Perhaps a better title for this post would be “Back from the dead”! It has been so long that I got lost in my own blog setup. So lost, that I couldn’t help but wonder if it was really a good idea to use Octopress in the first place. Finally, I got around to writing this post, but not without having to check the Octopress documentation!

Anyway, now that I am back here, I intend to write more often. In fact, that’s one of my new year resolutions! But I am getting ahead of myself. Before I go on to commit to some goals for this year (as I should have done soon after reading The Motivation Hacker in 2014), I’d like to review the last year. Before any one blames me of ‘plagiarism’, I’d like to give credit, where credit is due. This format is highly inspired by some other similar review posts I have come across over the years

2017 : What all happened!

The year was a peculiar, to say the least. I failed terribly on all my goals (except one). Here are the goals (however vauge) and what I achieved :-

1. Read 15 books (The only goal I managed to achieve)

   In fact, I read 16 books! (Where would I be without Goodreads to track my progress on such goals). Looking back at that list, I feel good about covering different kinds of books.

2. 1 project per month

   Towards the end of 2016, I had come across the interesting idea of resolving to ship 1 project every month for the entire year. Although I didn’t end up joining the club, or fully committed to the idea, I had hoped to make good progress keeping that average in mind. I failed miserably. Although I started well on Pigit, my interest soon fizzled out. I guess, that’s truly the reason why you should commit to such goals publicly. My Github commits were pretty low as well.

   

3. Run 1000 km

   As you can see in the image below, I barely managed to achieve 40% of the goal, ~100km of which came in December!

Looking at just the goals, it would appear that 2017 turned out to be quite an unproductive year. However, it was not all that bad. Yes, I failed to do a lot of the things I had expected to do, but that was also because things drastically changed over the year.

1. InLogg got acquired by Myntra!

   Towards the end of 2015, I had joined Preeti, Prateek and Hemant to build and grow InLogg! Early 2017, Myntra acquired InLogg and I joined them.

2. Later in the year, however, I moved to London to work as a Software Engineer at Facebook!

Goals for 2018

Having quickly glossed over the missed goals last year, it’s time to establish (and start working on) the goals for 2018. Unlike previous years, this would act as the public declaration that I couldn’t later deny (for anyone in doubt, you could track this history of this file on Github)

• Run 1000 km (100)

  Yeah, that’s me taking a second shot at the goal. This time, I am more optimistic, however. I have already signed up for the Edinburgh Half Marathon in May

  You can track my progress on Garmin Connect I use my Garmin VivoActive HR (since Jun’17) to log my runs. However, I also sync my runs to Strava and Runkeeper using Tapiriik

• Read 20 books (50)

  Thanks to Goodreads, I have gotten into the habit of setting a reading goal every year since 2013 - how many times I have achieved it is another matter. Goal on Goodreads

• Write at least one blog post every month (20)

  This post is the first in that series (and now you know why a post about new year resolutions comes towards the end of January).

To make my commitment to these goals even stronger, I have decided to make it hurt if I fail to achieve any one of these (another lesson from The Motivation Hacker). In the spirit of that, I commit to donate to charity the amount mentioned in parenthesis after every goal (totalling to 170), in GBP, in case I fail to achieve it.

Cheers to an exciting new year ahead!