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| New Years Goals 🎓🌴📖⌨️ | post | Following on from my NYE post, some goals for 2022 |
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2022-01-03T09:47:11+00:00 | /2022/01/03/new-years-goals-predictions |
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On Friday I wrote this post about my 2021. Despite COVID, a pretty good year for me personally (getting married and all). Here I'll outline some of my goals and expectations for 2022.
Here are my top 5 goals for 2022 in order of highest to lowest personal importance.
1. 🎓 Finish my PhD
This is my biggest aim/goal for 2022. I've been working on my PhD in Natural Language Processing (NLP) since 2015. It's about applying machine learning and NLP to scientific papers and news articles to better understand the real world impact that good science has on society, the economy and policy (i.e. law). I coined the phrase comprehensive scientific impact to cover these things back in 2017.
I've been saying "one more year... one more year" for about the last 5 years but this year my UK Government research grant runs out which means I really do need to wrap up and submit this year. My supervisors and I agreed that I've got one good scientific paper left in me before I write up my thesis proper but I've already started planning my main thesis and set out a template in Overleaf ready to go.
2. 🌴 Take a Holiday
This is something that has been pretty difficult over the last couple of years with COVID. Plenty of people we know have taken international holidays in the last couple of years but the hassle of PCR tests and masks on long flights just doesn't feel worthwhile to me or my wife right now. UK in-country holiday prices have also been driven up by people having similar thoughts to us.
Last year, after we got married, we took a week off as a mini-moon and we did some day trips to nearby attractions but this year I'm determined to actually get away somewhere for a few days - even if its just for a couple of nights in a B&B. I find that putting some physical distance between myself and work is very restful - some of my most restful breaks have been cruises where I've had no internet access for days at a time.
3. ⌨️ Blog more frequently
As you can imagine my day job and my PhD do keep me pretty busy but I do find writing to be a big stress reliever and I like to pass on knowledge. Furthermore it's well documented that learning by teaching others is extremely effective. In other words, in order for me to write about something intelligibly, I need to understand it well and the act of writing about it can improve my knowledge of the subject matter too.
I find I thrive under pressure and so this year I want to complete KevQ's #100DaysToOffload challenge. The aim is to write 100 blog posts in a year - or looking at it another way, ~2 posts a week. I think that's a pretty lofty, possibly unreasonable goal for someone as busy as I am but even if I got to half or a quarter of that number it'd be an improvement on previous years.
Fear not dear readers, I will try to keep my content interesting rather than talking in-depth about what I ate for lunch. I encounter a lot of tricky tech problems and I'm also a grumpy old man in the body of a 30-something so I should hopefully have no problem finding plenty of things to write about and rant about.
4. 📚 Read 12 Books
This year I want to consciously keep track of which books I've read. Last year I did pretty well although a lot of my reading time was occupied by Steven Erikson's excellent epic high fantasy Malazan Book of the Fallen series featuring 10 absolute tomes of which I've read about 6 and 1/2 over 3 years. I tend to intersperse them with smaller, more-manageable books and non-fic.
At some point I want to implement indieweb read posts here on brainsteam but for now I am tracking my reading in my dead-tree journal and over at Bookwyrm which is an open-source, federated Goodreads alternative not owned by Jeff Bezos et al. Very cool site.
5. 📖 Keep better analog journal entries
Like many techies, I'm a big advocate for keeping a private dead-tree notebook as well as a blog. I use bullet journal-esque journalling style In this book and write quick notes about what I've been doing, call notes, todos I don't have time to input into an app as well as thoughts, feelings - the more personal stuff I'd maybe be more hesitant about sharing online. I'll probably write a bit more about this as part of my 100 days challenge above.
Last year I did a reasonable job but when it came to my annual review I noticed a few gaps so I'd like to try and keep better notes on:
- How I felt when I did certain things (ate something, interacted with someone, solved a problem etc)
- What I watched/read/played - although I'll be keeping digital copies of some stuff too (See above)
- Achievements - weekly or monthly summaries of what I've done during that time frame.