Goals for 2018 - 50% review

This post was originally published on Medium.

https://twitter.com/year_progress/status/1013754160456650752

So, halfway there, right? I really didn’t notice how this half-year passed. Actually, there is more already. I was planning to write it down for too long. At the beginning of the year, I made a statement on Twitter with my goals for 2018 year. Here it is:

https://x.com/dpashutskii/status/948059634245488645

I was thinking about posting my half-years review for a month, but then I saw the post from Joe Previte and that inspired me to do it. Let’s see.

Get a stable income from a freelance — Success level 80%.

I started working on a Freelance platform https://upwork.com in January this year. The main reason for that was the independence from working hours and days. I can work wherever I want and with whom I want.

Surely, it has a lot of cons as well. You have to find clients by yourself and even with the platform help it still hard to do. Amount of freelancers is times bigger that amount of customers. First two months where really hard when you are trying to improve your portfolio and customer base. Eventually I found a few great customers and work with them on a long-term basis. These relationships are pretty stable, but still I can improve a lot.

First of all, I can start by increasing my hourly rate, it’ll give me even more stability. Besides I really want to find a long-term client with React, because I like this lib a lot, so it would be great to work with it on a daily basis.

In case someone is interested my profile is here.

Go on a long journey around the world (beginning approximately in the fall) — Success level 50%.

This one I am very excited about. This event already has a determined date (3.09.2018). I booked all the flights and accommodations. So it’s just a matter of time now.

My first path will be: Saint-Petersburg ✈️ Hua-Hin (7d.) ✈️ Bangkok (7d.) ✈️ Chiang Mai (1.5m) ✈️ Kuala Lumpur (3d.) ✈️ Bali (3+m.).

I only booked a few weeks on Bali so I’ll look for a house when I am on the island. I plan to spend the whole winter there, travel around Asia and go to Europe for three months when Spring comes. In addition, I travel this summer. I visited Kaliningrad /Budapest 🇭🇺/Belgrade 🇷🇸/Novi-Sad 🇷🇸 and I am going to visit Napoli 🇮🇹🍕/Milan 🇮🇹/Budapest 🇭🇺 again (One of the best cities I’ve ever been)/Debrecen 🇭🇺 in August.

Don’t eat a meat/fish in this year — Success level 99,9%.

This one goes unexpectedly easily and smoothly. Before I decided not to eat meat I read about it on the Internet and some people said that you could be experiencing discomfort or you want meat all the time. I can say it is not true for me.

I just stopped eating meat 1 Jan 2018 and It went so naturally. Frankly speaking this decision has already made a good effect on my health. I feel better every day. It’s a bit harder to look for places to eat, especially in countries where vegetarianism is not so popular. But it’s not too hard in general.

So why 99.9%? Some guy from KFC gave me Chicken Twister instead of Veggie 😆🥦. I don’t blame him, the work at fast food looks really exhausting, but anyway I was a bit upset 🙃

I’m not gonna eat meat/fish in the future as well.

Improve my English to Upper-Intermediate level — Success 40%

It’s the toughest one. I almost switched all my life (except every day talking) to English, but it still hard. I have a lot of issues with the grammar, but I feel some improvements anyway. I hope progress will be going faster when I am going to live as an expat in non-Russian speaking countries.

I also have a really great teacher on the English learning platform who helps me a lot with my issues. I have a weekly meeting with him and homework.

Finish #100DaysOfCode and coding courses — Success 100%

I finished all courses that I planned at the begging of the year and finished my commitment to #100DaysOfCode.

https://x.com/dpashutskii/status/981242389267468289

I still learn a lot though. I start new courses, read programming books and try to involve myself in the communities which usually really helpful. I really like two of them — https://dev.to and https://forum.freecodecamp.org. And twitter of course.

Btw, dev.to started a really great mentorship program a few days ago which I joined as a Frontend mentor and as a Ruby/RoR mentee. Yes, you can be both, cool, right?

Also related to this I wanna force myself to spend a bit more time to be in the community. For me, the best way to learn new things is talking to people, when you help them and they help you.

In addition, I study in the Online University. Honestly, I already have a few debts but I continue to learn new interesting stuff. I discovered https://www.khanacademy.org/ which is really helpful for me.

Continue running and start working out in a gym — Success 50%

I really like running. And really don’t like gyms 😔 These feelings lead me to result in this goal.

I went to a gym for a month three days a week and then I stopped. It takes a lot of time because the gym is too far from my home. But when I stopped I started running more which is really satisfy me.

Current year stats from Runkeeper:

I’m gonna continue to running and it’ll be great to beat my personal 10km record this summer. I don’t plan to participate in any competition, just with myself.

Continue meditating on a daily basis — Success 36%

I truly like to meditate, but it’s really hard for me to make something a daily habit.

I meditated this year about 72 times (due 201 days) which is approximate ~720 minutes.

Sadly, but in Health you can’t check overall amount of minutes:

I tried several apps for meditation (Calm, Headspace, 10% Happier). Eventually, I chose Insight Timer (thanks Joe for the suggestion and great advices) and it’s pretty great for me. It’s like open source in Meditation. Other apps more like products by subscription, but this one has a lot of community content, I love this way more.

Nothing changing here, I’ll trying to make it daily habit.

The additional challenge which I participate in every year is Goodreads reading challenge — Success 100%

Here everything goes according to the plan. I read 10/20 books so far and pretty close to finishing another one. My progress on Goodreads.

PS Saga is amazing by the way

Yeah, I know, the three of them are just comic books, but it counts! 😁 Besides, two of them are pretty big comic books.

That’s it for now, I’ll come back at the end of the year to sum up the whole thing and made new goals.

Really appreciate that you’ve read this.