I meant to get this post out the door before the new year, but… oops. My problem with New Years Resolutions is how they’re so vague.

Be healthier.

Take better care of myself.

Lose weight.

Be happy.

How will anyone ever know when they’re done? At the end of the year, can they look back at the past year and say, “I did it”?

Not to mention that if any of these things were really important to them, important enough to carry through with, why are they waiting until January 1?

That’s why I like to set myself goals instead of resolutions. I know when I have met a goal. It’s measurable. I can assign metrics (sigh). So that’s what I’ve done. Below are my goals for 2018.

  1. Take better care of my mental health. (I’m not listing the specifics here, but they exist, and I’ve already started 😛 )
  2. Exercise more. I want to work out 4x per week, every week.
  3. Learn 2 programming languages. I’m starting out with Go. I’m defining success by completing a small API gateway project I’ll lay out in a future post.
  4. Read more fiction. I read a lot, but it’s almost all technical or the news. I want to read more for entertainment. I have a list of books I want to read before the end of the year that works out to about 1 book every month.
  5. Share more. I’m a pretty quiet person, but I enjoy writing. I’m going to do more of that. For starters, I made a new blog!
  6. Publish an app. I’ve been doing iOS development since iOS development was a thing, but I’ve never put a personal project on the App Store. That’s going to change. I’ve chosen one of my pet projects to carry through to completion by the end of the year. More on that later.