Year of Focus

During a recent recording of OHAC, we talked about yearly themes. In short, yearly themes are meant to be broader versions of resolutions. They are not necessarily defined by explicit goals, but rather a frame of mind, or a general approach to the upcoming year. We talk about it in that episode, and there are links to episodes of the podcast Cortex with more information about the idea of yearly themes.

My theme is the *Year of Focus*. Now that I have more freetime on my hands, I want to use it to help improve my attention span and make significant progress on projects I put off while in college. The first step in this, before it was even official, was the reading binge I’ve written about a few times now.

Once I got myself back into reading consistently, while maintaining these weekly blog posts in addition to the podcast projects I’m a part of, I realized I had been making excellent strides toward the ideal sense of focus I’d aspired to throughout college. I dabbled with a few projects this past fall — I learned to use Google Apps Script to automate a few things with podcast shownotes, I learned the very basics of physics simulations with Blender, and briefly worked through a book about C — but wanted to commit to a few things that would stick.

One piece of research that has stuck with me is how it takes 7 years to become an expert in some area. There’s a good SMBC comic about this idea. While I don’t feel the need to become an expert, if I branch out with my current knowledge base I believe committing a year or so to various long-term projects will help me make large strides, and provide a greater sense of accomplishment.

For this upcoming year, I have a few goals in mind. Of course I still want to keep reading. I’ve made it through 3 books a month for the past few months, and would like to keep up that pace. In addition, I want to maintain a balance of 2 or 3 fiction books for every non-fiction book. This isn’t a strict limit, but I enjoy literary fiction and want to read a bit more of it right now.

The second goal, which is newer and will require more focused effort, is learning Python to a much more proficient level. It is my language of choice (mostly by default), and I want to increase my understanding of computer science through Python. There are a couple of excellent books in the Learn Code the Hard Way series which I highly recommend. I’m starting most of the way through the first book to catch myself back up on using Python to do OOP, which I have not done in about 4 years. Then, I’ll move onto the second book which has the material consistent with a second year course on algorithms and more advanced computer science topics.

The motivation for this project comes from the ultimate goal of being able to contribute to the world of Linux in some small way. Whether that is writing some open-source applications in Python, or transitioning into learning C to help with low-level development, I know I have the ability to learn computer science and want to take advantage of the time I have to do so.

A third goal has to do with leisure. While this is the year of focus, I’m an adult now, and have no desire to burn myself out trying to be overly productive. I can enjoy going to movies (and subsequently reviewing them), or taking advantage of my Nintendo Switch to play some Mario Kart while listening to a podcast. I have these leisure activities available, but I want to focus on enjoying them. When I want to sit down and watch a bit of Netflix, I want to be attentive to the content and make it something I get value from. This may seem a bit esoteric, but it bothers me when I decide to watch YouTube and end up browsing reddit on my phone at the same time. It’s a smaller goal, but its broad success will be helpful.

A final goal is to improve the quality of my writing output. I don’t want this blog to be a weekly slog, or a place for rejected writing and projects that did not branch into something larger. I have the time to write a quality post each week (which doesn’t necessarily mean a long post), and simply want to set a higher standard for myself. Writing frequently is a good way to improve writing skills, but once the schedule is set, improvement must be made by intentional thought and effort. I’m now many months into writing a weekly post without fail, so I can take the next step to put more care into what I post here.

One thing I greatly admire about xkcd is Randall’s ability to put out three comics a week, and in the background work on a massive project that just comes out like any other comic. I want to do the same. Some posts will be more filler than others, but they can still be quality; in the meantime, I can put in good effort for much larger projects which may find their way onto this blog. I have one in the works which I expect to be done to a satisfactory level within the next month.

I encourage anybody reading this to think about some yearly theme or guiding thought for the next year, or season, or month. It doesn’t need to be yearly precisely, nor must it begin on New Year’s. By definition, it is open-ended and should remain as such. As you may notice, the goals I describe above are not very well-defined except in a few cases to provide some guidance. They are a way to approach the time I use, with a few opportunities to gauge how I’m doing. Yet when the year is over, the theme is not. It is something I hope to carry forward with me, to change who I am a bit, and then when something else needs to change or improve I can think critically about how that looks. It’s a bit of a moving target, but I think that’s okay.

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