In which I set my goals for the year, a little late
The Year of Me
Fans of Cortex (a podcast from CGP Grey and Myke Hurley) will be aware of the concept of yearly themes. This year they were talking about the concept of the Year of Me* where you take stock and refocus on things that matter to you. Since this is my first year doing such a theme I feel that I will take this in its purest form: I'm approaching 30 so is my life headed in the direction I want?
*I know it sounds very self-centered but I didn't chose the naming scheme, be assured that I'm not planning on changing my personality. The theme is more of a guideline/goal to have in mind during the year to keep myself on track.
Job
I started a new job at my old company to coincide with the New Year. It's an opportunity for me to grow and also have more responsibilities. It's always hard to move away from something but I feel this was the correct decision for me. I've already had a lot of agency and feel I'm having a direct (and beneficial) effect on the running of the company. It's been a pretty busy first month but I've been introducing systems, chatting to our new PhD students and generally feel like the move back has been a good one.
Podcasting
Last year was a good year with some amazing guests on Hat of Many Things and decent listenership for Unparliametary Language. We've also (just if you count January) launched two other shows hosted by friends in the form of Astracast and Mish Mash Mayhem. The main thing that suffered was Dr Wilko's which is more of a passion project than the others. I will probably play with the format a bit this year and see what sticks. I have some ideas to tie it further into my reviews at Luxury London.
I also have some idea for modifying how I handle the back-end of the podcasts which I plan to tinker with in the near future. First I intend to move tawilkinson.com off of SquareSpace to reduce the cost of running it.
Volunteering
I want to be very clear that the "Year of Me" doesn't mean I'll stop my ongoing volunteering (Scouting and the Marathon mostly) but I won't be so fast to take up new things for a bit. It would be nice to have a few weekends at home where I do nothing.
Fitness
I have two fitness goals this year:
Make decent progress towards by 20 Quality Mountain Days (QMDs) required for my Mountain Leader training.
The first is already in progress as I'm now only 11 weeks away from race day. I am running for the Teenage Cancer Trust and need to raise £2,000 at a minimum. Based on my most recent run I think over the next 3 months I can get to within my time goal.
The second goal needs some more planning but I hope I can get 5 solid weekends in over the summer. There are a lot of mountains I haven't had the opportunity to summit yet so hopefully there will be a chance to hike all over the country this year.
Social
This section is really just here to stress my footnote from above. Keeping my personal goals in mind isn't intended to reduce the amount of social activities I will go to. I might say yes to slightly fewer events if it would get in the way of other things but hopefully it won't be too many.
Gaming
I found more time to game last year but since the New Year I haven't really played anything at all. I have a ridiculous backlog (what's worse my video game or book backlog? I'm not sure) that needs work. A big issue I have is that I feel the need to sit down for several hours with a game and often I don't get long, uninterrupted blocks of time. The Switch is really helping with this as it is so easy to pause a game and pick up from where I left off. I need to get into a better routine with PC games though. Also I should probably stop buying games in every Steam sale...
I've also purchased some more RPGs I would like to try. I've been running a regular(ish) 5e game for about a year now and I'm playing in an occasional 5e game. I think I'm most likely to tryout my new purchases by running oneshots for friends who get less opportunity to play RPGs throughout the year.† There's also the Student Nationals that I will be DMing at for the first time this year that I'm looking forward to.
†All hail Friend Computer!
Tom Out!