It’s about the start of a new year for me now. I know, it’s late February, and we’re almost a sixth of the way through the year, but I’ve been on sabbatical. In fact, with planning for the break, I’ve really missed almost two months of work at this point. I deliberately did not make any resolutions or planning at the end of 2019, since 2020 wouldn’t really start for my career until about now.

Now is the time to plan, and I will do some writing on my blog for the things I want to tackle, but I also want to think about my plan. The main reason for this is the SQLskills newsletter from Jan 7 (#214), in which Paul Randal wrote an interesting editorial on the start of the New Year. There are a few things in the newsletter, but one of the items was about resolutions and planning for the new year, but by starting the process while looking at the previous year.

I wrote about learning goals last year, and then blogged a bit about them throughout the first third of the year. I then pivoted a bit, with an outside commitment that ate up a bunch of my personal time. Despite having a reminder in my calendar, I never got back to the books I’d planned on reading.

2019 Rating : Failure

I’ll do more of a review on my blog, and then planning, but the important things I got from Paul’s note is that I didn’t go a good job of not only reviewing last year, but also I didn’t end up reviewing it periodically after a few months. Not only did my goal fail, but my review of my goal failed.

There’s a lot to be gained from some self-analysis, and maybe even a review of your analysis by a spouse, partner, mentor, or close friend. In my case, I ended up doing more speaking and traveling than I’d expected, didn’t even complete my commitment, focused my reading time on fiction and escaping from life, and really ignored a bit of my career goals.

I don’t know if I’ll do better this year, but just writing this and thinking about the process will help me do something different. Hopefully you are keeping up with your goals, but if not, maybe you need a mid year review, as I’m doing now.

Steve Jones

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