Ask HN: What’s your plan in 2019?

Be more conscientious about planning my days--and therefore my weeks, months, and years. I have been out of school for five years now and I noticed recently that time feels like it slipped through my fingers like water. I hardly know where it went. Of course I know logically where it went--I was living them, after all--but in some respect it feels like somebody else was living them because I lived without aim or purpose or direction, simply taking things day by day.<p>I deal with a lot of uncertainty and over-intellectualizing things and over-analyzing things, and I&#x27;ve realized that none of that has actually helped me move in my life, whether forwards or backwards. I&#x27;ve sort of stood in place, but you never really stand in place because things move whether you want them to or not, so in some way I&#x27;ve stagnated.<p>I want 2019 to be the year that I put an end to living like this, and instead give myself some direction to go in, whether I can see the end or not. I&#x27;ve been paralyzed by my inability to make decisions, and I want to put an end to that by forcing myself to make some decisions--things related to my career, side projects, health, etc.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;ll quit rambling. I just don&#x27;t want to keep living on autopilot as I am right now.

Build more long-lasting artifacts. As a software developer that has primarily worked in startups, most of which no longer exist, it can be frustrating to have nothing to show for the hours I’ve worked. I envy a friend of mine who works as a 3D animator on feature films who can point out the exact shots he’s responsible for and always has a permanent record of his efforts.<p>I recognize that software inherently lacks the shelf life that mediums like film enjoy, but I plan to at least partially achieve this goal by writing more often, contributing to open source more frequently, shipping and maintaining side projects, and striving to make the company I work for a success — steps that will give me something concrete that others find useful &#x2F; enjoyable.

I completed my family this month. I have my dream job. I officially have everything I want in life, and now I just have to enjoy it all. So my focus is on:<p>- improving living, eating, exercise habits<p>- working on how not to lose perspective. I&#x27;ve turned down more money for more time with my family. I hope into my 30s I don&#x27;t accidentally lose perspective on what&#x27;s important. So far I think the trick is to live a poorer lifestyle than your income suggests you ought to, which drastically reduces all financial and employment pressure. Figure out how to persist this into the future.<p>- sing with my toddler more<p>- clean up the basement<p>- grok C++

Be more social.<p>I&#x27;ve lost touch with a lot of people over the past 5-6 years. I&#x27;ve jumped jobs, built up my career, moved locations, got married, had 2 kids, and I&#x27;m just naturally a home-body. One thing I&#x27;ve neglected is building and maintaining friendships.<p>Whether it just be going to a dinner party every week or so or just making plans with people that aren&#x27;t my wife+kids, I should get out more.<p>I also really want to start playing D&amp;D regularly again, so that might be a good place to start.

8 hours of sleep per night. That’s it.<p>If I can nail this, everything else will fall into place. I’ll naturally drink less alcohol and eat better. In the last few months, I’ve experimented (via Apple Watch) with the impact that alcohol and diet has on sleep.<p>The book Why We Sleep, combined with habit theory, has had the greatest influence on this decision.

I have two big goals:<p>- I want to complete my CS degree, get a post-graduation work permit (I am a US citizen going to school in Canada), and find a full time job<p>- I&#x27;d like to learn to deal with my anxiety better. I have a diagnosed disorder, and lately it has made it incredibly difficult to enjoy doing things outside of my comfort zone. I often have problems eating and socializing, and I would like to start seeing a therapist and develop coping skills to deal with the shit that goes on in my mind.

Leave the shell of a company that sucks the happiness out of me, and move somewhere warmer.

Get the home project completed, so it goes out of head and checklist. 1. I am building am application using firebase, AppEngine &amp; Cloud functions using node.js, Java previously used to be personal desktop reporting application using mysql(stock analysis), now trying to learn GCP and implement it there. Since my GCP free days are going to be over soon less that 60 days and reading too many articles make me wanna think. Can I do a google certification with what I know or even attempt. That&#x27;s point 2.<p>2. Do Google or AWS certification. Well everybody I know of in office or friends are doing AWS certification, I never heard of any body doing Google certification is it hard or less job opportunities. I am professionally a mainframe Db2 DBA certified and being a DBA liked the concept of RTDB firebase started learning it and love it that how I got lured in gcp. Anybody here on any experience on GCP certification and what are thing I should learn to Even attempt ?<p>3. Get back to running marathon &amp; exercising. This was scratched to get point 1 completed in 2018. I should try walking in 2019.<p>4. Have to get the thought process aligned. I would say I am a bad designer or architect. I plan something write it down and write all the steps and do it and after some time redo that entire thing in some other better way sometimes entire thing is changed and gives better results. Frustrating thing is double the time to do one thing. So have to focus on practical things rather than too much details or fancy things.<p>5. Meet friends often, this was also scratched to get point 1 completed. Whenever we meet we drink that takes away 3days(hang over day + pending things from previous day + sometimes destroys ideas &amp; motivation). One thing happy about is keeping myself occupied and less drinking (only two times this year. Thats equal to sober). Next year hang out with friends and keep off alcohol.

