At the beginning of 2019 I did something I have not formally done before which is to set myself a number of formalized goals for the year(I wrote a blog post about it here). Like many I have always told myself next year I would be better but without anything to track it by how can you know. Below is a summary of how I did against each goal and all in all I am pretty happy even though one of the goals was a non starter. I will definitely be setting my self new goals for the year.

Write 25 blog posts (0 or 25)

Writing is one of those things I have lacked confidence in for most of my life so to help get me started I set myself a goal of writing 25 posts. Sadly I did not see this through at all as I can barely count the two posts I did write as legitimate posts towards this goal. I did however contribute a chapter to in book (you can find it here) co-written by several authors, this was an interesting experience and something I hope to do again. I will be setting my self a similar target again this year but making the goal more granular as 2-4 posts per month (Still to be decided).

Read 25 books (26 of 25)

As a kid I used to read a lot but have not done so for many years. 25 book works out to a book every two weeks which at times was a push but I managed to achieve the goal and even managed to sneak in an additional book during the December down time taking me to 26 books read. Many of the books were in the business category but I also read some great fiction books. I did learned that my reading speed is not what it should be or at least what kindle thinks it should be but I feel it had gotten better as we went through the year. The books I read were:

Title	Author
Making Work Visible	Dominica Degrandis
The DevOps Handbook	Gene Kim
Fast Focus	Damon Zahariades
Zero to One	Pieter theil
Good Omens	Terry Pretchet & Niel Gaiman
The Truthful Art	Alberto Cairo
American Gods	Niel Gaiman
Real world Kanban: Do less accomplish more with lean thinking	Matthias skatin
Agile Project Management with Kanban	Eric Brechner
Measure What Matters: OKRs: The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth	John Doerr
80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster By Training Slower	Matt Fitzgerald
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike	Phil Knight
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy	Cathy O’neil
Exam Ref 70-767 Implementing a SQL Data Warehouse	Jose Chinchilla
Exam Ref 70-768 Developing SQL Data Models	Stacia Varga
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup	John Carreyrou
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It	Chris Voss
Beginning DAX with Power BI: The SQL Pro’s Guide to Better Business Intelligence	Philip Seamark
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones	James Clear
I Am Legend	Richard Matheson
Data Strategy: How to Profit from a World of Big Data, Analytics and the Internet of Things	Bernard Marr
Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t	Simon Sinek
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World	Cal Newport
The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data	Gene Kim
The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut Book 1)	Mary Robinette Kowal

Run 1000 km (1000 of 1000)

This was the second time that I set myself this target after failing to reach it in 2018, I’m happy to say that I was able to do this although with some difficulty. I picked up and injury in September that kept me off the road for two months resulting in needing to run 170 km in the final month. All was on track with two weeks and 54 km to then I picked shin splints (no doubt from pushing too hard), I tried resting it for a week but this did not help so in the end I ended up “Power walking” this last bit which ironically felt harder an than actual jogging but I was glad to have finished this challenge and look forward to doing something similar in 2020.

Hire two employees (2 of 2)

I set my self a professional goal for 2019 to hire two employees for my company (A big leap when it has only been me for the last few years). I hired my first employee in March and in December hire my second although he will only start in February 2020 (I’m still counting it). In addition to the two employees I also made the decision to merge\create a new company, the company is called Cobalt Analytics and was founder by James McGillivray (L) ,Neville Marle (L) and myself where we will help our clients with their Business Intelligence and Analytics needs. this take us to a total of 5 people all together which I thing is a really good result.

I created a simple power BI report to track these goals, for some reason this does not render in WordPress, if you would like to see the report please follow this link

In the next few days I will be documenting my goals for the year ahead.