🏆 goals for 2024
After coming off a pretty relaxed, but successful 2023, I want to push my boundaries a bit this year and get out of my comfort zone. I want to do this all while staying the course of where I'm headed.
👩❤️💋👨 marriage
Last year was great for my wife and I, we are feeling more open and connected with each other than ever before. This year we want to shake things up a bit and spend our date nights doing things we don't normally do.
Instead of just going out dancing, this year we want to do things like go bowling, shoot hoops, throw axes, or play some games. Doing out of the box things together should create some fun new memories for us, and encourage us to keep things interesting and adapt to new situations together.
🏃🏼♂️ fitness
Over the holidays I ate way too much, didn't exercise as much as I wanted, and fell back into the pattern of pouring a whiskey every night. So going into 2024 I want to refocus on health.
My first goal is to only drink with others, not when I'm just sitting alone on the computer at night. Only drinking socially should reduce my alcohol consumption, especially during the weekdays, which will keep me more productive.
I also want to lean into running this year. My big goal is to complete my first ever half marathon, in under two hours. I'm targeting the Dallas Skyline Half Marathon on April 20th. It'll be cool to run through a different city with some awesome views.
👔 career progression
Something has to change for me this year at Atlassian. I still don't have a senior engineer title, even though I'm acting as one every day. So my goal this year is to get promoted or find a new job. If I don't get promoted, I'd like my next job to be at a smaller company.
I'd also like to speak at a conference or meetup. Unfortunately my proposal was not accepted for THAT Conference this year, but it really motivated me to write up a talk and find a place to give it. All of the meetups I've been attending have been asking for speakers, so I should have a good chance there.
And speaking of speaking, now that I'm an official host of Compressed.fm, I want to become more involved with the podcast. My goal is to contribute to the website, book more guests, and tweet more about the show.
💵 finances
I'm fortunate to have enough income where I need to think about where to intelligently invest my earnings. One goal this year is to speak with some kind of "money guy" and figure out a good strategy for me.
Ultimately I'd like this strategy to include where I save my money, like a 401k, Roth IRA, savings account, or CDs, and what I should do with my remaining stock from Adobe.
💰 side income
Although I think my side income from last year will be hard to beat, I'd like to try. That means my new goal is anything over $5,172.15. The income streams remain the same.
- consulting
- t-shirt sales
- saas application (tbd)
- youtube monetization
- github sponsors
- twitch streaming
- affiliate links
I'm already working with Cloudinary on some video content, so hopefully that amounts to more additional work throughout the year. As with last year, my biggest hurdles will be building a real SaaS application and getting monetized on YouTube.
✍🏼 writing
This year I want to continue to invest in my own content. That primarily means writing blog posts for my website. Owning my own content is very important to me, as social media platforms come and go. Additionally, putting out a few videos on YouTube would be a great bonus.
I've also been journaling a bit lately with Apple's new Journal app. I want to keep up this habit as it's helped me be more aware of my thoughts and feelings.
📚 books
After reading literally nothing last year, I want to set a very small goal of three books for this year. Here they are in order of my interest.
🎮 games
I went hard on the Nintendo Switch last year, it was so much fun gaming on that thing! Here's a few more games I want to explore this year. No hard requirements to finish them, but this is how I want to relax.
And that's it for this year's goals! The idea is that I keep making small steps forward to grow my side income, step out of the box with my wife and with my fitness, and keep enjoying myself along the way. Let me know what your 2024 goals are on Twitter!