Here we go again!

Another year is quickly coming to an end, and seeing as I’m not already independantly wealthy, and still have some BIG goals that I am yet to successfully master, let’s have another go at it shall we… When I fail, try, and try again ( or so goes the adage ).

This time I will commit to two posts per week and more if time permits ( and interesting things are happening … which is pretty much always the case ).

Let’s review the short explanation of this experiment…

Over the next 365 solar days, I’m going to let you in on a few secrets. Secrets that could potentially will change your life if you actually implement them (which is actually the only thing holding anyone back… action). I’m also going to track the progress of the results of these secrets as *I* personally implement them one at a time, so that the skeptics in the crowd can observe the results as they happen to me, because we all know that they are too chicken shit to take the risk required to try something for themselves first. Thats ok though, The smart people reading this will undoubtedly implement these secrets and gain from their benefits as quickly as I do and hopefully we can work together for our mutual benefit.

These are not new principals by any stretch of the imagination, some of what will follow will be my own orderly regurgitation of very old principals, however I know from taking a long and hard look at myself and my own life that the principals are true and do work independently of anything external to ourselves. I know this, because I have been honest with myself, because I have experienced many, many things so far in my life, and I know that *I* am 100% responsible for my attitude, my thoughts, and my actions.

So, the reason for this little online experiment is simple (for me), I need to get my life back in order (currently its a bit of a mess) and one of the primary principals of success is to be accountable for your actions and goals, this experiment is my way of making myself accountable. Its here for anyone to read, so that should help motivate me into action. Feel free to join in, simply sign up for an account here on my blog, and do as I do, or if you have your own blog, follow along and post your own results. I know that success is imminent.

Step 1 – Document your goals. Know what you want. (you cannot hit a target if you do not know what it is).

Seeing that it’s almost  ANOTHER new year, this makes it a perfect time to implement in writing what your specific goals are. (did you catch that? IN WRITING) … This is a secret that many people fail to grasp, something wonderfully subjective happens when we write down our goals, we take the first step towards manifesting them into our physical realities. How can you expect things to happen if you do not take the simple steps to ensure that you are doing your part?

My revised resolutions (goals) in order of priority for the year of 2010. (these will be broken down into simple steps over many up and coming posts).

1. Be the very best Dad possible for my darling daughters.
2. Have more fun then I have had in any previous year to date.
3. Be in better health then I have been in any previous year to date.
4. Maintain a daily meditation schedule to keep centered and keep a positive mental attitude.
5. Learn a new song on the guitar each month.
6. Become proficient in all of the courses that I am teaching (because proficiency is a far cry from understanding).
7. Inspire as many other people to be the best that they can be, and inspire them to inspire others.
8. Produce and be a part of a successful and synergistic Master Mind group.
9. Post a minimum of 2 new blog entries for every week of the year (minimum 300 words). and create a healthy subscriber base.
10. Launch the clothing line.
11. Learn, Laugh, Live. (healthy, wealthy and wise).
12. Make a metric ass-load (technical term) of money.
13. Be on track to be totally debt free before Jan 1 of 2011.

You may have more, or less goals and its ok if you don’t know HOW you’re going to succeed at them, I don’t have clue one how I’m going to accomplish all of those there, I just know that I WANT to succeed at each of those, and I have faith that the universe will provide a way to accomplish each of them.

I also think that this list will grow as I gain momentum. I just started out with some things and put them in order or importance (as far as the bigger picture goes). Note that cash came at the end of the list. This isn’t to say that I’m putting that off, this is to say that money is not as personally important to me as everything else. I have been at the top and the bottom, several times.

Got your list? Why not? Afraid to play along? Don’t know what you want? You can’t move to Step 2 (tomorrow) unless you finish Step 1 (today).

Please Note:
Just because things don’t pan out the way you want them too the first time you make an attempt doesn’t mean you should give up on them. I tried and had an EPIC FAIL last year trying to get this experiment going… That’s OK, I knew that I could try again.   … I don’t want blogging about this experiment to take up too much of my time, and I don’t want it to be the only thing I’m blogging about, so I will try to do alternating updates (one per week about the experiment (my weekly review) and one about how other things are moving along in life. If your one of my students, you may gain some valuable insight by reading both, I mean who wouldn’t like to read at least one weekly blog post on something more interesting to the development, programmer, geek, techie community (or subscribers that aren’t interested in this experiment). As you see above, expanding this blog and writing more is STILL one of my personal and professional goals for this year.

For obvious reasons, (too much information at a single time) I will post over the next few days of my winter break to get the experiment up to spped as far as documenting … my mastery of the cut and paste shall astound you

Please ALSO Note:

Further to the self motivating factor, I enjoy being helpful and this is a great way to provide some solid information aggregated from many sources over many years into a single location and format… Where it goes from there is anyones guess (a book perhaps?). Because I want to share this information and allow everyone else to share it, while still remaining the copyright holder… these posts (Back On Track Experiment) are released under a creative commons license.

Back On Track Experiment by Robert French is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.robertfrench.ca/contact.php

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Well I just noticed that my CSS is broken over here on the WordPress side of the site … I know it was when I added the header (also broken over here) … I will fix this week with some luck ….

