2018: New Year, New Goals

Welcome back guys, as another year starts its time for me to write my Year Goals post. This is the second year I am writing a post about my goals for the year. This year I will be changing how I am setting goals, instead of setting full yearly goals I will be setting goals based on a 12 week year. I got the idea from the book The 12 Week Year, the idea is that you split a regular year into four 12 week years. The idea of setting shorter years is that “we overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year”, thereby having a year as only 12 weeks you are forced to concentrate on 3-4 main goals because every week is considered a month. Thus, you are forced to make progress on your goals every day. Anyway, I have 4 main Development/Programming Goals for the 1st 12 weeks of the year:

Goal #1: **Release v2 of Zerowastestores ** - Completed see this post

Reason: Last year, I released an environmental website https://zerowasteshops.com/. It was a great experience getting the site up and running and having people use it. I want to take the feedback I got and implement it into a more polished and professional version 2 of the site. I already started this towards the end of last year so it will a case of making final adjustments and releasing it.

Goal #2: Implement and Release v1 of Portfolio Website

Reason: I have had an idea of a place to show off my work/advertise my web development services for a while now. I started implementing this a few months ago when I was starting to learn React but I never finished it. Since I want to start doing Web Development Freelancing it’s a good idea that I have a place to show off my work.

Goal #3: Get 1st Freelance Client

Reason: This goes along with Goal #2, I am looking to do extra development work. I love making new things and want to get more experience with different types of projects and getting my 1st freelance client will help me with that.

Goal #4: **Take and complete 2 online courses **

Reason: Continous learning is important and taking online courses are readily available via Udemy, YouTube, CodeAcademy, FreeCodeCamp etc. I want to take a course on CSS Fundamentals/CSS for 2018 as I think CSS is one of my weakest points as a Developer. CSS is so powerful in the hands of a person that uses it. They are able to create unique, beautiful experiences using CSS and I write too much Javascript to do things that are easily done in CSS. The other course I want to take is on Advanced React, I have developed a few projects using React and it’s time to dive into more advanced/lesser known features of the framework such as Styled Components, Redux etc.

Well, they are my 4 Goals for the 1st 12 weeks of this year. This ‘year’ will end on [26/03/2018]. I will write a summary post about how I got on later on and I will outline what I learned and my goals for the next 12 week year. I hope you guys enjoyed this post, I would love to hear about your goals and what you want to achieve in 2018.

Until next time,

Jason