- spend 200h at the gym, like in 2018.<p>- sustain my passive income of ~€28k (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;herrmann.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;herrmann.io</a>)<p>- improve my file manager <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fman.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fman.io</a><p>- find one new source of (passive) income

- More trail running next year.<p>- Finish at least 2 books from my shelf (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;review&#x2F;list&#x2F;5198521-aljohn?shelf=to-read" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;review&#x2F;list&#x2F;5198521-aljohn?shelf=t...</a>)

2018 has been a lean year for me. Even though career-wise, I am doing alright, I am a little depressed about not being able to achieve certain things I thought I would by the time I am 30 [I&#x27;m 31]. I don&#x27;t know why I am writing here as I am usually private about my feelings on this topic. Perhaps because none of my friends&#x2F;colleagues in my social circle would come across this post. My greatest regret right now is being unable to give back to the society I come from in terms of improving the education system there. I have received so many gifts in life, but my desire to contribute back is getting lost in the travails of life.<p>This year I must concentrate harder than ever before.<p>Targets:<p>1. Get a tenure-track faculty position in a good institution<p>2. Develop an EdTech idea I have in mind<p>3. Say no to more things. More deep work on smaller number of things than ever before.<p>4. Upgrade my Python and HPC skills<p>5. Spend more time with my family<p>6. Stop postponing &quot;life&quot; like I did in 2018 in anticipation of career breakthroughs. Go see Europe or South America for a few weeks.<p>7. Washboard abs by summer? ;)

My biggest goal is to try to better organize the flow of information that I process on daily basis. I deeply enjoy reading and learning new things just about everything, but during the past couple of years, I have been feeling that quality of information I process has been steadily going down, retention decreasing and FOMO steadily increasing.<p>This comes in different forms:<p>- Filtering my numerous feed (Facebook, Quora, LinkedIn, Telegram, etc.) better.<p>- Developing a better routine around reading save articles. Currently I use Pocket + P2K to read things on the Kindle, it works pretty well, but definitely room for improvement<p>- Improving usage of org-mode to better store information. Maybe taking <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.buildingasecondbrain.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.buildingasecondbrain.com&#x2F;</a><p>And I guess just learning to let go some things that are not essential

Qualify for 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

I am completely clueless and confused.<p>I’m 23 yr old working in a dead end job at Oracle. Each day of my work just makes me feel more drained and irrelevant. I’m unable to change company because of visa (I’m on l1). I am split between changing the team or leaving USA for London&#x2F;India for good.<p>Leaving USA is a risky career proposition - which also pulls me towards doing a masters so that I can stay in US few more years and work on OPT without restrictions. However my friends who are currently pursuing masters are not getting jobs easily, which makes me wonder again. All these worries never give me enough time to pursue my dream of enterprenuership and starting up something seriously.<p>So many considerations, so many thoughts and a very confusing year ahead for me.

Physical - Body fitness: 3 month: Increase reps to 2 per workout, experiment with 2 days and 3 days between to find out how to increase strength. Cardio once per week, 5-10 minutes 6 month: Increase strength to 3 sessions per workout day. Cardio 15-20 minutes. 1 year: Increase mass to 140 lbs 2 year: Increase mass to 150 lbs Body wellness: 1 month: Stop drinking coffee 6 month: Stop eating sugar Stop masturbating to porn. 1 year: Stop picking lips (and stop using balm) 2 year: Investigate ways to heal ‘permanent’ damage (left wrist, right hand, right foot, neck, back, breast, eyes) 3 year: Heal 2 ‘permanent’ damage<p>Intellectual: Learn to program: 6 month: Complete 2 to 3 courses on edx, create simple program. 1 year: Complete 5 to 6 courses, complete moderately complex program or contribute to same open source. 2 year: Complete 10 to 12 courses, contribute to complex program&#x2F;large codebase. Right brain things: 2 month: Stop reading news. 6 month: Write weekly post, 3 paragraphs or more, about a topic of personal interest. Paint or craft 1 work of art. 1 year: Write 2 weekly posts or make two weekly videos 6 paragraphs or more on a topic of personal interest. Paint or craft 3 works of art.<p>Spiritual&#x2F;emotional Job: 3 month: Work on expunging record 6 month: Work in a place that doesn&#x27;t strain body, try out beekeeping to become more independent 1 year: Work for government or self in programming or computing. 2 year: Working prototype for $SECRET_VIDEO_GAME 5 year: Release $SECRET_VIDEO_GAME Family: 6 month: Have family dinner every Tuesday, join or create social group to foster encouraging socialization, became more vulnerable with wife and stop criticizing her. 1 year: Family dinner Tues, have weekly social meetings with diverse and encouraging groups, speak only integrously with wife and don&#x27;t direct aggression at her. 2 year: Have healing conversations during weekly family dinner, try and integrate extended family and friends with the dinner and foster healthy relationships that contribute to growth, try to actively develop more intimacy with wife. Subjectivity and reality: Observe, relax more often, be in others&#x27; shoes, &quot;educate&quot; less. Discover highest life purpose.

