In the past I’ve gone a bit overboard with the whole ‘new year, new me’ idea. I even went so far as to write out a resolution goal for every single day of the new year. (Which was actually sort of fun!)

This year I’m being a little more open-ended in terms of my goals… while still trying to keep them SMART. My A is for Artistic but otherwise, it’s the same. 😉

This is the review day for my Week 1 (Dec 30-Jan 5) and my goal-planning day for Week 2.

Looking Forward

I didn’t get anywhere near as much done this first week as I had hoped, for a variety of outside reasons, both internal and external. Because of that, I’m going to step things back this week and focus more on the overall framework of the goals.

I’m trying not to focus on what didn’t get done, but instead on how to avoid the things that tripped me up.

So these are things I’d like to do better this week:

• Come up with a daily ‘ideal’ schedule for the week
• Come up with a way to track the reasons why I don’t do something
• Come up with a way to track the wins as they happen

Specific one-time things to do this week:

• Sign up for the next Nerd Fitness 4-week Challenge event
• Finish planning out how I want the custom WordPress posts for writing and art to look/act like.
• Spend at least 5 hours working on my GetPut Adventures game
• Spend at least 5 hours in Udemy classes
• Register and weigh-in for the Biggest Loser contest at work

Weekly Wins

• I worked from home on a day when I was feeling sick instead of going in. I also took the time to completely recharge and didn’t go overboard on catching up with chores when I started to feel better.
• I got all of my social media posts into Buffer and scheduled for the workweek. I also managed to post to my Pinterest almost every day of the week and set up a spreadsheet for repeat posting going forward.
• I updated the Saturday Story Prompt posts for 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012. This included updates to the new Gutenberg formatting, adding the domain name to the Canva images, and creating new Canva images and blurbs.
• Created bullet journal layouts for updating the January SSP posts, January and February calendars, the SSP 2019 posts, and the 31 Days of Vistas ebook.

Udemy Courses

One of my main goals this year is to learn. A lot.

Work is offering free access to a variety of classes through Udemy in order to train us for the new jobs. I took a few courses half-heartedly last year, but this year I’m going to really work at it.

I did pretty well on this last week, although I forgot to bring my headphones in for the first few days. The plan is to listen to the more generic stuff as I work on the lower brainpower tasks at work and then taking fifteen minutes an hour to listen to ‘real’ lectures.

My overall tracking page is here, but here’s a summary of what I finished last week.

Write Better Emails: Tactics for Smarter Team Communication – Hassan Osman

This was a quick win off the list of my workplaces’ ‘recommended’ courses. This one was… okay. It covered the material well and had examples of the various tips. It’s all stuff I had seen before and if work hadn’t been paying for it I wouldn’t have taken it. For what it was, it was 5-star, I’m just not the intended audience.

Absolute Introduction to Object Oriented Programming in Java – Imtiaz Ahmad

NOT RECOMMENDED. I was using this course as a quick refresher, which it accomplished, but it’s not an ‘Absolute Introduction.’ There were several times in the course where it promised that things would be explained in depth later… but never did so. On a 100% personal opinion– I know it has nothing to do with the course, but it bugged me that it was said that chickens can’t fly (they can) or that birds could be mammals. The use of ‘flyable’ and ‘eatable’ for designating animals that could fly or eat was also a little jarring.

Become a SpeedDemon: Productivity Tricks to Have More Time – Jonathan Levi

This was another of work’s recommended courses. I’ve run into every single one of the ideas before (the guy is a big fan of Tim Ferriss), but it was interesting to see all the links gathered in one place. That’s what this course is– one big summary of ideas and then links so folks can go research the ones they like. I get the premise, it’s a great introduction to the ideas, but I’m glad I got it for free.