use Perl

Its that time of the year when its traditional to sit down, take a focus on things and draw up a set of things to do to improve ourselves.

This year I've decided to try to:

• Spend an hour a week on the guitar
• Do more on less
• Sort out finances
• Study french

The actual list of goals is a lot longer, but I think its important to focus on more general things. The Guitar stuff is important to me because I've had a guitar for 12 years now, and never learned how to play it. I also want to focus more on developing myself creativly, which can be a challenge when you are doing support/maintenance based programming for a great deal of the time. French kinda fits into this, but is also important for a fair few life long ambitions - I think I need to start making small steps whereever possible, in order to turn dreams into potential realities.

Sorting out finances is probably quite a common one, especially if surveys on consumer debt in the UK are to be believed. Its also important to get the foundations sorted - at the end of the day things need to be paid for, and there is no point in wanting to take three months off work if there is no way to pay for it.

That just leaves doing more on less. I'm the type of person who comes up with loads of ideas, and doesn't mind taking the first steps on a lot of them. This leads to having too many projects on the go simultanously, and hence not enough time to devote to see any of them through to fruition. So I've had to take a hard look at things, and decide what goes and what stays. In the future, if something new comes along, something else will have to take a back seat, in order not to upset the development of ongoing plans.

I'm recording these in my journal to give myself a point of reference, and allow myself to monitor progress over the course of the year. 2005 has a lot of potential, and it'll be interesting to see how it goes...