One of the most valuable things you can do at the end or beginning of a year is to review the previous year to see how you did. This is also a valuable activity at the end of a day, or a week, or a month. Take a little time and review
Writing
This past year I did a lot less public writing, but picked up journaling. And I couldn’t recommend it more. For the first part of the year I was very consistent about journaling every day and ended up with 250 pages of journal entries at the end of the year.
Journaling is helpful for capturing valuable ideas that you find to help solidify your understanding and memory of them. It also helps to record commitments, plans, and challenges that you have faced and overcome.
Reading
My reading amount was down but I did read quite a few books with some very powerful ideas. I may do a review later this month of some of my favorites and at least try to list out the books I read. Particularly enjoyed a couple of books from Scott Adams.
Coding
I did not do much game programming at all in 2017. A little at the beginning of the year working on a Monkey-X tutorial and I spent a small amount of time looking into Unreal Engine.
However I did begin working with a small startup in addition to my day job. This has taken over most of my programming time outside of work as it is in a technology stack that I previously did not have a large amount of experience with.
Things are going well and I expect to be using it as the topic of a lot of my writing in 2018.
Video
Document, preferably with video. One of the lessons I am taking from Gary Vaynerchuk. One of the most interesting things you can do for content creation is document what you are going though.
I did a few videos this past year, not to document what I was doing necessarily but to document my mindset before I get to a higher level of success. To me it will make more sense if I am going to help someone else become successful to point to the documentation of my time before I was to teach them how.
I plan on doing more videos this year in addition to my writing. Not all will be published immediately.
Plans for 2018
I have come up with several challenges for myself in 2018, especially to start out the year, such as writing every day for the first 30 days.
Looking forward to a great year.
Keep getting wiser, stronger, and better.