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2011 Resolutions

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I’m not normally one to sit down and make New Years’ resolutions because I’m a big believer in constant, ongoing self-improvement as opposed to a big bang of improvements once a year.

That said, I’ve also learned that sometimes you need to simply draw a line in the sand to kick-start your motivation to actually accomplish tasks from that crazy-long to-do list you have. And that’s where I am. I spend too much time thinking about the things I want to do, and not enough time actually doing them. So here we go.

  • Come up with a set of New Years’ resolutions. Done.

  • Engage with people more often. I spend a lot of time hanging out in my head, and not enough time building relationships with people.

  • Improve relationships with people I already know. It’s really easy to put relationships on auto-pilot or the back burner. I want to be more intentional about growing relationships with people.

  • Publish my first book. Working on it, but I want to actually complete it and get it out to people.

  • Do my first speaking engagement. I’ve wanted to go on the speaking circuit for several years now, but was never intentional about trying to make it happen.

  • Take instrument lessons. Either drums or guitar. Or both. Maybe piano too.

  • Launch my first desktop app. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while as well. It’s time to do it.

  • Hit my weight goal of 180 lbs. I was almost there a couple of years ago, but the medication I’m taking made me gain some weight back. I want to be intentional about slimming down.

What are your resolutions for the new year?

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.