New Year's Resolutions 2020

In 2019 I finished my PhD which has been a goal for a very, very long time. I’m finding myself in a space right now where I feel a little frustrated that everything hasn’t fit perfectly together. To some extent I feel like there’s a lot of things I should do right now, but also I’m slowly realizing that happiness is going to be a mental state I put effort into achieving and not a “thing I’ll get to when my PhD is done”.

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Other than that I have some general things I want to do next year:

1. Finish the thesis - Waaaait a minute.


2. Accept life as it is - As I said, I spent a lot of the end of my PhD feeling like I’d be “happy” once I finished my PhD. And then I did and then realized that my mental state was going to be something I had to manage on my own. So I want to try to take a bit of time and a bit of energy each day to being happy.


3. Go on more adventures - Big or small I want to have a stream of interesting things I’m doing and planning to do. I want to organize my life and work in such a way that I have the flexibility and freedom to see things and people that are important to me.


4. Read more - I gave my students advice to read more at the end of a System Administration class and I should take that up myself. I want to schedule time each day to read.


5. Move Projects Forward - I want to get things done for my personal projects and my home and I want basically to try to work on one or the other of those each day. I’m also not quite sure how yet, but I need to find a way to handle those projects that have stumbling blocks that need to be moved past. I set numbers to this last year, and didn't really follow through, so I'm just going to do my best to keep moving.

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