2020 Goals, a Progress Update

So back in March I wrote out some of my goals for 2020 and I figured it’s been almost 6 months, so let’s see how I’m tracking.

COVID-19 had already rolled around by March, although it’s full impact wasn’t quite felt yet at that point. Maybe it’s still not quite there yet, but we’re all getting pretty used to being locked down and/or restricted and generally working from home where-possible.

These were presented in no particular order…

1. At home: finish a moderate house project such as a deck with a roof

Not much progress here. I think I might park this one, for now.

2. Extra-curricular: play the piano every day (I’m definitely failing this one already) and learn new songs

Success! I’ve actually got going on this goal, thanks to Adam Neely’s advice of playing every day for a fortnight turns it into a habit (turns out, it’s true!). I’ve been learning Energy Flow by Ryuichi Sakamoto. It’s probably the first song I’ve really properly learnt in a long time. I’m enjoying the learning process. Well, most of it, anyway!

3. Side-project: build and launch my super secret open source music web app

Nup, zero progress. That’s OK, I can pause on this for now.

4. In my career: successfully wrangle the digital architecture at the ABC

A small amount of progress here. I’ve realised that I should be focusing on defining an Engineering Strategy and not so much of Architecture, which can just become a component of said strategy. More to reveal in future blogs.

5. Big buys: acquire an electric car

No progress here, but I blame COVID-19 making things a little difficult to line up, plus there’s not a whole lot of choice going on in the 2nd hand car market.

New Goals

I’d like to add new goals, although I should really probably go with a “1 out, 1 in” kind of policy. I’d like to learn Japanese. Like, properly. I think this will require less of something else and a healthy dose of dedication to learning something that’s pretty challenging and new. So I might have to swap out a bit of video games & random web projects and then see how far I can get. I’m feeling pretty motivated until I open the book and discover that Japanese has just as many idiosyncracies as English. Oh, yay.

In some ways, I really should celebrate the Garden Diary section of this site, which was a fair chunk of work to get going but now I’m having a great time keeping updated with photos and little micro updates. It does need some work, as I’ve taken a very plant-centric view when I would also like to feature other inhabitants of the garden, such as Vulcan the Eastern Water Skink (named after his/her house the Vulcan brand hot water system) or the various frogs that keep laying freshwater caviar in our ponds.

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