Happy New Year, horses.
First post of the year and nothing better than a motivational post. In the last few days, I saw a lot of tweets about resolutions, and I decided to do my post about.
TD/DR
This post is about my ideas, thoughts, on how I can improve and track resolutions and results. Is a kind of motivational post and I hope this will help you to stop making excuses for your resolutions.
When I think about Resolutions is easy to come up with ideas like, I want to blog more, or I want one blog a week, Study more, create more projects, and so on …
Very often, we as developers want to learn more, and it is easy to come up with some project ideas. The problem is as a Good Developer I start several things and never finish anything, or even worse, I never start the idea.
Just woke up with another fantastic idea, rush to your favorite domain registrar and buy it, sometimes celebrate. Then you do nothing, your domain name sits sadly in your account gathering dust, only for you to renew it year-on-year and your idea flutters away like a feather in the wind.
Sound familiar?
Start point
The first step is to stop crying, stop complaining about time, stop making excuses, and be careful with “Fake work”, the little things that make you feel as if you’ve moved the needle on your project, but really you’ve just been procrastinating.
Invest your time before you invest your money, Build something before you buy the domain, Learn via YouTube before paying for a course, and several others.
“Efficiency Is An Excuse To Not Do The Actual Work”, I can blog more if I stop to polish my idea and my code. Sometimes this polish never ends or I never activate the level where I feel confident to publish.
“If you’re trying to do something efficiently you’re probably stalling.”
Goal
More than a goal or a target, this was my thought about how I’ll solve this;
I want to do more with less, I can blog more with less content.
I can blog about what I’m learning, working on, where and how I got solutions to my problems, how I solved them on my projects and with this, I think the result can be helpful for others and I don’t’ need to worry with things like, “Quality of articles vs quantity of articles”, and more, by creating content consistently I will improve my communication skills to a great extent, improve my English as a non-native speaker.
Is not about writing articles regularly, but about writing consistently.
The idea is to create a habit of doing.
Nice! Now how can I track this?
Track
You need momentum. You need progress. You need forward movement happening right now.
Is easy to set a goal for the year and get lost on the way. The idea is to divide it into something smaller like a month, week or even days. If I create a smaller goal for each week or day I can track more frequently and get a more precise result.
One idea that I saw a long time ago and unfortunately don’t remember where I saw this, is to use a sequence of numbers.
Image a list of 1,2,3,4 …
Every day or week, if I complete my go a go to the next number, if I didn’t complete I need to do the same number and only after I go to the next.
Let’s see an example;
Week 1 – write this blog;
Week 2 – Raspberry Pi idea
Week 3 – Project A
Week 4 – Project B
Now every week I can check my status, let’s say that I completed week 1 so I move to number 2. Next week If I complete my goal I move to number 3. Now if I don’t complete week 3 I need to do another task on number 3, before moving to number 4.
Another idea is to use a series of numbers like Fibonnati or others.
I’m not getting any project ideas
You need to realize that struggling to decide what exactly to make is normal. You need to push a little bit to get ideas.
Stack Overflow or Twitter are a good place to start, create an account, start following people from your area, colleagues, people that you admire, book authors, reference people from things that you like and the ideas will come.
You have an idea, write it down, for a simple or small one that looks like, there’s a big chance that you will forget. Create a list of ideas, and then you can prioritize it.
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This is an extra topic that I was thinking of as well.
Normally I just tweet one time my blog post and never come back. Sometimes I check the analytics and things like that, but I never do anything to promote.
Some ideas that I will start to do is to tweet more and post on other social networks, like Lindkin.
Another idea is to try to discover the best time to tweet.
Conclusion
- Stop with excuses.
- Using Stack Overflow or Twitter to get ideas is easier than you think.
- Create a way to track your progress.
- Do this consistently.
You need to make sacrifices to achieve a goal. Go make that sacrifice, because only make mistakes who try something.
Every time that I fall into my comfort zone, is the time that I need to leave. It means that I can do much more.
There is “no linear path to success.” Life is like a game of Pac-Man. You start with a tangible goal and reach for it while avoiding the obstacles and “ghosts” (people who don’t believe in you) that come your way. The connections you make are what get you from one point to another.
Once you define your goals, there’s a little rule, a little secret. Whether it rains or whether the sun comes out, whether you are in a good mood, or in a bad mood, whether you have luck on your side, or bad luck, but every single day, take another step toward your goal.
Every single day do something that will get you closer to your goal.