Do lots of projects which I&#x27;m yearning to do. It will consist of game engine, OS related stuff (probably some driver), databases etc

I like to call it 2FA - Fitness, Finance, Autonomy. All my activities will be around these themes, viz. Getting healthier, learning more about personal finance and planning around self-sufficiency in as many aspects of life as possible.

1. Start getting help for my depression and other mental health related issues. I&#x27;ve been dealing with depression for years now, been officially diagnosed about two or three years ago. I&#x27;ve had a few sessions with a therapist last year but I&#x27;ve broke off all contact with them since. I also have another mental problem which keeps me from eating 90% of food, which makes social gatherings in restaurants etc. a pain.<p>2. Start exercising more. I&#x27;ve bought myself some dumbbells earlier this year, and I&#x27;ve used them less than I&#x27;d like to admit. I wanna gain some strength to protect myself and other people from others, as well as have the strength to help people with moving etc. since i had to help with that a few times this year.<p>3. Get back into programming as a hobby. I&#x27;m slowly starting to regret turning my hobby into my job. I love programming, but when i get home from work i have no energy nor enthusiasm left to touch any of my personal projects. I&#x27;d love to add a bunch of planned features to my website which has about 1.4k unique users a day on average, but i need to get my motivation back first.<p>4. Contribute more to open source. This year I&#x27;ve made a whooping 4 pull requests to open source projects. Half of them one-liners. I&#x27;ve been part of this community for a while now and i feel the need to return something to it.<p>5. Do more volunteer work. I&#x27;ve donated to a lot of charities this year, but there&#x27;s only so much money i have left at the end of the month. I have a lot more free time than money, so I plan on spending some of my afternoons a bit different.

I am working on ideas that will make money for me while sleep. Will spend more time with family and friends doing the real work. Saying goodbye to social media sites.

1. continue learning Chinese (4+ years already)<p>2. get a new quant job<p>3. improve my marriage. It&#x27;s been awesome for 12 years now.<p>4. continue taking time to read each day but vary my subject matter even more.

I am taking my first step towards independence and also taking a big gamble. I will take a loan to do a masters in a field I have no previous experience in.

Learn how to invest - it seems to be <i>relatively</i> simple (especially if you&#x27;re a news nerd like most peple here) but emotionally deceptive. Not many people in Australia are doing it (past their regular Super&#x2F;401k-equivalent).<p>I&#x27;ve started to read the &#x27;classic&#x27; books (The Intelligent Investor for example), and will probably do some paper trading before I jump into the &#x27;real&#x27; thing

1. Continue to lose weight - i&#x27;ve lost 10 pounds the past month, would like to lose 30 more.<p>2. Work through PentesterLab Pro - past couple times I would get halfway through the first badge and just stop. This time I am pairing it with Anki cards.<p>3. Continue getting 7-8 hours sleep, been doing this since I read &#x27;Why We Sleep&#x27;<p>4. Learn Ruby&#x2F;Rails build a handful of applications.

1) Gained back some weight due to holiday stress&#x2F;drinking. Going to hard cut for a bit and try and get below 15% BF.<p>2) Try and get into some professional programming, deep into the internals of golang.<p>3) Do the entire &quot;Math for Programmers&quot; Book<p>4) Get into FPV Drone Racing. Autonomous flight. Have some ideas surrounding INAV and a 5&quot; Quad that I have.<p>5) Figure out how not to dread existence.

