Category Archives: The Plaid Mentat

Looking Forward in 2024

With another year behind me, I’m still looking forward, and 2024 has a lot of new things in store.  This year I’m doing a couple of different things to capture different elements of what I’m trying to do.  As usual, I’m going to have my typical list of goals, and they’re going to follow the usual SMART criteria, with a focus on specific and measurable.  In the past, these have been my typical resolutions, with rather few elements of, “I’ll know it when it see it” or “at least one is enough”, but this year, you’ll see this be more clear.  Conversely, I will also have some things that don’t meet the SMART criteria – they aren’t specific nor measurable; for these, you won’t see a progress bar, or me necessarily mince words on what it even means explicitly.  I’m calling these items “themes” as they aren’t really an achievable goal, so much as ideas that I want to keep in mind and guide some of my activities.  We’ll see how that works out and maybe it’ll be something I do again more often.

With that out of the way, let’s get to what my 2024 goals are.
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Looking Forward in 2023

It’s time to start looking ahead again.  With the new year, I’ve got some new resolutions (as well as some old ones making an appearance).  Sometimes I wonder why I still do this, but, at the end of the day, I do it because it’s useful to me – not as a way to give me goals, nor to motivate me to better myself, but to track what I’ve been up to.  Looking forward to the new year, and looking back to the past year, helps me remember what it is I’ve done, what I’ve sidelined, and what I thought I might do a year ago.

So, it’s with that that, once again, I set some goals, and here they are:

Continue reading Looking Forward in 2023

Looking Forward in 2022

This year, my New Year’s posts are going to be a bit out of order, as I haven’t really been spending a lot of time writing.  In fact, I just started taking the bus again last week, so we’ll see how that goes.  Still, I did make New Year’s Resolutions this year, so I feel like I ought to go over them so I know whether I succeeded or not with them at the end of the year.

That being said, here we go: Continue reading Looking Forward in 2022

Looking Forward in 2021

Having spent a bit of time looking back, I’m ready to look forward into 2021.  This year, I’ve got a whole pile of resolutions that I’m excited about, and even something that’s not a resolution for just this year, but something I’m looking forward to for multiple years to come.  I think over the years I’ve well-tuned what I choose to be resolutions and what I choose to just be things I may or may not do over the course of the year, and this year’s list is overall pretty safe.  They are things that I’ve planned a bit ahead on, and things that are very achievable this next year without going too far out of my way.  On the one hand, I might ask, why bother if it’s not a challenge; on the other hand…  …I’m not sure I really need a challenge this year, as there will be plenty going on without anything extra.

With that said, here’s what I’ve got: Continue reading Looking Forward in 2021

2020 In Resolutions

With the last blog post of the year, it’s time to go through my resolutions and see how I did.  I always find this one interesting, not only to judge how I did, but also to look back at my intentions.  Sometimes the two match up, sometimes…  …Not as much.  As usual though, this is going to be strictly pass/fail based on what I set out to do, whether the intentions match up or not. Continue reading 2020 In Resolutions

2020 In Review

It’s not saying a lot to say that 2020 was an odd year.  There was a lot going on, and I certainly had a lot in my life that wasn’t planned for.  Still, I’m still here, still healthy and doing well.  As usual, this is the first part of my end-of-year blog posts and I’ll talk through the year through the lens of how it went, where I’ll save how I did on my resolutions for the next post. Continue reading 2020 In Review

Looking Forward into 2020

It’s time once again to sit down and think through my resolutions for the next year.  I’ve got a few more than normal this year, but most of them are a bit smaller (less combo-goals).  There’s a couple that might be a little more difficult to measure, but we’ll see how it goes – It’s going to be the kind of thing that I’ll know it when it see it.  Well, enough of the meta-talk, let’s get to it.

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Looking Back at 2019 – Resolutions

Okay – it’s time for the reckoning, taking a look at my resolutions for the year and deciding whether I kept to them or whether they fell through.  My reflections here tend to be much more structured that in my previous post as I’m going to be looking specifically at the resolutions I made for the year and giving each a pass/fail – there’s no partial credit on these.  With the rules out of the way, here we go:

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Looking Back at 2019 – The Broad Strokes

As the end of the year approaches again, I start to think about how the year went in the big picture sense.  As usual, I’ll have my resolutions post next (the last blog-day of the year), but I do still like to take the time to review everything else.  At the top level, this year was pretty good – I’m happy, healthy, and able to keep a positive outlook.  On the other hand, there has been a lot of craziness, stress, and rough spots that made the year less than ideal.  I’ll talk a bit about each below the fold.

Continue reading Looking Back at 2019 – The Broad Strokes