I’m the type of person who takes the time to plan a year’s worth of goals that I inevitably fall short of accomplishing. This is an all too common issue that people run into every year, but why? I think it all comes down to scheduling. The goals we choose for ourselves never have a set amount of time spent on it nor a deadline to track our progress.
My goals for 2017 were fairly simple, I wanted to focus on learning JavaScript, Blender and to work on my Portfolio. The problem I ran into was that I only had about two hours of free time a night to work on something. So how should I prioritize learning? I tried spending a day on each subject, then I tried focusing on an hour trying to learn each one. Both failed because the time it takes to really sit down and learn a subject requires more than an hour or even two. Ultimately, I really only had some progress learning Blender, and some progress with my portfolio.
This year I’m taking a different approach. This year I’m focusing on quarter goals. The plan is to pick four subjects I really want to learn and then spend 3 months solely focusing on that. So, these first 3 months are almost exclusively focused on my portfolio. The weekends will be used to focus on tracking the progress of my goals by blogging. I still want to learn Blender, but luckily my portfolio could use some 3d models and mockups so I can learn Blender in small sprints. I’m dropping trying to learn JavaScript since I really don’t do that much web design right now, and anything I learn will quickly be forgotten since I won’t practice any of it.
So, this will be an interesting test this year. I’ll keep you up to date with my progress and I’ll probably end up doing quarterly reviews. Who knows, this might just be the thing to make 2018 my most productive year ever.
