{"id":585,"date":"2013-12-15T00:58:22","date_gmt":"2013-12-15T07:58:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/?p=585"},"modified":"2013-12-30T15:32:43","modified_gmt":"2013-12-30T22:32:43","slug":"personal-sprints","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/articles\/personal-sprints\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal Sprints"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have a problem &#8211; I have too many balls in the air, and I can&#8217;t even juggle. There are too many things to learn, too many toys to play with, too many things to make, too many books to read. I&#8217;m too good at keeping track of things so nothing ever falls off of my TODO list &#8211; it just gets punted forward. My attention is split between too many things and I never get any of them done (or even started).<\/p>\n<p>This bugs me. To become technically excellent, open up career opportunities, influence the world, you need to ship, finish, produce, practice, promote, and share. I haven&#8217;t been doing any of those things, and without changing my behavior, I unsurprisingly kept getting the same results.<\/p>\n<p>New plan:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Keep my project wish-list in a separate document rather than my active TODO list.<\/li>\n<li>Every two weeks, choose one project that I most want to work on right now. For those two weeks, I will defer all the other projects to focus on the one I have chosen.<\/li>\n<li>By Wednesday of the first week, I will write up and publish a rough roadmap and set of goals for the two weeks I will spend on this project.<\/li>\n<li>At the end of the two weeks, I will write up what I accomplished, learned, etc and include code, demos, deliverables, etc.<\/li>\n<li>I don&#8217;t have to feel guilty about the other projects I&#8217;m not working on, since they&#8217;re still on the list and when it&#8217;s their turn, they&#8217;ll get my full attention.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>After one year, I will have 26 completed projects with deliverables. However, since this is a new idea, I&#8217;m committing to 3 months (7 cycles). At that point, I&#8217;ll evaluate if I&#8217;m satisfied with my output using this method.<\/p>\n<p>For my first cycle, I&#8217;m going to get more comfortable writing Clojure code. Some of the things I plan to do are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Clojurescript Koans &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/clojurescriptkoans.com\/\">http:\/\/clojurescriptkoans.com\/<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Clojurescript 101: <a href=\"http:\/\/swannodette.github.io\/2013\/11\/07\/clojurescript-101\/\">http:\/\/swannodette.github.io\/2013\/11\/07\/clojurescript-101\/<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Pedestal Tutorial: <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/pedestal\/app-tutorial\/wiki\">https:\/\/github.com\/pedestal\/app-tutorial\/wiki<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Create a simple database-backed website, so I need to learn a persistence library, ring, templating, etc<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a small subset of other projects I hope to get to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Make a directory of company dossiers and tools to generate them &#8211; kind of like Crunchbase but from the perspective of a potential employee trying to quickly evaluate the company<\/li>\n<li>Basic computer vision and image processing<\/li>\n<li>Sphero hacking<\/li>\n<li>Nodecopter hacking<\/li>\n<li>Study Peepcode videos<\/li>\n<li>Learn Python<\/li>\n<li>Write some meatier essays I&#8217;ve had in mind for a while<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Thanks to @swizec for his <a href=\"http:\/\/swizec.com\/blog\/inspired-by-the-180-websites-i-will-understand-52-academic-papers-in-52-weeks\/swizec\/6365\">52 Academic Papers in 52 Weeks<\/a> project, which sparked this idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have a problem &#8211; I have too many balls in the air, and I can&#8217;t even juggle. There are too many things to learn, too many toys to play with, too many things to make, too many books to read. I&#8217;m too good at keeping track of things so nothing ever falls off of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-585","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-personal-sprints","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pazgP-9r","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pchristensen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}