I love yearly goal setting and tracking! I achieved 4 of my 6 goals for 2023. The biggest thing that helped me was my progress tracking spreadsheet [0].
I try to define very achievable monthly milestones. Over the past few years I have learned to love the feeling of focusing on just this month's set of milestones and accomplishing them in time.
For anyone that's interested, I'll share a link to a sample of my progress tracking spreadsheet [0] -- nothing complicated, but it can be helpful to have a predetermined structure in place. Feel free to make a copy for your own use!
This was incredibly fun -- my wife and I played as a team where I am the flappy bird and she calls out ideas for the Wordle part. Highlight of our day!
I love planning out my year and setting goals! I try to run my personal goals the way I run business goals -- by defining concrete metrics to track my progress and trying to hold myself accountable to monthly milestones. This past year was a great one, and I really credit a lot of my progress to the simple joy of "making the numbers go up" in my progress tracking spreadsheet [0].
I usually start thinking sometime in mid-November about what goals are most important to me for the upcoming year and try to finalize them by the last week of December. I think about what matters to me personally, what matters to my family, and what matters to my career.
I like to choose about 3-5 key goals to focus on and then figure out how to measure progress. For things like "Lose 30 Pounds", it's very easy to track. For more nebulous ones like "Invest Time in my Marriage", it can be hard to quantify progress, so for that one I created a monthly relationship survey that my wife and I both fill out to score each other numerically on things like "I feel my partner listens to me" or "I feel my partner is spending enough time with me". It may sound weirdly clinical, but it actually became a fun ritual to evaluate each other every month and was really helpful to pinpoint where my partner felt things were great and where things could be improved.
It's also interesting to look back on the data and see how progress (or lack thereof) toward one goal often impacted another -- for instance, as we were in the thick of closing on our house, my progress on my book editing stalled. In a challenging month between my wife and I, I gained weight instead of losing it.
A big part of this is choosing good goals -- specific, measurable goals are important. It's also been important for me to choose goals that I feel really confident I can achieve in the course of a year, rather than choosing goals which are too ambitious. For 2022, I was tempted to make my goal "Lose 50 pounds" instead. I'd actually had the goal of "Lose 50 pounds" in prior years and failed badly in trying to achieve it. I think because it's such an ambitious goal, once I fell behind, it felt impossible to catch back up. The more modest and achievable goal of losing 30 pounds was perfect for me -- meaningful enough for real progress, but realistic enough to allow for some slowdowns or screw-ups along the way.
Tracking progress also helps with reflecting on the previous year -- in my case, one of my goals in 2022 was to release another game, but I'm not going to accomplish that one. It's really helpful to look at what I earnestly thought I'd be able to achieve this year, figure out what went wrong, and make a better plan for 2023.
[0] For anyone that's interested, here's a sample of my progress tracking spreadsheet -- nothing complicated, but it can be helpful to have a predetermined structure in place. Feel free to make a copy for your own use: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13G9L1t82BtIggxEqeFUV...
Oh shoot, thanks for the heads up. Is the page not loading for you at all, or is it another problem? I just tried it again at https://trykon.itch.io/omnicube and I seem to be able to get through to successfully download the demo.
Incredibly cool, looking forward to digging in more on your projects. I love the mix of technical projects alongside the creative ones. Signed up for your email letter. Also -- I love your website, so simple and clean.
I'm passionate about two things: game development and writing!
For several years I've been working as an evenings-and-weekends indie game developer. I love it -- it's such a joyful mix of technical and creative tasks. It's stimulating and challenging and expressive, and makes my heart feel so full when I've finally finished something that another person can play. If I could ever reach a point where I could properly fund it, I could spend every day for the rest of my life making games. I launched my first game in 2018, a challenging puzzle game called Omnicube [0], and am having a blast working on a few new projects now.
On the writing side of things, I've been writing stories since I was a kid in one capacity or another. I think it scratches the same creative itch as game development, just though a different medium. I'm actually in the final stages of publishing my first book -- a memoir about my experiences playing competitive chess [1].
This is so fantastic to read -- congrats Andreas! I admit I am very envious reading this. I would love to be in a similar situation, able to focus full time on a passion project (in my case, video game development). Maybe it's time to start planning my own Patreon...
