They say you're not supposed to make this list too long, but I'd rather be ambitious, try a bunch, and then *hopefully* be able to say I accomplished at least a handful of them by the end.
So, here goes:
- I will see my parents in person at least once a week. This shouldn't be hard to do since they're in the neighborhood, but sometimes its easy to take that for granted.
- I will try to organize my life around several small groups of friends. Evites with 150 people on them do not constitute friendship and, too many times, I've tried to "merge the worlds" by inviting everybody to everything for the sake of my own convenience. I want to pick out like three or four groups that I really want to see more regularly and try and plan something with a natural set of people that makes sense.
- I will begin to code. Its kind of frustrating to have all these ideas never be able to even begin attempt any of them, so I just bought myself "MySQL+PHP for Dummies."
- I will go to church twice a month. This is as much for my interest in participating in my local community as it is anything else. Every Sunday not only isn't practical for me, its not something I feel like I want. Its just that I'd like to have a stronger bond with my community and, to some extent, I do miss the whole idea of a spiritual community that I had when I was at Fordham.
- I will learn about my local government. I'm going to look up my Community Board, go to some meetings, maybe even blog about local Bay Ridge issues.
- I will be more empathetic. Sometimes, I can be a bit of an emotional bull in a china shop, and so I think one thing I can work on this year is to try and think about others first in terms of my reaction and interaction with them.
- I will go to bed earlier and wake up earlier. New bedtime: 12:30AM. Wakeup time: 7AM.
- I will make more of an explicit effort to learn from those more experienced than me. I've been very lucky to work with some great people, and I've always preached a more active approach to one's network, but there are definitely a few people whose brains and experience I need to pick over a little more.
- I will keep my inbox empty and better organize my contacts. Last week, I spent two full days taking my inbox down from 3000 down to about 300. Most of the 300 are organized by action items, like "deals" which get logged, reviewed and deleted (i.e. they go away) or "save" which means the info in that e-mail is supposed to go somewhere better than my inbox.
- I will cook more and broaden my recipe base. I need to pick out like 30 recipes or so to put into a little bit of a rotation and have the ingredients always on hand. I think I got a little lazy in the past year in terms of going out to eat, and spending more than I wanted to for food that isn't as good as I can make it.