What better way of improving your chances of completing a task than publicly proclaiming you’re going to do it? That’s the idea for publicly posting my goals for 2020. I unfortunately skipped this exercise in 2019 but hope to correct it for 2020. It’s the start of a new decade after all and a good opportunity to get into better habits. Another lesson I’ve learned is that to hold myself truly accountable they should be measurable so I came up with a quantitative way of measuring each of them over the course of 2020.

• Finish up my Parking Spot Finder project. I started digging into this at the end of 2019 but the title is self explanatory. The success here will be defined by making at least two significant commits each month and achieving my goal of identifying available parking spots over 90% of the time for my narrowly-defined streets of interest.
• Longer, more technical blogging. I write two posts a week yet they have gotten shorter and shorter. This year I want to take a step back and focus on writing more thoughtful and longer posts. In addition, I want to move away from focusing on “meta” topics and instead do deeper writing on technical and managerial topics. Measurement here will be looking at post length as well as the tag distribution.
• Quantified self dashboard. I’m into this idea yet have done very little outside my simple daily spreadsheet. You don’t improve what you don’t measure and the goal for 2020 is to start measuring more and more of my life. The measurable goal here is to have a personal dashboard that is updated multiple times a day with at least 3 health metrics.
• Another coding side project. This is an open-ended one but as I’ve started managing I haven’t gotten to spend as much time coding. I want to get back to some code in 2020 and the goal is to develop a side project that will be launched and maintained throughout 2020. I have a few ideas floating around and will pick one to pursue over the next few weeks.

In true OKR fashion I should probably also commit to quarterly updates so stay tuned for the next one in April.