1. Learn Spanish. I have always been fascinated by people who speak multiple natural languages and have started learning spanish recently by talking with people on iTalki and doing various exercises around the internet. I would like to get to the B1 level by the end of the year. As part of this I would like to practice every day.<p>2. Move from test developer to regular application developer. I finished school and started my job 4 years ago and have not gotten a promotion or even change in position since. I have been living on autopilot and I need to take more charge. I would like to make software engineer, get a promotion or move jobs if those aren&#x27;t possible by the end of 2019.<p>3. go on more dates. Another thing I haven&#x27;t done enough of is dating. remedy this in 2019

* Officially launch byobudget.com - my first side project, hopefully on new years day.<p>* Continue at my day job.<p>* Have another child (crossed fingers)<p>* Being more kind, patient, understanding and towards my fellow man.<p>* Quantify myself - weight, food and sleep tracking, along with room temperature tracking<p>* Do a handstand for 60 seconds without support.<p>* Better manage my money<p>* Get good with the $20 dollar drone I got today :)<p>* Build stronger binds with my family.

Improving diet and exercise habits.<p>Diet &gt; more plant based<p>Exercise &gt; more “zone 3” cardio training and maintenance level weightlifting.

I&#x27;d like to just find my passion for this industry again. This year has slowly worn me down to where my interest is now escaping it in my off time rather than exploring.<p>It scares me that something I&#x27;ve always loved is finally turning into a job. Maybe that&#x27;s normal though.

Find a new job before I&#x27;m outsourced&#x2F;laid off at IBM&#x27;s newest acquisition.

Health and Fitness needs to be number 1 - part of that is reducing alcohol intake which is difficult as I am part of a very active social group which has a lot of alcohol and drug abuse.<p>Financially - reducing my cost base and actually getting to a new highest &quot;net worth&quot; figure (I&#x27;ve spent a lot on self education which has been very fruitful but I need that &quot;fuck you money&quot;)<p>Otherwise I need to diversify my income and move towards operating my own businesses - either contracting or a bootstrapping an info product. I think I need to bite the bullet and rebuild my income as 100% location independent because I hate the daily commute so much.

- Switch over to a mouse-less workflow.<p>- Stop being so negative and cynical.<p>- Stop caring about things outside of my control.<p>- Train my body harder.<p>- Learn a new instrument.<p>- Learn all the songs off one classic record. Probably an early Megadeth one.<p>- Read more books.<p>- Write regularly.<p>- Touch my toes. Handstand. Etc.

An old-school, pay-for blogging platform in the indieweb vein.

I should graduate after the upcoming Spring semester with a bachelor degree in CS. After that, I want to find a decent full-time job as a software engineer.

Leaving the industry.

a.)Need to read complete these books<p><pre><code> 1. The Personal M.B.A 2. Running Lean 3. Thinking Lean 4. The Automatic Customer 5. Bankable Business Plans 6. A programmer&#x27;s introduction to mathematics </code></pre> b.) I have a starup idea in education to shorten learning curve using education games, this is what I am planning.<p><pre><code> 1. Build M.V.P of educational games that teaches mental models or popular concepts or ideas release them on HN, take feedbacks. 2. Release a beta product 3. Grow the business to earn a living out of it. </code></pre> c.) Writing<p><pre><code> 1.) If everything goes fine, my book on Ripple will be launched in January 2.) I need claim back my top writer in innovation, technology titles on Medium 3.) Learn to write content that are scarce, indispensable and deep </code></pre> d.) Open Source Leadership<p><pre><code> 1. Find good problems to solve 2. Make a simple solution, open source the code. 3. Build a community and let it grow 4. Go back to Step 1</code></pre>

- Learn and grok Rust.<p>- Get certified on RHCSA, AWS, etc.<p>- Continue learning German<p>- Find a new job that allows me relocate to Germany &#x2F; Switzerland<p>- Find new sources of passive income

This is a note for my future self that I will come back to this. 1. Complete Beta of my &quot;AI&quot; SAAS offering and do a ShowHN in Q1. 2. Do a series of Medium posts with a deep dive on the Why, What, who and where? 3. Launch on PH, Reddit and start collecting feedback. 4. Go back to step 1 and repeat.

Wrote a blog post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;manu-chroma.github.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;ramble&#x2F;exploration&#x2F;2018&#x2F;12&#x2F;25&#x2F;some-ideas-for-2019.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;manu-chroma.github.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;ramble&#x2F;exploration&#x2F;2018&#x2F;1...</a>

