2022 goals

January 3rd, 2022

Man, it’s 2022 already. Another year has passed, and I still suck at meeting my goals. 🤣 I want to walk through a quick review and talk about my new goals for this year.

Feel free to check out my 2021 goals here.

2021 Goal Review

It’s crucial to do a review of your previous goals. You may have assumptions about how well you did or did not do. Once you do a review, you can be confident of how you did and make improvements.

• Read at least one book per month.
  • I didn’t accomplish this goal, but I read about three or four books this year.
• Write one blog post per week.
  • I didn’t achieve this goal either. I wrote a single blog post this year after a freelance project. A total of 86 unique users visited my site this year.
• Take more vacation time.
  • I did not do a good job defining this goal. At a minimum, I should have explicitly explained what “more” means here. Even though I did a poor job establishing the objective, I met this goal. I did a better job at taking time off. I want to try to keep this goal in 2022, but in a vivid way.
• Travel more
  • COVID continued to make this challenging in 2021. I had expected to do more traveling outdoors. I spent a significant amount of time outdoors, just not traveling.
• Upload one YouTube video per quarter.
  • I uploaded 0 YouTube videos in 2022.

Takeaways

I need to do better with a few goals for 2022. One thing is being more explicit with my goals. The examples of “travel more” and “take more vacation time” come to mind. Those are agreeable goals, but they’re hard to quantify at the end of the year. Another thing is that I’d like to follow a pattern for setting goals, in particular, the framework described by Sahil Bloom on Twitter. His tweet describes a precise structure for how to think about goal setting. I highly recommend it.

2022 Goals

Alright, on to the substance of this blog post. Let’s talk about the goals I’m setting this year. I’m tracking the same goal categories that Sahil mentioned in his thread: Personal, Professional, and Health.

Personal

• BHAG
  • My Big Hairy Audacious Goal is to gain a significant Twitter and LinkedIn following, so I can help others learn to code and grow as software engineers. I aim to reach 1,000 connections on LinkedIn and 2,000 followers on Twitter.
• Connected medium-term goal
  • My connected medium-term goal is to have 50 followers on Twitter and 350 connections on LinkedIn by February 15th.
    • I currently have 335 connections on LinkedIn and 39 followers on Twitter. To accomplish my medium-term goal, I’ll need to gain one follower every four days and a new connection every three days on LinkedIn.
    • Once February 15th comes, I’ll create a new medium-term goal with a new timeline, whether I’ve accomplished it or not.
• Process Goals
  1. Write a Twitter post creating value each day, including following others and commenting on related posts.
  2. Write a meaningful LinkedIn post once per week, connect with others and comment on related posts daily.
  3. Write three blog posts per week.

Professional

• BHAG

  • My Big Hairy Audacious Goal is to grow as an engineer in Domain-Driven Development and Clean Code. By the end of the year, I want to give a conference talk on a related subject.

• Connected medium-term goal

  • My connected medium-term goal is to write a talk on Domain-Driven Design by March 31st, 2022.

• Process Goals

  1. Study the Domain-Driven Design book by Eric Evans
  2. Study the Implementing Domain-Driven Design by Vaughn Vernon book.
  3. Write related blog posts and LinkedIn posts about the subject to get feedback from experts.

Health

• BHAG
  • My Big Hairy Audacious Goal is to weigh 200 lbs by the end of 2022. Currently, that’s around 48 lbs to drop.
• Connected medium-term goal
  • My connected medium-term goal is to weigh 244 lbs by February 1st, a loss of four pounds.
    • I’ve read that one to two pounds per week is safe, so I’m targeting that for my goals.
• Process Goals
  1. 16/8 Intermittent fasting at least 5 days per week
     • I’ll track this in the Zero app.
  2. Cardio 5 days per week
  3. Strength training 3 days per week

Goal Wrapping up

Happy New Year! I hope you have a great year. To our goals! 🍻