The simplicity of this is awesome. I've vaguely wanted to start blogging for many years, but suffered from analysis paralysis on where/how to get started. This was so simple -- took me less than 2 minutes to get set up and start writing. Thanks for making this!
The company I work for has an opportunity available that might be a good fit for you -- we specialize in conducting remote technical interviews as a service. It pays pretty well & the work is very flexible. We have some folks who work full time on our platform, and some who only do 3-4 interviews per month.
This is so neat! Seems like a really fun game, and I'm also a big fan of the very straightforward & minimal website. Would definitely buy one of the decks you're planning to sell :)
I started a new habit back in 2016: anytime I felt bored or felt an impulse to just open a browser and navigate to a news site, I would instead tab to my word processor and write little character scenes or plan out the plot of a new chapter in my book.
I actually finished an entire manuscript for a murder mystery book this way.
Make sure to actively invest in the relationships that are important to you. It's easy to take them for granted without realizing you are doing so. That might be your spouse, your parents, your siblings, your close friends, your kids. Make time for them whenever possible -- you don't want to wake up one day and realize you missed out on having a relationship with the people that matter.
The company I work for would be a great fit -- we specialize in conducting remote technical interviews as a service. It pays pretty well ($100 USD per 90-minute interview, slightly higher as you become experienced on the platform). The work is very flexible and you set your own hours, so it works for people aiming for a lower volume per month such as yourself, as well as people interested in more than that. We have some folks who work full time on our platform, and some who only do 3-4 interviews per month.
Particularly if you have the skillset for mentoring, it's likely this would be a great fit for you.
If this is the kind of thing you (or anyone else reading this) might be interested in, send me an email and I would be happy to talk further about it! My email address is in my profile.
This is a tradeoff I've grappled with a lot in the past 5-6 years. I was in my mid-twenties at the start of that period, and I generally have chosen money over passion. Part of my reasoning was that I could try and utilize some of that money to hire people to work on my areas of passion for me, and I could just oversee that work.
I think overall it's yielded mixed results. For me, part of choosing the money meant being committed to a full-time job, and that challenged me in ways I don't think I would have been able to simulate had I not chosen that path. The main value was the growth in a variety of soft skills -- leadership, ability to critique products and maintain high standards for quality, communication skills, overall discipline and professionalism. I think those areas of growth were a lot more valuable than the actual money.
I'm very proud of being able to financially support my family, and I probably take for granted the fact that we haven't really had to worry much about money for half a decade. So there are certainly upsides to choosing the money.
I do feel envious of my peers that have chosen their passion and been successful going down that path -- I feel like they've gotten to experience the best of both worlds and I wish I was in that group. But there are probably a lot of my peers who tried to choose their passion and failed, and I feel lucky that I'm not in that group. Ultimately, in my case, choosing the money was a bit of a hedge to ensure a middle-ground -- I didn't have to worry about failing but I eliminated my chance to get the best of both worlds.
If I could go back in time right now and do things over, I would probably try to find a way to instead choose passion, but do so with some form of strong mentorship in place to help support me from the start. Easier said than done to find the right mentorship structure, but I think that's what I'm hoping to transition toward for my next 5-6 years.
In terms of your situation, I'd encourage you to question whether the MSc is really necessary -- if your goal is to code or be an awesome SWE at a cool startup, the MSc is probably not a good use of your time.
I also want to strongly second the others in here giving the advice to not count on equity & not trust the projections they gave you. Any actual money you hope to get out of that might only be realized years away at best, and never realized at worst. You might still want to make that bet, but make sure you do so with a full understanding of how risky a bet it can be.
I actually work in technical interviewing and technical hiring so please feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat more about this topic. Email is in my profile. Best of luck with your decision!
I try to define very achievable monthly milestones. Over the past few years I have learned to love the feeling of focusing on just this month's set of milestones and accomplishing them in time.
For anyone that's interested, I'll share a link to a sample of my progress tracking spreadsheet [0] -- nothing complicated, but it can be helpful to have a predetermined structure in place. Feel free to make a copy for your own use!
[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13G9L1t82BtIggxEqeFUV...