The Twelve Goals of Old Man Wallace [08/21/2006 16:10:10]

It wasn't a move I was particularly keen on making, but given the lack of viable alternatives, I decided to turn thirty yesterday. I suppose it's time to start acting like a grownup. :)

I've learned a lot about being productive this year, but productivity without a long term goal is wasted effort. My goal horizon tends to extend out a week or two, and that's kind of pointless. I have all kinds of projects in the someday/maybe space, but my actual commitments are pretty short term, and that's a mistake.

So, last night I wrote out a list of goals I wanted to accomplish this year. I came up with twelve, in no particular order:

1. Raise $8000 for the Leukemia/Lymphoma Society - this is the 100-mile charity bike ride I'm doing in November. So far, I've raised $25 with another $250 on the way. The next action is to write out my please donate letter.
2. Bring my weight under 200 pounds - at 280, this means losing about 7 pounds a month. The biking will certainly help here, and I'm seriously considering hiring another personal trainer.
3. Read all the books on my stack - I've got approximately 90 books that I've purchased but haven't read.
4. Release my web framework - sure, there's a zillion other frameworks out there, but I still think I've got some good ideas. Anyway, I've been trying to get these ideas out there for ages. It's time to make it happen.
5. Raise my liquid net worth to $10k - I paid off my credit cards over a year ago, but I haven't really saved anything since. I've basically been living paycheck to paycheck, and that's not good. I'm not planning to buy a house, but if I did, neither the mortgage nor the house would count here. I'm talking about savings and other liquid investments like stocks. Along those lines:
6. Raise my SEI salary to $5k/month - Right now, I pay myself $3k/m, which is a whole lot less than what I'd make developing software for someone else. I could be saving and investing more even with my current salary, but one thing I learned this year is that I don't make enough to start a family or even buy a decent house in this area. Growing my business to this level seems tough, but I can do it if I work at it.
7. Spec and implement "tangentstorm" - this is a piece of software I've been daydreaming about for ages. It's a GUI outliner / diagramming tool, and may at some point become a commercial product. Mostly though it's just a tool I want personally for myself. One of the main reasons I work for myself is to follow my own interests, and it's about time I made it happen.
8. Write a 100k-word rough draft of a novel - What?!?! No, I'm not kidding. Writing used to be a major hobby of mine. These days I seem to spend most of my free time mindlessly surfing the web. This seems daunting, but I know it's doable: it's only 275 words a day - far fewer than this post! Also, hundreds of NaNoWriMo folks write 50kw novels in a month every year. I tried NaNoWriMo last year, but I tried to make it important and useful and completely botched the whole thing. I'm not going to worry about making it any good, I just want to finish it. This is just for fun.
9. Visit 25 different groups in atlanta - this is an odd one. Basically, I just want to meet a few more people and try some new things. So, once every two weeks, I'd like to go hang out with a different group of people. This doesn't have to be anything organized - it could be a karaoke night or a user group meeting, as long as I'm actually interacting with people and not just watching a show by myself or something.
10. Go on dates with at least six girls - this kind of goes along with meeting new people. Obviously, if I get into a relationship this would be cut short, but I strongly believe it's silly to jump into a relationship with the first person you go out with. The main point here is to just make an active effort to meet some new people, and have fun.
11. Learn to play Mozart's Rondo Alla Turca on the piano - I've always wanted to be able to play piano. I can read music and play simple melodies but I'm not so good at playing harder pieces. This is one of my favorite pieces of music to listen to when I'm programming, and I'd just like to be able to play it.
12. Implement a profitable automated trading system - I kicked variations of this idea around for several years looking at advanced AI techniques and finally came up with a system that's so painfully simple that it kind of spoiled the fun. This likely won't make me rich anytime soon, but it should provide a small but steady monthly return for the foreseeable future. I just need to implement it.

So that's the list. I have a lot of smaller projects in mind that might help me accomplish these goals, but I haven't worked out any detailed plans.

All of these are doable, and none of them require me to be perfect on a daily basis. I have no doubt I have the potential to make all of this happen.

My main concern is that a month from now, it'll be business as usual and I will have forgotten all about this list of goals. I've got a couple ideas about that, such as announcing the list to the world here, and taping it up in prominent places around my apartment.

The other thing I think would help is to get all the other stuff I have to do - the little routine daily tasks - into an organized system. To that end, I'm working through Getting Things Done again. In the past, I've just been overwhelmed by my outrageous number of project ideas. I'm hoping that starting with a list of my big goals will help me keep things manageable, since anything that would take away from what I want to accomplish this year can be tucked away in the someday/maybe file.

In any case, I've got two email inboxes and five rather nasty stacks of papers to deal with in order to clear the decks, so I'd better get back to work.