Goals for the New Year

This is a somewhat rambling post I wrote off and on over the span of a few days. It is mainly for my own benefit.

When I was younger, I used to be highly skeptical of the idea of New Year's resolutions. "If one lives one's life rationally," I used to opine (very rationalistically), "one does not need to make resolutions in the first place."

Nothing could be more off-base than to scoff at the idea of resolutions. Certainly, part of living rationally is evaluating how one is doing and making any needed adjustments. Making such assessments and adjustments on a yearly basis provides one with a crucial perspective over time that otherwise gets lost in one's regular routine. Indeed, it may even be aspects of that routine, as in my case, that need to be changed!

And so I went on a hiatus from my blogging and most of my other normal activities at the end of last year. I relaxed and enjoyed myself. Being reflective by nature, I also started thinking.

I saw major room for improvement.

***

In the course of composing my blog's annual report (Which I will rewrite completely.) just before the holidays and taking a step back from blogging, I have realized that I am in need of refocusing.

This need to refocus became apparent to me in several ways. First, while I am happy that my blog is doing as well as it is in terms of readership indicators, I would like it to do better. Second, I began blogging as a way to get myself into opinion writing with mixed and overall disappointing (so far) results. I have not written that many opinion columns. I have succeeded in getting just one published. This is partly because I have devoted almost all of my writing time to blogging. Third, my overall career objectives involve me finding either a writing job or one that will give me plenty of time to write. Time spent blogging has not just cut into time for reading and more serious writing, it has caused me to lose sight of my next career move.

Due to many factors I will not discuss here, the exact timing of my next career move (and even what, exactly, it will be) is almost entirely beyond my control and will remain so for at least the next six months. But there are things I can start doing about it now while my current situation persists. These things are all united, believe it or not, and it took me some time to understand exactly how. The quick and dirty is this: My current job situation, which I once half-jokingly described to my father-in-law as a "Miltonic Limbo", makes it very easy to lose focus on long-term goals. And a lack of long-term goals can quickly infect other areas of one's life by making it difficult or impossible to set priorities rationally.

Having realized this, I have come up with a series of new year's resolutions whose overall aim is to get me back on track and blogging (not to mention doing many other things) more efficiently. The general scheme is:

(1) Actively research the options that my training and interests give me that will help me reach my goals as a writer.

(2) Set firmer boundaries between time at work and free time. Academic schedules are very flexible, which is both a blessing and a curse. If I want the advantages of not having to spend lots of time on evenings and weekends working, then I have to get used to having a lot less flexibility to do other things during what most people regard as "normal working hours".

(3) Find much more efficient ways to use my time.

(4) Take active measures to get my opinion writing career off the ground.

The concrete resolutions I have come up with are as follows. I have already begun a few of these.

1 a Study for and take the patent bar examination. Of the possible career moves I have researched so far, patent prosecution seems like the best option by far. It also seems hard to get one's foot in the door. This would help.

1 b Join the local intellectual property law association. I will probably have to move out of Houston when my wife becomes a resident after medical school. Surely, someone in that association will know contacts in whichever city we end up. And if I don't have to leave my favorite town, I'll have a gazillion more contacts here (than I have already) when I do -- er, don't.

1 c Finish the exercises I started before the holidays when I consulted a professional career counselor. This includes finding out what other options besides patent prosecution there are.

2 Spend no more than 30 minutes between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm on blogging. This allows me to answer comments within reason or make a quick post about something particularly newsworthy, but also gets me into the habit of budgeting my time wisely, something academia seems to oppose almost militantly.

3 a Learn how to use GNU Emacs. This had been a post about why I decided to learn Emacs way back when I started it, but I began thinking of the bigger picture in the process. If you want to know why I'm learning Emacs, go here and knock yourself out. In short, this will make it far easier for me to concentrate on the content of what I am writing rather than its layout.

3 b Find better ways to follow news and opinion outlets, and bloggers. This will involve finding a good RSS feed aggregator, among other things.

