Goals for 2017
In 2016 set myself a bunch of goals for the year for different areas of my life. Of all the goals I only managed to achieve one successfully but am still pretty happy with how the year turned out. Overall improvements were made and new things were learned so what that concerns it was a successful year.
Given that setting goals did sort of work for me in 2016 going into 2017 I decided to do this again and set some goals in order to actively progress in different areas. This time I also decided to write the goals down somewhere public.
For 2017 my goals are
Improve my overall fitness while maintaining my weight at or below 80kg.
In 2016 my goal was to improve my fitness and lose some weight. Due to a shoulder and elbow injury I actually gained weight in the first half of the year but over the course of the last 6 months I managed to lose about 5kgs thanks to a lot of exercise and an improvement in my eating habits. As a bonus I gained a lot of strength and general endurance. Overall these improvements have made me feel a lot better, have a more defined set of muscles and helped me in my outdoor spot pursuits as well.
For 2017 the goal is to keep the weight the same, just below 80kgs, while improving my general strength and fitness.
Make my career independent from my job
The last two years I have been working for Vista as a software / build engineer responsible for the development tooling and infrastructure. While this has been a bit of a change from my previous jobs as software developer it has been a great experience. I have learned about many new technologies, created some awesome tooling and have many more things still to learn and create. However with this change from general developer to more of an internal tooling / infrastructure person it has also become clear to me that my technical capabilities will improve more if I make my thoughts, opinions and code available for public scrutiny by the larger development community. I already have a number of open source projects but for 2017 I also plan to write and potentially speak more about the things I'm working on. One part of that is re-re-activating my blog and writing new posts about some of the cool technologies I'm currently working with and on.
Simplify life and my surroundings.
The first few years after I moved to New Zealand I didn't have very much in the way of material possessions, after all I had just moved to the other side of the world with only the things I could take on the airplane. Additionally I moved almost every year to a new house so getting rid of useless possessions meant I had to move less stuff from the old house to the new one. Over time though I have acquired more things both materially and in habits. Some of those things are highly prized however some things are a waste of time and space. The goal for 2017 is to minimize the amount of useless stuff I have, like pieces of furniture which are never used, and useless things I do so that there is more time and space to spend on things that are useful and improve my life.
Improve my confidence, in general in life but especially for climbing and paragliding
In general in life having confidence in yourself and your skills is important. For my outdoor activities, climbing and paragliding, it is even more important. Without confidence in yourself and your skills it is not possible to perform well in either activity. Due to injuries and some intense experiences my confidence in either my climbing or flying skills isn't very high at the moment so 2017 is the year that I will do my utmost best to improve my confidence in my professional skills, my climbing and paragliding capabilities and life in general.
Sports / achievement goals
The final goals for 2017, at least as far as this list goes, is to actively improve my skills in climbing and flying.
For a while I have been trying to improve my climbing skills, strength and endurance enough to be able to climb a grade 24 sports climb. So for 2017 that will be my goal, to improve enough to finally be able to climb a 24. Additionally over the last few years I have been doing more trad climbing I am also going to try to improve my skills in that area by setting myself a goal of climbing a grade 20 on trad.
In my other outdoor activity, paragliding, the general goals are related to the distance your can fly cross country (XC). As I have so far not managed to get away from launch at all my goal for 2017 is to do an XC flight of more than 5km.