Goals for 2019

Last year I wrote the goals for the whole year and it helped me a lot during 2018. I also wrote the review on it at the end of the year and I was pretty much satisfied with the results.

So this year I decided to do the same thing for 2019. Let's go!

💪 General

Last year was about new things, I started a lot of new challenges in my life so I decided to spend this year more with securing the results.

🏃 Health:

🧘‍♂️ Meditation: Last year I tried to make meditation a habit, but it was not so consistent as I planned. So this year my main goal is to keep it as steady as possible. Right now I'm doing 13 minutes every day (usually in the morning) so the main goal is to do it every morning.

🏃 Physical activity: This one is hard since we travel full time and staying in one place one month in the longest case. I'll try to find at least one physical activity at each place and stick to it. For example, when we were close to the ocean on Bali I've been surfing a lot. Now we are at the center of the island and we do Yoga classes (which is awesome by the way). Next place is Malaysia and we will go to the gym there etc.

🍲 Food: I wasn't eating meat during the last year, but I have to eat seafood sometimes. Basically, the plan is the same. Stick to vegetarian food as much as I can.

🥂 Alcohol: I realized that alcohol and parties coincide with traveling pretty bad. At the end of the year, we almost completely deleted liqueurs from our routine. This year I decided to cancel beer and other related products as well. We also don't have access to wine here in Asia so basically, we don't drink at all which is great. I would do an exception to this rule only when we travel to wine countries (Spain, Italy, France etc.) to taste some good wines. And I don't have plans to back to beer or liquors.

📚 Education and brain food:

👨‍💻 Programming: I have so many cards in my Trello board related to new things and technologies I wanna learn in the Software Engineering area, but I decided there is no space in this year for that. I'm gonna stick to a few areas which I use in everyday life and for work and dig deeper in that: ReactJS (and JS in general), RubyOnRails (and Ruby itself) and very related things like Webpack, GraphQL, CSS/HTML things etc. If I can I'll also include the Computer Science to that, but I'm not sure. I still have SICP and Grokking Algorithms to read, but only if I get free time, which I'm not sure of.

🎓 University: I still in the middle of my Computer Engineering degree at Marconi University. I study online and in May 2020 I have to go to Rome to get the diploma. It takes a lot of time to study there, but still not as much as if I studied at not-online University. So keep going here and at the end of this year, I need to pass 12 more exams to pass the schedule.

🌐 Language: Last year I spent a lot of time improving my English level. This year I don't have plans to improve English on purpose, but I use this every day so I think it would get better anyway. But I started to learn new language, it's German. I started with zero knowledge so I don't have big plans to achieve a great level this year and I don't rush it. The main goal is to learn it every day (I have babbel subscription and my words app which I love very much and it helps me a lot with English) for 20-30 minutes. One day I learn grammar, the other one I study words and stick to this. With this approach I'm gonna reach A2 level at the end of the year I suppose.

📘 Books: As usual, I participate in Reading Challenge 2019 on Goodreads (20 books is the goal). My main purpose of this year to read in English all books unless I have copy in Russian.

💡 Project(-s):

🧳 Travel content: Our travel lives lead us (Me and my wife) to create content about it, so right now it's the main project I have. In particular it's YouTube channel and Instagram account. We don't have a huge success with it so far, but we just started with zero knowledge to any of that so I think it's alright. During the year I wanna improve my knowledge about filmmaking and video editing. And also about photography (theory, equipment, practice parts). I have plans to improve the equipment as well. At least to buy a new camera (perhaps a mirrorless one). We also gonna launch our site in a few months which will be kinda portfolio + blog. So We're gonna work on that as well. In addition, it would be great to improve marketing skills at least a little to know how to promote your content. We're not waiting for any money from that project, we just like to do that.

✈️ Travel: I consider this part of my life as project as well and thread it like a project. In terms of planning, success measuring etc. Right now we already have strong plans (tickets and accommodation) about the next destination. We going to Penang island in Malaysia on the 6th of February. And some approximate plans in terms of countries we want to visit until May (Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand).

✍️ Blogs: I had a plan to write more in the last year but couldn't manage it well. So this year I'm really into it. Not sure about the topics, maybe I concentrate on travel blog or current blog, but the goal is to write more.

⁉️Other projects: I have several ideas in mind to implement in the coming years. It could lead to business or just side projects depending on how it goes. In thise projects, I also could improve my knowledge of technologies which I listed above. But I don't have to rush it, so I also don't set the goals in this area, but it would be great to publish live at least one project this year.

💰 Finance

My wife and I have huge plans for the year 2020 and for that we need to start saving money now. We already started to analyze our spendings and cut the things which we really don't need (alcohol is one of them as well). Approximate goal to save $7000 by the end of the year. If we take into account that we travel full-time and it costs money I think it would be a great result. In terms of work, I have no plans to change something. Maybe we gonna start taking more work projects to to achieve that goal, we'll see.

That's it. Will do a review at the end of the year. If you have any thoughts, suggestions, questions or you just wanna chat you can reach me on Twitter