Wow! I can’t believe it’s February already! As I stated in my New Year Resolutions post, I wrote down my resolutions so that I could be held accountable for them. Reviewing my resolutions after a year seemed like I would easily lose touch/sight of them. I decided a good idea would be to review my progress month-by-month, so here it goes:
Read more (and not programming/technical books)
I believe I’ve been doing a good job of this! My previous post was a review on Ready Player One, which was a fantastic book. I’m still reading technical books (Clojure In Actions) As I’ve taking a liking to Clojure, but I’m still making time for other books as well. A close friend of mine recommended reading Outliers: The Story of Success by Martin Gladwell. From what he’s told me, the book sounds incredibly interesting and very motivational. I hope to begin reading this as soon as tomorrow night (02/02/15), so keep an eye out for that review!
Continue to shoot (photograph) more often and update my blog with some of my favorite pictures!
I’ve been shooting and posting my favorite pictures to my Instagram, but I haven’t done a good job of posting the pictures to my blog. Be ready for an influx of pictures soon. I’m not sure if I just want to have one post/picture or if I want to setup a sort of gallery. Regardless, release fast and release often, so I’ll have some pictures up this week. I do have a couple of shots that I have in mind and I’d like to be able to get more pictures of activities with my friends, so I’ll hopefully put those in motion this month!
Graduate and complete my M.S. in Computer Science!
I’ve enrolled in my final thesis class, which is a step forward towards the path of graduation. I have to proof-read my thesis and practice my defense.
Try to really help one person a week.
I don’t know how much I’ve been sticking to this one and it’s probably the thing that bothers me the most. I feel like lately my friends have been helping me out a lot lately, but I don’t know if I’m recipricating that back to them or towards other people. I don’t exactly have a plan for this one, but hopefully I can put something together soon.
Talk to/meet new people.
I also feel that I’ve been dropping the ball on this. This may partially be due to me getting a new phone (and wanting to play around with it), but also just me shying away in general.
Continue to swim at least 3x/week!
I think if there is one resolution I’ve excelled at, it’s been this one. Since Christmas, I’ve been swimming about 5x/week and exercising 6x/week. I’ve been attending Masters workouts at least once a week. I feel that my swim game has been improving tremendously. My strokes still need a lot of work, but they’re getting better! Despite my hardwork, I have a plan to improve. Masters workouts are hard for me to make since they’re right in the middle of the day (12-1) and having to get there early, then eat lunch, and go back to work, I lose a big chunk of my day which is why I’ve only been going once a week. I plan to start attending the 6AM-7AM swim workouts, that way I can get my workout out of the way early in the morning and be available for my team/coworkers when it counts!
To summarize, the things I need to work on for the month of February:
- Read Outliers (and learn Clojure :P)
- Post my favorite pictures here
- Proofread my thesis and practice my defense
- Figure out a plan to help people
- Get off my phone when I’m out alone
- Start swimming the morning masters workouts
Accountability.
One last thing, I realized my “talk to/meet new people” and “try to really help one person a week” goals aren’t SMART goals which may be why they’re so difficult to identify. Maybe my plan for achieving these resolutions should be to identify them as SMART goals and then execute.