward the goal by bookmarking the things I find that I want to read, unfortunately all that means so far is I have a ridiculously long list of bookmarks that isn’t getting any shorter.
3. Blog more – I made 9 posts in 2009, 10 in 2008, 8 in 2007. This post already marks number 7 for 2010. Success. Hopefully by 31 December there’ll be well over 400 of these…
4. Build more – One of the resolutions for 2009 was to make more websites. That didn’t really happen and is incredibly annoying. Including this blog build I think I only built a total of 2 sites last year. Any self respecting web developer should be ashamed by that number.
And finally the constant… constant in my life – 5. Lose weight. Bleh.
No, wait. Ignore that one. I’m gonna take a leaf outta the Internet’s book this time. My goal for 2010 is not to lose weight. It’s not to lose X pounds by Y date. My goal for 2010 is quite simply to lead a healthier life. Whatever happens as a result of that is a win. Not dying being right at the top of the win list.
John Robinson - designer, developer, coder... John’s not quite sure exactly how he should be labelled. Why not check out his blog and make a decision for yourself. He mostly talks about CSS, jQuery and the crazy world of the Interwebs, with a little bit of personal life thrown in for good measure.
