I’ve never been a big on making New Years resolutions, but I have come up with them on occasion. Generally, throughout the year, I also set goals for myself that are usually unattainable in that they would involve completely changing my lifestyle or personality in some way or another. I’ve decided to dispense with all that, semantically anyway, and instead try to improve myself through experimentation. There’s very little pressure when it comes to an experiment, even if it fails you’ve still learned something. For example, one of the things that can kill my productivity is thinking about one thing while I’m doing another. If I’m trying to write some code but I’m thinking about something I wanted to write about here, it makes my coding less productive. If I have two projects and I’m working on one but thinking about another, I’m not really optimizing my time. So my current experiment is trying to do whatever I’m thinking about. If I find myself reading a book but thinking about work, I’m going to try and get up and do the work, rather than having a sub-optimal reading experience. If I’m having a conversation with someone, I’m going to try to concentrate on the conversation either by focusing on what we’re discussing or turning the discussion toward whatever it is I’m preoccupied by. It will be interesting to see if I can even succcessfully perform the experiment and whether or not it makes me more productive. (It seems to be working so far – I’m writing this piece because I was thinking about it while I was trying to get something else done.)