Categories
Fitness Life

New Year’s Resolutions

There’s nothing like the New Year to make us think of what’s important and what changes we wish to make during the year. This year, I’ve broken my resolutions down into sections, although this will be the first time I’ll have written them down.

Family

Last year was a bit of a disaster. There wasn’t enough family time. A busy work schedule for myself and my wife being relocated to Kuala Lumpur for work made family time rare. As my son is growing up and becoming more active, I want to spend more one on one time with him. Father-son time.

Fitness & Health

In 2016, I discovered Ultimate Frisbee, and have been practicing multiple times per week. Two international Ultimate tournaments have been booked in for the first half of the year, with hopefully another two in the second half.

While Ultimate keeps me fit, I would like to reach a level of fitness that I’ve never had before. To get things started, I’m joining forces with a friend, Ben, to do the 1000 Reps Per Day challenge. It’s simple enough; 1000 reps per day, 6 days a week, with Sundays off:

  • 100 Pike Push Ups
  • 100 Push Ups
  • 100 Squats
  • 200 Sit Ups
  • 100 Dips
  • 100 Jumping Jacks
  • 100 High Knees
  • 100 Burpees
  • 100 Pull Ups a day for 30 days.

This will be a replacement for my usual gym routine until the 30 days is complete.

Progress reports will be posted on Instagram @aaronportbury with #1000RepsADay

Work

2016 was a productive year for work. I was very lucky to have amazing long term clients throughout the year, which reduced the need to source ongoing projects. This year I would like to be more product focused, packaging some of the components from common projects, and selling them as a fixed priced package; themes, plugins etc. I believe this will add a high value, entry level price point for new clients, and will help free up some of my time to spend with family, friends, and work on higher end projects.

Personal

Coding. I want to be a better coder. Specifically full-stack JavaScript. While I use JavaScript every day with my WordPress development, I really want to understanding the deeper workings of JavaScript and build complex full-stack apps using NodeJS on the backend and ReactJS on the front.

To get started, I’ll be joining the #100DaysOfCode challenge: Coding for at least one hour per day, for one hundred consecutive days. The time I spend coding for my day job won’t count towards the one hour per day. I’m hoping this will encourage some of our regular Coffee and Code attendees to also join in.

Accountability

Now that everything is written down and published, I have more reason to push through and will rely on friends and family to hold me accountable.

The next 30 days will be hard, with an extra 2 hours added to my schedule with the #1000RepsADay and #100DaysOfCode challenges, but I’ll push through!

Bring on 2017!

Categories
Life

2016 in review

2016 was about letting go.

Fussy, anal retentive, OCD – All words used by friends and family to describe me.

2016 was the year that I stopped being vegetarian after 7 years. Stopped caring (as much) what people think of me. I also started smoking.

So from a hippy like, vegetarian, overly sensitive, anal retentive, OCD control freak, to a more laid back, social, drinker, Ultimate Frisbee player who smokes cigarettes.

There’s still more work to be done, but life feels less stressful because of those changes.

Bring on 2017.

Categories
Minimalist Organisation

Living Without Baggage – How To Remove The Clutter From Our Lives.

About 3 years ago, I made the decision to remove anything superfluous currently in my life. In my mind, I’d be down to a suitcase in no time.

Whilst I did get down to a suitcase pretty fast, everything else ended up in a storage unit and was only temporarily out of sight.

It certainly wasn’t out of mind, and it took a further 12 months to clear it all out. It didn’t fully hit home how light I now am until a recent trip back to Australia, where I packed everything I own into my suitcase.

According to the airport scales, my life now weighs 23kg.