My goals for the next year

December 31st, 2010

I don’t normally do new years resolutions.

I don’t like doing things that everybody else does, “just because”. I like to rebel against those things, for whatever reason. This new years eve, however, I’ve decided that I’d like to dig out my someday/maybe list and find a few things that are really important to me. I’ve read that publicly announcing your goals makes you significantly more likely to achieve them, so here goes:

1. Improve my Spanish.
While I’ve not explicitly ever made a list of life goals, this one would have been on every single one for the last six years. In 2011 I am going to find one or two people in Ann Arbor who speak Spanish that are willing to converse with me on a regular basis. I will keep a journal of every word I come across that I don’t know, and memorize it. Ideally, I will be adding at least 20 words a week to that journal. Finally, I will be giving myself a broad grammar base by reviewing my Spanish grammar book, completing at least 1 chapter a month. I don’t really have a final metric to establish whether I have sufficiently “improved”, but as long as I’m making progress I am happy.

2. Writing
I’d like to begin writing again. I don’t know that I will start this goal until after I graduate, but if I could find 20 minutes a day (blog posts included, though I’d prefer to be writing fiction) I would be happy.

3. Play guitar on a regular basis. This goal will also probably have to wait until April, but I have two guitar books that I want to go through, playing 20 minutes a day until I’ve gone through them both. I’d also like to be able to play “Nothing else matters” by Metallica all the way through, while singing.

4. Launch Bandizzy
This project is essentially like Ticketmaster for independent artists. I’d like to have a prototype launched sometime in 2011, using Ruby on Rails.

5. Write 10 blog posts for PHPCollective
I’m working on a developer blog using the PHP programming language. I’d like to have 10 blog posts ready for when I launch.

6. Launch BoSS
This is a directory of Basic Social Services, which lists all of the free social services available in Michigan (i.e. food, shelter, clothing, phyisical and mental health services, etc.). I’m doing this with a friend, and hopefully we can launch a non-profit to support the site once it’s up.

So that’s my list for 2011. If you’ve posted your list, feel free to link to it below, I’d love to read them! (If you’re not sure where to post, try Facebook, Blogger, or any other site like that).

Feliz año nuevo!