I’m a bit over a week late on this, but on the “quarter” scale that’s fine, right?

Standard warning: personal post, lots of annoying details, lots of meandering, lots of parentheticals. I tend to write these things kind of freeform. You’ve been warned.

Quarter 1 Summary

All in all, I’m moderately happy with how Q1 went. March ended up kind of a wash, since I had trips to (prepare for then) go on followed by a longer-than-expected recovery time. I’m not complaining about that, it just cut into my productive time since I’m not used to scheduling productive non-work time in around and during trips. Hopefully I can get better at that.

I didn’t end up hitting all the things I wanted to hit on the Q1 breakdown, but as always I ended up over-scheduling. Even without hitting all of the numbers on the list, I can still hit all the goals by the end of the year no problem, I just need to get going again. Momentum is important, and not on my side at the moment.

Q1 Detail Breakdown

Lose 40 pounds – Progress – I lost about 15. I actually lost more but March was a bad month. This is a momentum game, and I’m not feeling too bad. Winter is the hardest to keep from gaining weight, and I managed to lose some, so I expect more progress as the year continues.

Get a certification – Missed – This might have happened if I hadn’t suddenly scheduled two trips in March. I did quite a bit of prep work for the AWS Developer cert, but I haven’t pulled the trigger on it yet because 1) I’ll probably have to take at least a half-day to take the test, and 2) I can only attempt it 3x per calendar year. I had been planning on taking/failing once just to gauge the test, but after seeing that restriction I decided to pile on more study.

Write 6 posts here – Complete, Outdated – If I’m reading my CMS right, I’ve published exactly 6 posts for this blog between 1/1 and 4/1. However, this main goal changed, and technically doesn’t matter anymore. Oh well.

Write 10 nfc posts – Progress 5/10 – Missing March is what broke me here. I’ve had plenty of ideas too. Just need to keep at it. Consistency is what matters.

Rewrite NaNoWriMo 2015 story – Missed, Outdated – I’m going another direction now, so this one doesn’t matter.

Get 200 Twitch followers – Missed, Outdated – For the purposes of goal tracking, I have 116 followers on Twitch right now. However, since Twitch stuff is a MAJOR time sink, I’ve kind of tabled it for now.

Get 250 Twitter followers – Complete – 529 followers as of now.

Have 1 mentor – Complete – Only a 1 call session, but that’s enough. He said I could call him back whenever. Not going to list names here, but someone I consider much more successful and I wouldn’t have expected to be able to contact directly.

Publishing company setup – Missed – Names are hard, legal stuff is hard too. The real “due” date for this is once I start publishing.

Novella series plan – Progress – I have a general idea, and a few pieces that I like. Just needs a bit more work before I’d call this part “done.” And no, it’s not perfectionism talking. I didn’t like the first pass enough, so I’ve been working on a second pass.

Write (draft) a novella – Missed – Didn’t get the plan done, didn’t get the Novella drafted.

Annual Goal Updates

I’m just going to list the ones with progress, I might do something more complete after Q2.

1. Lose 80 pounds – 15/80 so about 19% of the way there

5. Write 30 posts on Not Final Code – 5/30 -> 1/6 -> 16.67% done

9. Have 500 Twitter followers across accounts – 529/500 -> DONE

10. Be mentored by 3 people more successful than me – 1/3 -> 33%

Quarter 2 Focus

I managed to actually complete a goal last quarter, so that’s good. What should my focus be for Quarter 2?

I think that question starts with “What was a focus for Quarter 1 that I can put on the back burner?” Blogging took some time, but not a huge amount. Twitch streaming took quite a bit more time. The nice thing about doing the coding streams was that they kept me sharp. I’m not going to remove those as a possibility in the future, but as of right now they’re off the list. I also spent probably 2 – 4 hours per day doing Twitter stuff in February and March. I can cut that way back since I’ve hit my goal follower count.

I guess the thing I need to determine is what I want or need to get done this quarter. I know that I need to start focusing on Japanese study to have any chance at all at passing the N4 in December. I’ve done a little preliminary work gathering some resources, but it’s time to start studying in earnest. I want to write at least 2 posts per month on NFC this quarter. Preferably 3 or 4, though weekly might be too much of a time commitment if I want to keep the posts relatively high quality.

Getting the novella stuff up and running is a huge thing. I’d been planning on hopefully having my first novella ready to go in June or early July, having done all the editing and legal work by then. I’m not sure that’s still possible, but I want to at least have the bottleneck be editing and not writing. So I want to have at least one novella written this quarter. Preferably two – one having gone through all the editing I can manage and waiting on a professional (at worst), and one being drafted.

One more mentor would be good, though I’m not sure who right now. I know that I need to do a little more preparatory work before I talk to the next person.

The only real open question I have right now is whether I start the push on the 100 miles of biking again. Preparing for that like I did last year just chews up weekends like you wouldn’t believe. I mean, the longest I did was 60 some miles at once, and that took something between 3 and 4 hours if I remember correctly – I have it written down but not in front of me – and that sort of kills the rest of the day too. So I’d have to ramp back up to those kinds of distances on weekends – probably at least 3 weeks – then I’d have to do some kind of additional training over the week. You know what? I’ll put it on the list to start digging into in May. Maybe I can find some way of studying Japanese while biking long distances. Kill two birds with one stone.

Quarter 2 Goals breakdown

1. Lose another 30 pounds – 45 pounds total
2. Bike 100 miles in under 7 hours.
3. Japanese study:
   1. Finish the Genki I textbook
   2. Finish 4 chapters of Genki II
   3. Translate 2 months of Hir@gana Times
   4. Begin N4 Kanji study (know at least 50 more well, and know the N5 Kanji inside and out)
   5. Finish Japanese in Mangaland volume 2
4. Make 1 attempt at a certification
5. Write 8 NFC posts
6. Draft 2 Novellas
7. Plan 4 Novellas (including the nearly done one)
8. Set up legal publishing entity
9. Have another mentor
10. Find an editor

Conclusion

Deep list, probably too much. Work is ramping up too, so some or all of this could be pushed back as things come up (work comes first – bills gotta be paid). Of the things on my list, the priorities go Weight loss -> Japanese -> Novellas -> Biking -> Blogging -> everything else

Alright, Q1 wasn’t too bad, but could have been better. Let’s see how Quarter 2 goes. I have the possibility of crossing off another item from the main goal list, and I’m ramping up to start knocking stuff off the list left and right.

I’ll update this again in July for a Q2 summary / Q3 setup, unless something comes up in the meantime to change things or whatever.