Hopefully find different employment (with hopefully better pay and room for advancement) but based on all the rejections this year (between a previous bankruptcy and no degree I&#x27;m effectively an undesirable) I don&#x27;t hold much hope. Last year I had one company hire me, never once ask about my financial history, then terminate me while I was asleep the night of my first day of work after they discovered my bankruptcy (seriously, no document or paperwork even asked unlike every application I&#x27;ve ever filled out that specifically asks, nor did any of the people interviewing me or onboarding me) and this year I didn&#x27;t get notification either way from a half dozen companies and rejected after interviews with several others, one of which had me do three video interviews which may be common for tech type jobs but here in the Midwest anything past 1 interview means &quot;unless you&#x27;re a wanted fugitive, we&#x27;re hiring you&quot;, that was pretty defeating.<p>I just can&#x27;t do this job much longer and my primary employer keeps doing annoying things:<p>- This is the first year they didn&#x27;t give us a Christmas card and as a Christmas gift they informed us food trucks will no longer be allowed to come here as it violates the corporate solicitation policies... despite the fact they are food trucks we&#x27;ve been finding for years and inviting them to come out because we get tired of eating microwaved food and 30 minutes isn&#x27;t enough time to drive anywhere, get food, drive back and eat it and eating at desks is forbidden.<p>- They told us they&#x27;d be bringing more jobs to our location... I went from having 1 manager and 1 team lead to having 1 manager, 3 team leads and what is basically a &#x27;jr&#x27; team lead. All 3 of my team leads have been here half the time I have. They did this for every team and in every single case promoted people with considerably less time at the company&#x2F;in the industry than a good chunk of the applicants.<p>- Banned most decorations for holidays<p>- Made our insurance worse yet again<p>- Gave us a Trump tax break &#x27;bonus&#x27;, except to our pensions, and gave us an out-of-cycle cost of living increase (which if you read the fine print, did away with our next merit based increase meaning instead of 6ish months away the next one would be 18 months away).<p>- Continues to highly discourage any talking or socialization by placing a team lead or the &#x27;jr&#x27; team lead-like individual in every single row to watch every single employee.<p>- Etc

I am Planning to learn SEO and affiliates things,i have just lunched <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tweetvideo.info&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tweetvideo.info&#x2F;</a> twitter video downloader tool for learning process.

* Finishing my degree.<p>* Weekly goals: 10KM in runs, writers pages, meditation, being more put together (varying uniform from T-shirt, jeans and trainers).<p>* Making money in the markets (should be a good time to short)<p>* Becoming a whiz at linear algebra and data structures.

Leave tech

My plan is to show &quot;Oh By&quot;[1] to one million people.<p>The idea has always been that I have no idea what Oh By is good for and that someone (or many) will come up with surprising and interesting use-cases.<p>Recently on HN I was reinspired by the Tim May[2] interview[3] in which he said:<p>&quot;... the street will find its own uses for technology ...&quot;<p>Surprise me!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;0x.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;0x.co</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18690492" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18690492</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coindesk.com&#x2F;enough-with-the-ico-me-so-horny-get-rich-quick-lambo-crypto" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coindesk.com&#x2F;enough-with-the-ico-me-so-horny-get...</a>

Finish the product I&#x27;m building with some friends and start selling it, so I can finally leave my current company.<p>Also, get more fit, since I&#x27;m starting to lose my ideal weight.

Finally start doing creative stuff: work on animated music videos, make music of my own, develop my drawing skills, play some guitar.<p>Also, get into the habit of volunteering.

Pass CFA Level 1

Lose another 100 pounds. Get an MVC of my web-based DBMS onto GitHub. Learn trumpet.

learn D, work out a realistic timeframe&#x2F;plan to move back home (country not my parents house), travel domestically more, get back into a routine of riding my bike regularly.<p>Plus like a million other things.

I really start and finish writing the first draft of a book this year.

this november i left my job. i have lots of stuff to do<p>1. work on a project. hope that will generate some money. 2. start YouTube for fun 3. working out again 4. enjoying my time off

My Plan<p><pre><code> - Startup in FMCG(targeting rural area of India) - Books - Vision 2020(By APJ Abdul Kalam), Changing India(By Manmohan Sigh) - Investments</code></pre>

Do more cardio.<p>Align with BogleHead philosophy.<p>Use less stuff.<p>Learn more Go and Kubernetes.

Launched Draftss.com this year.<p>Currently at $7,000 MRR and aiming to achieve $50,000 MRR by end of 2019.<p>Planning to launch 2 more products in the first quarter.

- Launch couple of projects based on ideas that have remained with me for last couple of years.<p>- Spend 300 hours in Gym<p>- Apply to YC<p>- Pay off loan

My goals are : Learn how to invest Making $10,000 month Travel

Give up alcohol.

eat healthier and lose 10 Kgs of weight

Find a good girl and get married!

Scale Narwhal kloudtrader.com&#x2F;Narwhal and make it profitable so that I can pay myself. And introduce kloudtrader’s other financial solutions.