Clarity

It seems drilled into your head - "Goal Setting" - and I've always avoided it. I've never liked goals and it seemed to me to be a very mechanical way of measuring success.

Turns out not setting goals is probably one of the qualities that makes me so unmotivated.

So I should clarify what I will be doing this year:

• I will finish moving out of my house in this next week. I am moving into a smaller basement suite with my girl Aubrey, so this isn't so painful.
• I will sell or give away most of my material goods by February 1st. I can't be wandering the globe and visiting tropical beaches if I have to pay rent just to store my sofa and bed. Anything I absolutely cannot part with will be going into a small storage locker, but I'm hoping to minimize this.
• I will continue working on my various web contracts to pay for my bills. This is web design and community management work. It isn't a free ride, and I'm not rich by any means. 
  
• I will make an effort to cut expenses. This year is going to be pricey and I need something in the bank. Less eating out, more home cooking, less home electronics. This should be easier since I am trying to avoid material goods collection.
• I will finish all of my half-finished projects by April 1st. This includes my custom blogging engine I should be using instead of blogspot, my personal websites, and cleaning up a few draft PHP libraries I have half finished. I think it's important to clean up your old work before starting anything new.
• I will continue brainstorming at least one new application or game per week. This is a big one. I'm making an effort to blog every day, but blog is just talk. Once per week I'm actually going to have a tangible product that, given infinite resources and time, I would actually want to make.
• I will select a Flash Game from my list and create it by November 1st. I hope this happens sooner than November but this is my hard deadline. I have zero Actionscript experience and have only made a few budget flash animations in the past. This is going to be a from-scratch effort. Hopefully it will make me a millionaire.
• I will select a travel location and get there by September 1st. I'm hoping this will happen much, much sooner but international travel laws make things more complicated. I'm thinking this could happen as early as April. Again, hard deadline.
• I will spend New Years 09->10 in a foreign country. Drunk.
• I will post a retrospective Summary on January 3rd, 2010, and officially end this blog. Not to say that aught-ten isn't just as good a name. ;)

There we go. Now I have some solid goals to meet.