So, 2019 is upon us. New year, fresh start, time to write down some goals, or at least some intentions.

Here’s a brief overview of some things I intend to work on over the course of the year.

Running

Do some! Preferably lots, and consistently. I’ve set my Strava goals to be the relatively low levels of 25km per week and 1000km for the year. On a good week I will likely do around 50km, so this gives lots of breathing room. Plus, started the year well with a 10k to get things started.

Running is a great way to clear my head, get some exercise and a distraction-free zone to think about things, either deliberately or in a ‘wait for inspiration to strike’ kind of way. Regardless, I always feel better after I’ve been out, even if not always during!

Plus, it should help shed some of these pounds I seem to have put on over the festive period. Too much chocolate…

Writing

Do more, and in public! I’ve been writing a lot more work-related thoughts down of late, and I want to try and transfer some of that from private to public musings. Hence this blog - getting this set up is a first step to providing myself with a bit of forum for these half-baked ideas.

Which is not to say all the entries will be work-related. I see this, rather, as a place for me to explore certain things I stumble upon and to think them through while writing them down.

Learning

Do some! I ended 2018 pretty prepared in this regard, having a good pile of books to get through. But there’s always more to be done. I applied for the Smartly Free MBA as well and have worked through all the introductory fundamentals of business courses so far. Fingers crossed that my (hastily penned!) application is accepted and I can enrol and learn more things ‘business’ in 2019.

Executing

I am the worst (or best if you look at it that way) at grabbing a domain name with a vague idea of doing something with it. I’m intending for 2019 to be the year where I actually start executing on some of these ideas, and at the very least getting some web pages up and talking about them.

With my role at Buffer changing from engineer to manager recently, this should also give me the opportunity to keep my coding muscles relatively sharp, or at the very least prevent them becoming too blunt. But it’s by no means all (or even mainly) engineering. Rather it’s research, build, gain feedback and interate, with a big focus on the feedback phase.

And maybe, just maybe, there could be the potential for a source of side income, one day.

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