Progress Report: Catching Up On My 2014 Goals

After writing my last post, I started to think back on the goals I had set up at the beginning of the year for myself. As with most people, my progress started out with a bang but has since been a bit underwhelming. Hopefully revisiting them a little over halfway through the year will help me push forward on the ones I want to prioritize.

52 Blog Posts

I started the year off quite strong on this one (7 posts in January!), but after switching jobs I started to blog quite a bit less frequently. Part of it can be attributed to laziness (most of it anyway), but I’ve also found myself contributing a lot of my findings working with Salesforce Communities to the internal knowledge banks that we have at work. Going forward I’m hoping to find more general Salesforce nuggets to share, but I suspect I’ll start to vary the content a bit more around different technologies as opposed to pure Salesforce tips.

In any case, 22 blog posts after 7 months is still pretty solid, as it puts me on target for 38 posts this year. While the variety of posts has started to veer off a bit into non-technology topics, I’m happy with using the blog as a medium for posting things I think are interesting regardless of content.

Be more active on StackExchange

Similarly, I’ve spent quite a bit less time on the Salesforce StackExchange site the last 4 months. I was extremely active in January and the first half of February, but simply haven’t been visiting the site much lately. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to turn this one around as much, as I spent a decent amount of time at the beginning of the year trying to close out older questions that no one had answered to improve the % answered metric on the site. There typically aren’t a ton of new questions every day, and people tend to jump on the answers pretty quick at this point.

Publish an iOS app

This is one of the goals I’m starting to focus a bit more on now. The announcement of Swift as the programming language of the future for iOS excited me because I felt like the syntax was much easier to understand for people new to the iOS platform, but it was measured against the idea that publishing an app for iOS using Swift would require waiting until the fall when iOS 8 was released. This dampened my enthusiasm a bit back in early June, but I’m now considering trying to build an Objective-C version of one of the many small, non-monetized, productivity apps that I’ve had on my mind for a while as a way to overcome those excuses (plus I still need to get familiar with the SDK anyway). I keep telling myself a lot of the ideas I have that aren’t dependent on an external system can be built in a weekend (albeit without looking good), so at this point I just need to commit some time to it.

Woodworking

This is the other goal that I’m trying to focus on a bit more. Back in June I finished my first relief carving, and now I’m working to set up a more stable woodworking environment as I get ready to work on a bigger project. I’m feeling pretty good about completing this goal by the end of the year.

Spanish

There has unfortunately been no progress on this one. I actually forget that it existed as a goal…whoops.

Exercise

This has been up and done. I started strong in January, then got lazy (recurring theme) as the snow fell and stuck around. In the spring I started up again using Vibram Fivefingers until hurting my foot and taking some time off. The last couple weeks I’ve started to try and run and lift a little more frequently, so things are looking up.