4 b Write at least one column and submit it for publication every two months. This at once sounds modest (probably to my readers) and difficult (certainly to me). In Miltonic Limbo, where the availability of a weekend for serious writing or editing is uncertain more than a week or so in advance, six is probably a hard, but realistic goal. It is also, I am embarrassed to say, twice what I wrote last year.

4 c Compile contact information for opinion outlets likely to publish my columns. More contacts equals a greater chance of getting published with each submission.

4 d Compile a list of contact info for major bloggers who might like my work. The next time I write something I'm really proud of, I want to be able to follow Diana Hsieh's advice with a minimum of fuss.

4 e Finish the various blog improvements I started last October by the end of this month. I know what these are. I just need to get off my keister and do them.

My main reservation about this list is that the patent bar exam, according to all I have spoken to, is extremely difficult and will take a lot of time to study for. I will take a self-paced course, but it is quite possible that this will interfere with some of my other writing goals. If necessary, I'll have to adjust some things, perhaps to include my blog posting frequency.

-- CAV

---

"What's Emacs?" you say. It's a highly adaptable text editor, and one of the two most widely-used in the Unix/Linux world. The reason I want to learn Emacs is that the knowledge would serve me not just in blogging, but also in my job and in my hobby as a Linux enthusiast. I sometimes have to write simple computer code for my work, and I frequently employ two markup languages (HTML and LaTeX).

I've gotten by, I am almost embarrassed to admit with pico and nano for years, but neither offers the flexibility afforded by Emacs. Most of my fellow bloggers will wonder why I don't simply migrate to another WYSIWYG editor aside from the one native to Blogger. I have several reasons, negative and positive for this.

1 I have never seen a WYSIWYG editor that gives you exactly what you think you're going to get. You have to know the underlying markup language to get optimum results anyway, and you still have to look at your work through a real browser anyway. WYSIWYG is really just a good approximation for the final product. Nice, but hardly a necessity. (And a cursory glance through some Emacs documentation tells me that I can even get WSIWYG-like functionality fairly easily through an extension, if I really want it.)

2 To top it off, many blogging tools seem to assume web connectivity (as Blogger does) or are platform-dependent, which almost invariably means "unable to work without Windows". Emacs has neither problem and, if I must use it on Windows, it's been ported to that OS already.

3 Many editing tools have a small set of macros, or even simply give the user a choice between clicking an icon or entering the relevant HTML by hand. Blogger is a good example of this. Consider that workhorse of the blogosphere, the block quote. In Blogger, I can do some combination of two basic things to get the text of an article I'm writing about into a block quote. (1) I can dump the text into the WYSIWYG editor, highlight it again and click on an icon with quote marks. I then have to click to enter the HTML editor to make sure that any formatting I don't want (like a font specification) is not there or to remove it if it is. All that clicking is hard on my wrists (another reason I don't like Windows) and I'm still using the HTML editor, which is really just a very lame, macro-less text editor. (2) I can just dump the quote into the text editor and add any formatting I did want (like bold, italics, or hyperlinks) in addition to the blockquotes. Neither these nor any combo I've thought of so far is acceptable. I'd like to be able to add or delete HTML markups without typing them in (or deleting them) entirely, or having to use my mouse so many times my wrists fall off. Emacs will allow me to create my own customized set of macros, not to mention ...

4 I can search my HTML code (and easily do substitutions) in Emacs. I am, oddly and inexcusably, unable to do these things in Blogger's HTML editor. (This is irritating as blazes when Blogger chokes on a lone <font> tag -- caused by removal of formatting in the WYSIWYG editor -- in a document thousands of words long.)

5 If I'm going to take the trouble to learn a new software package, why not leverage the knowledge by learning something I can use in the world beyond blogging? Emacs will slow me down slightly at first (I am using it to compose this post.), but I will eventually be able to blog much faster than I do now. The goal is to be able to dump HTML links, relevant text, and any initial impressions into a text file, which I can edit later and then paste into whatever content managing tool I am using to blog.