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Comment by slashdotdash | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying a new approach for 2017: personal goals, made public [1].

A public GitHub repo where my goals are recorded as issues and accomplishments are closed tickets. I've created milestones for each year (e.g. 2016, 2017) to track my progress. I've backdated some of my 2016 acheivements to get a feel for how it will work.

I hope that writing down my aspirations for the year ahead will help me fulfil them.

[1] https://github.com/slashdotdash/personal-goals

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I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer, but you should watch this TED talk about publishing goals: https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yo... The TLDR is "people who talk about their ambitions may be less likely to achieve them." As with many TED talks, the message is thought-provoking but not guaranteed to be based on solid science.

In any case, best of luck. I hope you achieve your goals -- but please don't interpret this encouragement as false social reality.

Sivers later clarified that it's only true for "identity goals" where telling people about the goal is part of what the goal is. Like "I want to be a runner." By saying so you're making it sort of more true in that you're identifying as at least a wannabe runner.

I believe that for specific, discipline-oriented goals -- like "I want to run 3 times a week" -- you're well advised to shout it from the rooftops, as common sense would dictate.

Sivers's clarification, along with his original TED talk: http://sivers.org/zipit2

I've found that using one of Sivers' alternate approaches - "I'm going to do x and please kick my ass if I don't" - works remarkably well. Of course you need to choose people who actually will kick your ass, otherwise you start figuring out who amongst your network will let you slide and tell only them, defeating the purpose of the exercise.

"kick my ass" can also be translated to a major monetary penalty - Steve Kamb tells us about his friend who bet $500 to his friends if he didn't lose weight

stickk .com

Thanks for sharing the Ted talk, will take a look.

> Build a product that has a monthly recurring revenue of $1,000 (USD)

Don't we all want this? :)

Anyway, good luck! It would be interesting to see how far you get, so please post to HN about your experience.

You'd be surprised by how many don't want to.

I applaud making goals and reaching them, but when I see 'Learn ELM' (or, in fact, 'Learn X') that was marked as completed after 2 days it makes me wonder if it shouldn't be, in reality something like 'Play with X'. I've been doing some things from that list for quite a while, some of them even for years and I still am not sure if I'd dare to say that I've 'Learned X'.

That was a 2016 goal that I backdated (I had the goal months ago, but only just recorded it, and immediately marked as 'done'). To get a feel for how it will work going forward to 2017.

Perhaps I should make the goals more concrete than "learn". As an example: build a form to do X in Elm and deploy to production. Agree that learning is an ongoing, and never ending goal.

I dont think it's hard to learn a language. Perl for example. But its hard to master it. I think there is a big difference.

There is evidence that making your goals public actually makes you less likely to accomplish them because the act of being praised is in itself a reward.

Interesting to hear that. I didn't look into the evidence about public goal setting and its affect on achieving them. I'll need to reflect on the approach and report back.

#meta -- don't report back :) keep those to yourself. make a post at the end of the year to reflect on what you ended up doing, not what you plan to do.

Ha! using github PR as a todolist, fun.

ps: as a deep nerd, my system is 4 notepad.exe (yes notepad.exe) opened with a bunch of markdown lists... the shame.

I hope you do and document goal #18. 1000 recurring revenue product.

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