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New Year's Resolutions for 2013

I'm not a big fan of creating resolutions at this time of the year. Mostly it's because everyone else is doing it and I think you should make resolutions all the time instead of when mass media prompts you to.

It should be a proactive choice not a reactive one. That being said, there's something neat and tidy about doing it at the start of the year that appeals to my ordered, mathematical, process-driven mind.

Having said that, I think one year is too big a time frame, I'm more comfortable speaking in days, weeks and months. I'll break it up into sections

Digital

Updated: 8th July, 2013

Goals: To fill in all the gaps in my digital knowledge, to be able to make high fidelity wireframes quickly and easily (within 2 hours), to be able to turn my ideas into flow diagrams (Omnigraffle), user specifications and technical specifications, to consolidate my SEO knowledge, to get the basics of front end web development and to improve my Microsoft office skills.

By March 1st - Finish the Codecademy HTML & CSS course (view my progress here: http://www.codecademy.com/users/thepurplemonkeyking). - DONE

By April 1st - Have basic Photoshop skills. Start with lifehacker's guide and then move on to other resources. [Set a specific challenge to achieve]. - DONE

By May 1st - Have basic Illustrator skills. Start with Adobe's guide as well as this round-up post as well as this one. [Set a specific challenge to achieve]. - NOT DONE

By June 1st - Finish reading the "Search Engine Optimization All-In-One For Dummies". - NOT DONE

By July 1st - Have a working understanding of Omnigraffle. - NOT DONE

By August 1st - Finish working through the book: "Eloquent Javascript" and complete the Codecademy Code Year. - Decided not to do.

By September 1st - Learn how to do Regex.

By October 1st - Learn how to do VBA Programming.

Entrepreneurial

By January 13th - Have first blog post done for my ESL website (will update this soon)

By March 1st - Have 50 users for my ESL website.

By June 1st - Make $20 a week from my ESL website.

Update (8th July): The entrepreneurial goals were based on an ESL project that's morphed to the point where the above goals don't make sense.

As for other goals I've become more focused on blogging, networking and Kanban (just in time) learning. Here's what I've achieved in the first half of the year:

For the second half of the year I'll have a few more goals like: interview three more people for my blog, build more websites, learn more about community management, create some online revenue streams, etc... but nothing I've turned into a concrete goal just yet.

I'll have to do that but right now the things that are harder to quantify like building networks and connections are important but difficult to write specific goals for.