2019 - The Year of Advancement

20 Feb 2019

New year, new theme! Well, it doesn’t feel much like a new year anymore, as I write this in February(!), things have been moving very quickly indeed. 2019 will be the the second year using the theme concept and I’m really excited to get started having learned all that I did last year.

This year’s theme is The Year of Advancement. With a focus on Optimisation, Development and Improvement of things which already exist - no big changes! Essentially, taking what already exists and making it better, doing better at it or progressing it. Of course there is one big change and that’s getting married and frankly, that alone is a big enough change for one year (50 days to go!).

While I plan on keeping the theme concept there are a few alternations I’m going to take after thinking though last year. The first is to combine the theme with a high-level list of target areas and goals. The shift from a fixed list of annual goals to a theme was good, it gave space to allow things to happen more naturally, but at times it felt I was ‘riding the wave’ rather than driving progress. So instead I am going to maintain both, the theme in addition to a list of focus ares to help move forward - some of these are more traditional fixed goals, others are areas where I just need to be more aware and keep them in mind.

The second change I am going to make is to hold monthly checkpoints - I’ve found checkpoints a valuable process when running projects and hopefully a similar activity will help ensure that everything is still aligned, if it isn’t it will serve as an opportunity to do something about. I’m unsure how to implement this but my hope is that I can become accountable to the checkpoint, perhaps that will be a blog or tweet - who knows!

Aside from this wedding planning is coming along well, almost everything is done! Victoria has done a fantastic job organising things and I very excited for our big day and cannot wait to have all of our friends and family in one place - something that’s never happened before…!