January follow up and goals for February

So how did I go for the first month of the year?

Goals for January, 2016

  1. Have lunch or coffee with at least one London based tech entrepreneur.
  2. Have a date night with Renee.
  3. Complete at least 15 headspace guided meditation sessions.
  4. Create my new blog at adrianfletcher.org.
  5. Complete study of four measured skills for the 70-410 MCSA Exam.
  6. Request a correct legal contract for the contracting Project Management work I’m doing.
  7. Complete at least 6 HIIT sessions.
  8. Release a public MVP of Procedure.ly.
  9. Write one blog post about the MCSA study process.

Not great ;)

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first, the study for the first 70-410 Microsoft exam took up far more time than I expected (see the 70-410 study notes blog post). Don’t take the MS certifications for granted, they really do require a fair bit of dedicated time for study. February will require a more dedicated study schedule.

Morning meditations have gone better than in the past, but I only managed around 4 sessions this month, nowhere near the goal of 15. For this to work, I need to really dedicate 15 minutes each morning to the practice, even if it means getting up earlier than usual. Starting tomorrow, the alarm will be set for 5:40am sharp. This will require hitting the sack at 9pm at the latest to allow my mind to rest before sleeping around 10pm. Regarless, I’ve been able to more successfully recognise days where I’m anxious and take a step back and acknowledge the anxiety without it taking too much of a hold on me - something I consider a huge success. I want to improve that again this month. I’ve found the anxiety manifests itself as a mild to heavy (depending on the stress) tightness around my stomache - almost indistinguishable from the feeling you might get when coming down with an illness.

It’s finding a way to tell the difference that lets me know when to take a step back or when to try and push through.

Requesting a correct legal contract with my current employer has been set aside until I get back from a trip back to Australian in March - not fair to ask when I’ll be leaving for a 3 week break.

My biggest dissapointment? I didn’t spend even 5 minutes on Procedure.ly. Never underestimate the amount of time required to put out even a basic web app. In this case, I’ve falled pray to putting too much effort in to the site before putting it in front of customers. I still want to release what I’ve built of the site, so the goal for the february will be to release a radically simplified MVP of the site for use by select customers.

Heck, if I can’t get it released, I may just open source the code (or some of the useful libraries).

Fitness has been fantastic. I’ve played at least 6 squash matches at the new club (brondesbury squash and fitness) and at least 4 HIIT sessions at the local gym. So I aim to continue that this month while also improving my diet (not going to get than six pack without cutting out the dodgy food!).

Goals for February 2016

  • Study Schedule for February for MS 70-410.
  • Complete practice exams with 100% results twice before taking exam.
  • Open source (Github?) the Golang Redis HTML server built for Procedure.ly.
  • Meditate 15 times.
  • Another Date with Renee.
  • Have lunch or coffee with a London based tech entrepreneur.
  • At least 12 HIIT session as my brothers wedding gets closer.
  • Goal weight: 86 (Currently 89kg).