2016 has arrived, and all resolutions have already been shattered into a thousand disappointing pieces. The excuses have already arrived and I swear, it's not my fault. I'm moving into a new apartment and I'm buying furniture, and so I need to eat poorly and such, to save time. Tomorrow though. All of the grand ideas that I had in 2015 for 2016 are still tucked away on a napkin somewhere. So I'm starting the year off wrong. But this time around it only took me 3 days to realize it, as oppose to last year, in which the realization never made an appearance. And so, "today", whichever day this is, is the day that those big plans start to take shape. And boy do I have plans for 2016.
Last year was definitely a good year for me. I got 2 jobs, each one paying more than the previous ones. I made several new websites which I was very proud to release, and I learned many many things. And because of that, and because of what I learned, I need to make 2016 count even more. I need to learn even more and build even higher and make it difficult for 2017 to top it. So my 2016 resolutions have changed a bit from previous years. They're no longer things that may or may not happen within 365 days, but instead things that should be happening 365 days out of the year.
Plans for 2016
I personally think that resolutions are very cheesy, and it's just a list of things that you know you should be doing already, but have gotten too lazy to do. But, it's also a good way to make a to do list for yourself, and if it helps you complete one more thing in life then why not. So for 2016, I've made several resolutions for myself that I hope I can adopt into my daily life.
Blog More
I started this blog sometime in 2014, and it's been a fun and somewhat arduous experience. I get to talk about technology and I get to help people learn how to do something new, sometimes. But it's difficult. Writing coherent sentences spanning 2000 words a few times per week is hard. And writing it so that people are generally interested in them is even harder. Having said that, I don't get a chance to do it enough. With a full time job, and with several projects on my timeline throughout the year, blogging becomes a task that I normally need to make time for. But, it has become much easier since when I first began, so this year I'll hopefully be taking it up a notch with several posts per week that I hope are entertaining, educational and engaging in some way.
Code something useful
I code alot. Like alot alot. Daily and into the late hours, and then more at work, although not as passionately. And I usually at any one time have a dozen or so ideas circling around my head about things to code. Usually though, those ideas revolve around projects that are fun to build but that don't really help anyone in any real meaningful way. And while I don't technically need to do this, I feel like I'm like in that stage of my life where if I can do something to help, then I should.
Healthy and wealthy
Making money is always a plus, but it's useless if you can't enjoy it. With two different jobs last year, I definitely took my stress levels to new heights and I updated my diet from the green and organic to the quick and artificial, and as such I've gained weight and overall just feel unhealthier. It's a tough balance to achieve, mainly due to time restraints, but I'ts not something that is impossible. Everybody has 30 minutes a day to spend walking/running and everyone has 15 minutes a day to make a healthy meal. And being a subset of everybody, this apparently applies to me too.
Learn more
This should be everyone's goal always. To learn more about different things, different cultures, different people and just different ideas. It's a big world and galaxy out there and for the most part, we'll never see anything outside of our tiny little circles that we live in daily. So this year I'm aiming to learn a new language, a new programming language, a new concept and to find ways to incorporate those into my daily life, so that they don't just become things that I kind of learned that one time.
Enjoy Life
This one is tough for me normally. Like most people, I wake up, go to work, come home from work, eat and then Netflix and sleep. The weekends are used for chores and in the small nooks and crannies in between, I get to do what I enjoy and code new ideas. After adding up that "enjoy" time, I'm looking at 2 days of enjoying life per year. And a part of living a fulfilling life definitely involves enjoying it to some extent. And I think that goes without saying. So this year, I'm going to step out of my comfort zone, and spend a few hours per week away from my computer screen and attempting to do something fun.
These are indeed things that I should be doing everyday, but then life happens and slowly they turn into chores that I'm too busy to attend to. That one unhealthy meal turns into a weeks worth of the same and running that extra mile turns into something that I can do next week. Hopefully knowing that fact though will change the way that I view 2016, and if you read this far, then hopefully you will too.
Walter Guevara is a software engineer, startup founder and currently teaches programming for a coding bootcamp. He is currently building things that don't yet exist.
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