Goals

This year I plan on changing up the process just a little bit. While I still want to have a few goals that are for the year as a whole, I also want to come up with one super simple and achievable items for each month. The reason for this is that, upon reviewing last year, it became clear that there wasn't a whole lot to keep things happening. So, this year I want to ensure that there are activities with enough frequency to keep the engagement and excitement - while still being realistic.

For the past few years I've made a list of the things I would like to accomplish in the new year. For the most part, these items are more than resolutions; they're meant as a plan of attack for personal growth and development. Each item is something personal to me, is meant to be actionable and something I honestly hope to accomplish. Of course, a year is quite a bit of time, so anything can happen. Lets see how I did...

Every year, a large chunk of the people who set resolutions are destined for failure. Complete and utter failure. While we can all speculate the reasons, more often than not, it comes down to a combination of procrastination, unactionable goals and lack of a clear game plan. Seriously.

Starting from scratch, with severely limited free time, has been a challenge - to say the least. However, it has afforded me a few luxuries; most notable is that I can truly start fresh. Because of this, I have taken quite a bit of time to step back and evaluate new directions. My current company, Epoxy Labs, has served me well for many years. However, much of the work I have produced under that entity is either locked away behind NDA's or no longer online. This was by design; it was meant to provide income and experience, not an elaborate, hyped portfolio. It also worked out well because my work spoke for itself and word of mouth recommendations replaced any need for ever advertising my services. However, times are changing - as is the model for the web. Custom, contract-driven, one-off solutions are no longer the value proposition that I want to target. Instead, I feel that its time to move on to something new. My goal now is to create a fresh company with a focus on delivering simple, intuitive and elegant SaaS solutions; read: products. These need to be so compelling that the ROI is instantly understandable and the barrier to purchase must be incredibly low. They need to be worth their weight in gold, but cost the same as tin.

I have finally gotten The Tomboy and the Geek back online! This is third site I needed to restore and is right in-line with my Year of the Hustle post. This particular site is meant to help keep our friends and family in the loop with what we've been up to. The site previously housed years worth of pictures and content, so it will take a while to get the old content (as much as we still have) republished and available.

I am happy to report that CurtisRissi.com up and online! Its not much, but its at least a start and will continue to increase in functionality over time. As mentioned in my post, "The Year of the Hustle", this is simply one item of step one, but is, by far, my most critical site and seeing tangible progress is invigorating. The site is my first real attempt at implementing a Twitter Bootstrap theme and was a great learning experience. If anyone reading this has suggestions, please list them in the comments; I'd love to hear them.

2013 has begun and so far its off to a great start; the holidays were fantastic, the kids are happy and Nancy and I have a renewed focus on making ourselves independent. In a nutshell, this year is going to be the year of the hustle. To help kick it off with a bang, my focus is going to be on new sites and projects built with modern tools and cloud-based infrastructure. Yup, if it all works out, 2013 is going to be one wild ride.