Self-Improvement, Accountability and Transparancy

This will be a quick blog post, but one that will mark a new page in my writings.

As the title suggests I want to be more accountable and transparent with what I am doing. Just by having a website that I blog in monthly does this a little. For example I am transparent that I want to blog once a month, and I’m held accountable as it is public. This maybe isn’t the greatest example, but hopefully you get the point.

Moving forward, these are processes and constructs I want to start and/or continue doing.

Ask me anything!

I recently came back from ReactRally 2017 (which was awesome). In Sean Larkin’s presentation, he mentioned that he has an AMA. I took at look at it, and I thought it was an awesome idea. In the vein transparency, I decided to create one and link to it on my website.

I don’t have high hopes for many questions coming in, but at least it is there.

Progress Posts

In addition to the monthly blog posts, I want to publish a new series of progress posts. I’m still not 100% sure what they will entail, but I have seen other blogs do something similar. Right now these are some ideas I’m playing with:

• Updates on progress in any side projects
• Blog analytics
• Productivity (i.e., RescueTime, pomodoros)
• Fitness/Activity
• Knowledge consumption (i.e., videos, articles, books, podcasts, courses)
• GitHub stats

This would be a living experiement. I’m not too sure I’ll keep going with it, or what I’ll be tracking progress on. I’ll likely make adjustments to what I’m tracking and writing about, as well as the frequency of updates. I’m going to start with monthly updates, although we’ll see how that plays out.

Ideally I want to do this so that I am more transparent in what I’m doing (on a finer-level), but also accountable in what I’m setting out for myself. A side bonus is having an archive of data (although probably not in an ideal format – maybe I’ll make some kind of JSON as the raw data for each update haha).

It would be sick to pull something like Stephen Wolfram’s Personal Analytics, although that seems like quite a system he had put together.

Now Page

I already have a now page (link points to where I got the idea from) located in the top navigation of this website. The contents of that page detail what I’m doing now. I haven’t been that regular in updating it, but it is something I want to work on.

In a way the Now page could also act as a holding ground for my progress posts, with the next set of goals.

The Goal

With the accountability aspect, I’m hoping that I can push myself for deliberate self-improvement. Not only in software development, leadership, but in all aspects of my life. The progress posts and the now page should will hopefully be the catalyst in starting this trend.

I still have to give this article, Design your personal growth, a read. It offers a plan for self-improvement, and hopefully I can incorporate something like that in these new changes I’m implementing.