My team at Red Hat made some New Year's resolutions at our meeting this week - for accountability, here are mine. Note that I usually do goals (life-wise) in cycles syncing with my birthday rather than the calendar, but for my dayjob, for my team, here's what I want for 2011. Trying to keep these goals light, focused, and meaningful - and immediately actionable.
1. Consciously moving out of pure-novice mode. Keep the beginners-mind and the willingness to learn, but recognize that I'm not green any more and need to be able to step into larger and longer-term shoes. One of my biggest weaknesses is the tendency to wrap things and start with a clean slate whenever I get frustrated, rather than trying to fix the existing situation (rebooting vs restarting individual processes, etc). This is one of the things I need to fix in a number of aspects of my life (career included) in order to move on to the next level of Awesome. Ideas on how to do this are welcome - it's mostly something I'm trying to keep in mind, and I've written "don't just reboot - stay and fix things" on a piece of paper in my wallet, to remind me, for starters.
2. Communication (something everyone on the team wanted to improve). To make this more concrete, past FUDCon Tempe (as a break-in grace period), every workday I don't send a status email to my team's internal mailing list, I will donate $5 to an open source related charity. (Suggestions welcome!) Note for blog readers: when possible, I'll make the status reports blog posts, and then simply have my email to my team link to my blogpost; I don't work on very much internal stuff at all (it's mostly filing expense reports).
3. Not working all the time, nor expecting myself to. I should work hard when it's time to work hard, and rest completely when it's time to rest, not try to work 100% of the time and then end up flailing in this twilight zone of semi-ineffective work. On this note, I'll be taking at least one day each week - almost always a weekend day - completely off work (getting up in the morning to going to sleep at night). It's surprisingly hard for me to *not* do work, but I think doing a bit more of that might actually make me work... better.
That's it.