2018-01-01 Commitments

Formalizing My Commitments

During the last Homebrew Website Club I started informally documenting my 2018-01-01 Commitments, but they were just tagged onto the end of other content. I now want to actually dedicate a post to them!

For those unfamiliar, these are a list of website goals and tasks that you aim to accomplish before the new year. Last year, I did a fairly good job at achieving most of my goals. Since I’m now working toward being more proactive at posting and writing, I figured a good way to hold myself accountable is by listning my objectives. So, here we are!

2018-01-01 Commitments

Last year I intentionally made my commitments a combination of technical and non-technical goals. This ended up being a great approach for me because I could shift my focus whenever I hit a slump. For me, being able to alternate between two different types of task is something that helps me push further.

Technical Goals:

These goals are directly related to technical aspects of my site. Here they are:

• Implement local environment + Git workflow for WordPress development
• Make child theme of SemPress theme and add more style + personalization
• Create template for project documentation pages
• Decide on (and refine) taxonomies and information architecture for site

Non-technical Goals:

• Add project pages for past and current projects:
  • Facepaint v1.0
  • beatHacker v1.0
  • Past and (possibly) present music projects
• Write 3 posts in December
• Curate and archive previous content from past year

On Scope and Goal Setting

One of my biggest places for improvement is that I tend to create lofty goals that are out of scope for a given time frame. I don’t have this issue at work, but whenever it comes to personal projects and tasks I tend to aim too high. The goals in my commitment this year are within reach and specific. I know that some of these are multi-faceted and are potentially rabbit holes (especially switching up my development environment / workflow) but are high priority for me. I’m going to use our meetings throughout December to check in on my progress and, if necessary, modify and refine. Cheers!