I’m in need of a nice project/issue tracker that can be installed via FTP / Web interface only … I’m currently entertaining bug genie, but am open to suggestion … Ideally I would run RedMine and call it a day, but I have to deal with some strange limitations at the moment, and Don’t really want to do all the customization needed to get Mantis to look right…

Tomorrow is a BIG DAY …. Positive vibes from everyone please, just send me some thoughts of awesomeness if at all possible in the morning… I figure it can’t hurt and may just help.

Need to get to sleep…

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Well it looks like that new project is a go, Kal, Geoff, and Myself met last night for a dinner meeting and went over some details, I’m not at liberty to say what the project is or is about, but it’s a pretty good idea, if I do say so myself, and considering all the ‘good ideas’ I hear, thats actually saying something.

We will be aiming for government grant cash, but have set aside a percentage of the company that we are willing to part with for VC … (Why I’m even considering the VC route again is a little beyond me, I guess I believe in the project that much) … But Geoff is confidant that raising funds won’t be an issue, and isn’t sure we will need to do the VC thing … But time will tell the tail.

I’m excited, but need to get some sleep (even though this goes live tomorrow AM … I’m writing it now, and I should get to bed before I end up in trouble)

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So as I was ranting about changes yesterday, what do you think came out of my meeting? (aside from feelings of absolute hunger and/or starvation because the meeting went through lunch and stretched out to four and a half hours)… Thats right, changes … 12 new feature requests and a slew of changes actually. Some of the changes are simple enough and fall just outside of the 2 minute rule to make, so they will be tasked. The application has been built to manage at least some degree of change that way, but some of the change requests will require a fair bit of thought to design and implement. This is definitely a great example of a ‘typical’ client and contract.

So, being all GTD stoked now … Craig and I get to exercise some of what we have been learning, so this isn’t really a rant parsee, its more of an observation of what to be grateful for … yea … yea … thats what i’ll call it But seriously, I am grateful for such a ‘typical’ opportunity to exercise the GTD principals I have been learning, and I’m sure that as long as Craig gets some sleep he will feel the same way too.

The collection process went well, Craig was on top of making sure that nothing got overlooked, I was sure to make relevant notes to the way the underlying system needs to be changed to support some of the new-ish functionality and although I will be coding a bit over the weekend, the majority of the notes can wait until Monday to get processed … I had to leave and get to another meeting immediately, so processing will have to wait (unless of coarse Craig updates the project site over the weekend). There is more then enough to get cleaned up before Monday that was already in the queue.

The sprint for this next iteration has been set to twice the length (two week sprint this time), that should provide more then enough time to get things back on track and done. I’m hoping that the organization strategies of the GTD principals will be the solution I’m looking for, time will tell the tale, and i’ll be sure to update as I go through it.

As always, comments, thoughts, feedback and flames are always welcome in the comments.

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A prime example of why I need to be be more organized, and why the world needs ubiqx (project idea I have had form many years) … I made an appointment with a lady, but it got entered into my phone, my phone (being the normal variety and not one that I typically use to store appointments in because I don’t sync it with anything). End result, the meeting got forgot about (completely left my brain) until 30 minutes before the meeting, at which time my phone made a little jingle noise that caught my attention. But there was no way for me to get to the meeting on time, so I had to call and apologize, and then re-schedule.

Now if I was on top of things, I would have moved my appointment to my iCal and everything would have been gravy. But because I never use the schedule in my phone, I didn’t think of it. (Clearly another case for why I could use an iPhone). This is exactly he type of thing that drive me nuts, so I added a few things to my GTD schedule and with some luck that will be the last time I have to re-schedule an appointment because of a lack of organization on my part.

The GTD stuff really is simple to adopt, I have only been at it for a few days and already things are coming together, I can see the next steps required for all of the tasks on my plate and that gives me a lighter / good feeling. As long as I can keep with it, I know this is going to make a huge impact on my life. I will admit that I feel kinda dumb for not implementing these simple principals sooner, but I still know forgiveness for myself when I fail, so I trudge happily forward.

I’ve started taking advantage of my morning commute again, (I don’t do the driving in Wed, Thurs, or Fri) … This turns out to be an ideal time to make sure I’m caught up and review what I need to get done for the day. It also makes the ride in go uber quick, and makes me start the day off feeling productive.

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I signed up for 43 Things a few months back, and then I forgot about it… Want to know why I forgot about it? Because I added the 43 Things widget to my iGoogle so that I would see it all the time (releasing my mind from having to think about it). Problem was, it’s lower on the page and not somewhere I actually look, so it wasn’t somewhere that I would see it (although my mind thought it was a good enough place to put it to allow me to forget about it).

So my ranting the past few days has been centered around GTD, and clearly, I haven’t been getting anything done (or at least very little). My biggest problem is that I’m taxing my brain to remember far too much, so I took the time to do a brain dump a few days back, and I actually already feel less stressed about some of the things I need to get done, not because there is a lot of forward movement on any of them yet, but because I know that getting them out of my head was a great step in the right direction.

Today I have to get a few more details for a project wrapped up and I’m utilizing the GTD philosophy to manage the project. I haven’t started using OmniFocus to it’s full potential yet, but in the coming days I hope too, such a great tool (and the iPhone support makes another case for acquiring an iPhone in the near future).

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