I need to write more. That’s why this blog is here. This week I celebrated my eighth year working as a remote employee. All of my years as a remote employee, I have worked in different country than the majority of my coworkers. As a result, most of my professional communication is written. I am also a programmer, so my primary non-communication output is written. So I write a lot.

I listen to the Cortex podcast, and the hosts discussed their themes for 2019 in the most recent episode. I have decided to adopt the practice of using yearly themes, and have chosen two: operationalization and unity.

My third child is due nine weeks from today, at which point I’ll have a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and a newborn. When my first child was born, I wrote a blog post — which I may repost to this blog in future — that was about how I needed to be more organized. Five years later, and I can honestly say that I’ve done better, but I’m still not happy with my life’s organization. I feel like my life is “on the rails”, but I’m not consistently doing all the things I should be doing. So I plan to use operationalization as my guiding principle in 2019. The two tools I plan to use are the GTD organizational system and my Google Calendar. Expect blog posts about both in the future.

Unity is harder to explain, and requires some background explanation. I frequently refer to Past Mak and Present Mak. My memory is awful, and that fosters a sense that things I did in the past were actually done by another person: Past Mak. Unless an event was truly special, I’m likely to forget it. A friend once remarked that the reason I talk so much is so that I will say everything I’m ever likely to say, and then “That sounds like something I’d say” will be a reliable heuristic. There’s also a concept called “dynamic inconsistency” and “time inconsistency”, describing the phenomenon of people making different choices at different points in time. So I will aim in 2019 to be unified — not inconsistent — with my choices. Present Mak should be able to put events on the calendar and expect that Future Mak will agree that they are the correct choice when they arrive.

So that’s the plan for 2019. We’ll see how this goes…

P.S.: For many programmers, the first program they ever write displays Hello, World! on the screen. For me, the first program that I ever wrote displayed Swab The Deck!. That message was suggested by the QBasic book I was learning from, whose title is lost to history.