Retrospection - Year 2010

With a new year and a new decade starting, its a good time to think over what i want to achieve personally this year.

But first, its time for some retrospection.

I did come up with a list of resolutions for last year 2010. I din't make it public (no special or secret reasons though). But thinking about how well I fared with respect to my resolutions for last year (2010), I feel good because I fared pretty well. I was able to achieve most of what I wanted.

I think I did good in the following areas:

• Eat regularly and eat healthy
• Thanks to the cook that my wife hired (my wife works too..)
• Have a fixed number of beverages per day
• Far better compared to before. There were times when I used to drink 15 - 20 coffees a day. Its 4 -5 now!
• Read the best selling books every month
• I've read lot of best sellers in 2010. You can see the list of books i've read in my LinkedIn profile 
• Keep myself updated with the latest happenings in the technology industry
• Well this is the culprit which kept me awake until early morning hours. This led to me failing bad with the first point mentioned in the list of things that i could not keep up with, mentioned below.
• Make full use of library 
• Yep, borrowed lot of books from the library.
• Declutter anything and everything
• To add to it, i dint just declutter, but i got more organized now, especially got very organized with my mail inboxes. 
• Stay close to projects, people and meetings/calls
• Track every penny being spent
• While i was good at that, not reflecting weekly on it made this just a mundane chore. So I stopped tracking my expenditure in the last 3 months of last year.
• Enjoy doing household chores and use it as means to relaxation

I think I was off the mark (did bad) in these areas:

• Sleep early and give sufficient rest to my body
• Try to meditate and pray
• Try to start walking early mornings
• Maintain my assets in good condition by regularly servicing them
• Weekly reflect on the spending and budget
• Keep in regular touch with close friends and relatives

As you can see from the list above, most of them are habitual changes that I've been wanting in me and not really an end goal in themselves. So for the things that I've fared well in, I will continue doing them. For things that I missed, I will try to get better at it this year and I will add few more things for this year. 

On a whole, I feel good about what i've achieved. I probably achieved many more things and improved my character on different aspects. For example, I think I have much more emotional and mental discipline and patience. 

Last year, was also a year of lot of learning on the professional front, not just on the managerial and leadership aspects of my work, but also what I always love to do, getting handson on the technical front. Though to a small extent, i did some amount of perl programming and started learning Core Javascript and Python. In fact, this year, I intend to become an expert in Python. 

I know this year (2011) is full of challenges both on the personal and possessional fronts. I believe, every human challenge hardens ones character, if the challenges are taken in a right spirit. I am ready to take up these new challenges and I hope this year value adds to what I am  today. 

I am still working on my list of resolutions for this year. I have a rough draft, but will publish them once I have finalized it to some extent.