Welcome, 2011

It is the start of a new year and as of tomorrow the start of a new for me personally which means it is time to think about starting some new practices and resetting/re-committing to some old ones.

Things I Need To Focus On;

I’ve never been very good at keeping track of tasks and staying on top of them so that is on of the things I want to work on this year.  As part of that I am trying to focus on priority management on a daily basis, putting things into a matrix that looks at importance and urgency.

	Urgent	Not-Urgent
Important
Not-Important

Part of my strategy this year is to make better use of gadgets to help me stay on top of things.  I’m using Tasks in MS Outlook and linking that that to Appigo’s ToDo application on the iPad.

One of my key goals this year is a change in my work role.  For a while now, due to a re-alignment caused by a review of corporate Span & Control, I’ve been an individual contributor but I miss managing staff.  I’m a big fan of Manager Tools and spent a lot of time during the past year re-listening to the majority of the Manager Tools and Career Tools podcasts.  As always the more times I listen to these podcasts the the more I gain from them and I would like to put what I have learned into practice.  This may mean leaving my current employer if I cannot find a suitable role internally. 

(Re-)Developing Some Key Skills;

My role hasn’t required me to due much “writing to persuade” and for lack of practice I find I have lost that skill.  I spent part of last year reading The Minto Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing, Thinking, & Problem Solving by Barbara Minto. I didn’t finish it but need to re-dedicate myself to finishing it and putting its principle’s into practice. I ordered my own copy via Amazon today so that I don’t have to keep the county library’s copy out for an extended period of time.

The Minto Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing, Thinking, & Problem Solving

Education

For the past couple of year’s I’ve also wanted to take an MBA, but with one daughter just graduated from college and a second one just starting there isn’t room in the budget for me to pursue that at the moment.  I’m also not entirely convinced of an MBA’s ability to pay for itself, particularly in my current role.  Just because I’m not able to pursue a degree at the moment doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t pursue the knowledge.  To that end I intend to ensure my reading includes books listed in the Personal MBA Reading List.

Blogging

For the past several years I’ve had a number of blogs including this one.  I have posted sporadically  but recognize that, even just as my own record, I should post on a regular basis.  This year I would hope to post regularly to this blog as well as another one I keep for Information Security Issues.

The above list isn’t an exhaustive list of what I hope to do this year in terms of personal development but if, with everything else that is going on this year, I can accomplish 80% of the above I will have done well.

 

While writing this, I was listening to "iPad Today 21: Holiday Shopping Apps, Spirits, Boutiques, Goodreader, 4.2 Goodness!" by Leo Laporte and Sarah Lane (I’m running my own personal iPad Today Marathon this weekend).

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