A new category – what went well today
When I first began to write this blog there was a category called Achievements. It’s still there of course and I think that even one of my goals for the year was to maintain an ongoing account of my achievements. But the thing about this category was that I only wrote accounts of achievements that were particularly noteworthy such as cycling from London to Brighton. Other more minor achievements such as figuring out a knotty web programming problem didn’t get much attention and wasn’t big enough to be included in this category. Soon I began to wonder how to measure what indeed could be included in this category and in the end having no real yardstick the whole achievements log was abandoned.
This year I have a new goal on my list of goals which is to pay attention to the more minor achievements. But they’re not called achievements but simply what went well. They could be things that I did intentionally or just by chance. But paying attention to them creates a positive state of mind. That is the whole point. Bigging myself up over something as simple as taking time to watch a sunset isn’t really an achievement but it is something that went well that day.
I also wanted to get back to the whole idea of a more spontaneous unedited blog post that was free and easy and didn’t need to be of the same calibre as an article or tutorial. It’s an attempt to just get me on the blog a lot more and allow me to blog more freely. The articles and tutorial type posts that go through numerous drafts will still continue but I just want to make blogging fun again and less of a big deal. After all, it’s not a news magazine or an online book but a means of making my goals public and thereby helping me to achieve them. Hopefully a few others out there will benefit too.