Some people say that the best way to motivate yourself is to be inspired and/or desperate. At the moment I don’t feel like I’m any of those two. I was very ambitious and inspired in the past, but I guess things change as you get older.

One thing that still helps me a bit with motivation is planning and recognition of my work by others. You can get inspired just by thinking on what you want to do in your life. Also, in my opinion, planning puts you in somewhat desperate situation as you want to complete items from the list. I don’t know if you like planning or not, but I use it for the above reasons and for the reason of keeping track of greater picture of my life goals.

I’ve been writing year resolution posts on my blog since 2010. There are few things that I’ve learned about planning for a year. It is easy to overestimate what can be done and to lose track if no detailed planning was done. So for this year I want to set somewhat smarter goals and do a detailed elaboration on achieving them. I will break down tasks to monthly tasks and keep track of those separately from this blog, as it will be a total mess to post it here.

Let me start my planning with list of life areas to improve.

I want to improve:

• health by running regularly and doing some gym
• life satisfaction by travelling and having more quality time with family
• soft skills by copying the best characteristics of people I admire
• professional skills by learning one or two technologies and doing a personal project
• foreign languages proficiency by acquiring German B1 and fixing English accent
• financials by learning more on investing, keeping expenses low and deciding on home purchase

Now let me convert this list into some concrete achievable and measurable items.

1. Run 2-3 times a week for at least 5 warm months.
2. Make start of the day more healthy and productive. Ideal scenario would be: get up at 05:55AM, drink glass of water, do exercises for 15-30 min, shower, some important task and/or planning for the day, breakfast, work… But I will consider this item achieved if I start doing exercises regularly even if it is only 2 times a week just for 10 minutes.
3. Travel to the UK, Norway, sea side country, and do a car trip somewhere nice.
4. Spend one hour every day with my daughter playing and learning things.
5. Count not more than 12 weekends in a year when we didn’t go out to do some activities.
6. Learn 12 simple skills from other people. To achieve this goal I will first identify 12 people from the community and those surrounding me and chose some characteristic I admire.
7. Read at least 6 technical books.
8. Watch at least 12 pluralsight courses.
9. Write a simple stock analysing web site. It could have any set of features, point is to get something interesting running.
10. Write any simple useful open source tool. I have WCF related idea in mind.
11. Learn at least two web technologies. I have NodeJS and AngularJS in mind at the moment.
12. Share knowledge more actively. Minimum would be to write 24 blog posts, answer 12 questions on SO, help few people online.
13. Acquire B1 German certificate, attend German course, finish entire German Duolingo tree.
14. Learn English language prosody and fix pronunciation of vowels. Optionally attend a specialized language course.
15. Save 24X my monthly spendings, go through 13 investment books I read in 2015 and extract notes, do reviews and write about them.

In the end of this year I don’t want to find myself among those 92% who fail with their new year’s resolutions, therefore keep an eye on me and I promise I will keep an eye on you, provided that you share your list with me.

Happy New Year!

2016-Feb-01 UPDATE: This is how I’m now tracking completion of the above list. I have a broken-down list of tasks for each month in OneNote and I also have recurring and detailed tasks tasks in Wunderlist app.