sw'as

GHD Resolutions 3/3/10

And before you know it, the first GHDR review day rolls around.

My resolutions this year were:

  1. Just Do It,
  2. Take Financial Control, and
  3. Engage More

The progress...

... has been mixed at best. The detailed report follows.

Just Doing It

I initially thought I'd been doing quite well - I've certainly been very busy at work, and even completed a whimsical personal project over a weekend and a bit. But then I realised that those aren't the things I actually need to focus on just doing - I'm already pretty good at whimsical personal projects. As I've already identified, it's the mundane I have trouble with and I can identify plenty of mundane I haven't done.

I've been telling myself this week I'll get my haircut for at least the past month.

I have made a little progress on doing a GTD refresher. I've got my filing system back up to scratch (almost) and been pretty good at completing a Weekly Review every Thursday morning. I still really need to read the book again, and I will.

(I'm also counting this post as a win in the just doing it column.)

Taking Financial Control

I tried - for at least a couple of hours - then I hit a road block and didn't manage to circumvent it. I'm a web-based creature and I'll take web-based SaaS over desktop software any day of the week - especially expensive desktop software. A couple of years ago I bought Quicken (after using a free student version for quite a few years), then promptly bought my first Mac and never looked at it again.

This month I tried to find an Australian equivalent of Mint without any luck at all1. There are a few options out there but none I found seemed to have anywhere near the usability I would expect.

On the upside, Laura and I are very close to finalising the purchase of our first investment property - which at least partially ticks the take financial control box. At least we're doing something constructive with our (no longer) spare cash.

Engaging More

I've massively failed at engaging more. The one industry meetup I almost made it to ended up being blown off for an evening at my local with a mate - which was totally worthwhile, but could have been done the next night or the previous night. Never mind. There's always this month - got any suggestions?

The Rest

On the rest I've been doing pretty well. I've been exercising every morning (excepting the crazy weather of late). I read Managing Humans which was well worth the small investment of time and money. I also bought some shelves which I'm expecting to magically make my life simpler - all they've done so far is sit in my office slowly gathering office detritus. What are they waiting for?

This month

  1. Just Do It: Finish re-reading GTD. Get a haircut.
  2. Take Financial Control: Find a reasonable way to track expenditure and income (and settle for something suboptimal above doing nothing at all).
  3. Engage More: Go to the next Brisbane Webdesign Meetup Group - they're looking at HTML5 which could be kind of interesting since I'm currently building a client's site using HTML5 for the first time. Go to the next Petcha Kucha.

Also this month, I'll keep exercising every morning. I want to get back in to yoga which I've neglected for a month or so now. And to keep simplifying I'm going to throw/give something away.

Should be easy.

  1. Just to rub salt into the wound, Mint is now owned by Quicken, who have (wisely) discontinued the online version of their software in favour of Mint, but (unwisely) done so before introducing a version of Mint which Australians can actually use. [↩]