New Year Goals 2017

I really believe new years resolutions can be a great thing to drive people to self improvement. Not in a "New Year, New Me!" kind of way. That's silly. I don't want to be "new" I want to be "me", but a better me from past me.

I think the best way to achieve those is through setting yourself realistic weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals.

So what I've done is written down everything I want to achieve in the first 6 months of this year. I've divided these into big things and little things, as well as listed what I need to do to achieve them. In other words, I've broken them down into manageable new year goals.

Then after 6 months I want to look back on what I've achieved, what I haven't, why that might be, and create new goals for the following 6 months.

These are my goals for the first 6 months of this year, although I won't go into detail on the exact timeline (I'm sure that won't interest anyone).

My New Year Goals for the First 6 Months of 2017

J-EN Translations

I'd like to translate more. I translate a fair amount for work but I'd like to translate things that I enjoy and upload them to this website.

Things like novels, articles and interviews.

I'd also like to write more articles about translation, the industry and practices.

Japanese Talk Online

I run another website called Japanese Talk Online, which focuses on weekly articles to help people teach themselves Japaneses.

At the end of last year I started a Patreon. This is because Japanese Talk Online has been run in my own time for free without ads for the last 3 years. I'd like to do more for the people who donate to the website, and want to create special Japanese lessons through anime and manga for them. I'm still working out the kinks but hope to get this up and running by March.

I've also made a lot of free courses through JTalkOnline Memrise. I haven't been able to make any new courses for this for a while and would like to finish some courses that I'd started a while ago. Including a grammar course for JLPT N3.

Self Improvement

I've been wanting to complete some extra classes for a while now. I'm a huge fan of edX and Coursera which are both websites that provide free classes for various topics. I've signed up for Introduction to SEO and Intotroduction to Project Management, two fields that I've been interested in for a number of years and want to learn more about.

My big investment for this year will be evening classes in Translation and Interpretation at Bellevue College, Washington. This is to improve my own translation abilities (hopefully take the ATA exam) and learn interpretation. I've wanted to be an interpreter ever since I started learning Japanese and am excited to finally have the chance to study it.

I also hope to be a little fitter and healthier this year.

Summary

I hope to write an update on these goals in 3 and 6 months. That way I will be held more accountable to achieve them. If not by anyone else, then by myself.

I'm aware that when you plan too much sometimes nothing gets done, but I hope with careful planning and scheduling I will have a productive quarter.

What are your goals for this year? Anything exciting planned?