New Year Resolutions
January 30, 2012 2 Comments
The New Year is always about change. We all make resolutions to try to improve ourselves. For me, my main personal goals this year are simple:
- Interact more with my friends and former colleagues
- Blog more about business and food
- Build a website
- Get back into chess
Interact More
This one is a little more difficult than it seems. Social media helps and hinders. LinkedIn is a good indicator of size of network. I have 582 contacts on LinkedIn. Just to connect with everyone once a quarter requires 55 email threads a week, 11 for every working day. This just is not maintainable. I have had to split the list into two groups: business and personal.
The business list contains those contacts that I interact with regularly at work or used to interact with regularly in a prior role. These interactions are purely to get the current job done. I do not reach out to this group much as there really is no catalyst for conversation or I already see them all the time anyway. This group makes up 2/3 of my contacts.
The personal list contains those contacts which are truly interesting. These are often former colleague with whom I have a deeper personal connection. I want to know them better. I would love to work with most of them again. I want to know what is going on in their lives. This group makes up about 1/3 of my contacts.
So essentially I have 200 people with whom I am trying to build deeper connections and a stronger relationship. Ouch. The good news is that this boils down to 3 e-mail threads per day which is very doable.
Blog More
I want to share more of my experiences. The two most prominent areas for me are business and food.
I have always wanted to write books on business management. We’ll see if I can gather my thoughts well here. If so, these posts will become the core of the books. This is the hardest of my resolutions.
Food however is easy. Living in London gives me access to wonderful markets and a wide range of amazing food. It is really time to resurrect www.howieat.wordpress.com. More to come on this later. Maybe this will spawn into a cookbook or two. You never know.
Build a Website
I have been toying with some social media applications for the past few months. This experience has proven to me that the social marketing space has a huge hole that needs filling. I am working on a tool for authors to help get their marketing platform off the ground much easier. There is a lot left to do. More on this in the coming months.
Get Back into Chess
Another benefit of moving to London is that I now have access to some world class chess clubs. Unfortunately I have not played a game in 10 years. I will start playing again. First step, go to the first meeting…
The common theme here is time. I have let my time get pulled away from me over the past couple of years. As a result, I have stopped doing the things that I love to do. This year I am taking it back.
