New Year brings new beginnings, new starts, new ideas and for some New Year’s resolutions. I’ve been reading, with a lot of interest, zenhabits.net recently and the post How to Have the Best Year of Your Life (without Setting a Single Goal) particularly caught my eye. do we set ourselves too many goals and resolutions, and are they ultimately doomed to fail?
With that in mind, here’s my plan for this year, sorry, I mean here are some practices 🙂 I intend to engage in through the year which I hope will help me and others.
- Blog little and blog often: Easy to say of course but more difficult to do. But often you spend too much time thinking about what to say and the moment is wasted. So I intend to start practicing regular blogging, but posts will be shorter. Not as short as my posts on Twitter but a little shorter than last years more lengthy ones.
- Get back to getting my hands dirty: It’s time to start doing some testing again and not just managing and talking about it. This really is a practice not a goal, becoming part of my DNA again. As a start I’ve signed up for James Bach’s excellent Rapid Software Testing class which The Ministry of Testing are bringing to the UK this year. Can’t wait 🙂
- Widen my circle of contacts: Obvious really, I’d like to learn more from others outside of my regular circle of contacts. Do you want to talk about something or help me out?
- Practice generosity: Directly from zenhabits and I’m not ashamed to say. It’ll all be a bit better if we help each other out. What can I help you with? (I know a fair bit about software testing and test management, and too much about cycling :).
What will you do this year?
Mine is pretty much the same,
Blog – I need to get into the habit of blogging, so far so good and hopefully I will write for myself and not worry about producing grand pieces of insightful posts about Software Testing. Just get my thoughts down would be a good start.
Network – I really want to widen my network circle when it comes to ST, there are so many knowledgeable people and with social media, it would be a shame to waste that opportunity.
Knowledge – I generally want to improve my practical skills and test on a variety of platforms, I also want to get more involved in learning about different aspects, so any opportunity I have to do this, I will take up.
I have some things planned for the upcoming year, I just have to make sure that I pace myself and not burn out.
Of course, in all of this I want to ensure that my family get as much of me as they can while still achieving these goals.
I totally agree. For me, realising that I won't always produce the grand insightful pieces on software testing, but have got something to offer with smaller posts was important.