Sometimes I have high ambitions for myself and decide to do something other than play PUBG all night after getting home from work. At the start of this year I made myself a checklist of things I wanted to accomplish by the end of January. Most of those items were things I wanted to accomplish by the end of 2017 but this time I was serious!

January ToDo List -Write two blogs -Upload Iceland pictures -Work on Iceland vacation video -Define ship features for my HomebrewDB app

— Kevin (@raincitycoder) January 3, 2018

I went on an amazing Iceland trip back in March 2017 with three friends and I have hundreds of pictures and videos of the trip I want to share. I used to blog semi-regularly about tech stuffs, personal stuffs, and game stuffs in order to get myself into a creator mindset and not just a consumer. And lastly I have been working on a Windows10 application to help tabletop GMs to keep digital homebrew files organized. I have over 2 gigabytes of files on my computer detailing homebrew adventures, monsters, and items in a loose folder structure that I’ve realized is almost unsearchable on its own, so I set out to create a program to help me find a cool piece of magical treasure on the fly.

And I really was serious, I wanted to do these tasks! And I did work on them…a little bit. But I didn’t finish by February. I still haven’t finished them all and now it’s well into April! I have uploaded the Iceland pictures, I have made progress on my HomebrewDB app but it isn’t ready for the release, and this will be my first blog post in over two years. I’d hardly call that close to completion. I’ve always enjoyed finishing goals so much that when I don’t I end up agonizing about what went wrong. Was it my planning? Was it my competence? Was the goal too unrealistic? Did I not train enough to summit that peak? Or maybe I didn’t bring the correct equipment? I should have bought those new shoes, then I would have made it!

The guilt and anxiety we take upon ourselves for failing is not healthy. So, one of the things that I like doing instead is taking a look back and see what I DID accomplish, outside of the original goals. Many times, there are things that were still great accomplishments, took a lot of work, or had a great pay off that I can still be proud of. These aren’t excuses for not completing the original goals (still gotta do those!) but rather to prove that I’m not incompetent. Sometimes the literal goal is what you need to accomplish (a task at work or cleaning the bathroom) but sometimes a goal just gets you moving towards action!

So here are some other things I am proud to have accomplished:

• My sister and I decided to book a trip to Great Britain within 3 hours, planned the whole trip in less than a month, AND pulled it off effortlessly. It was a blast traveling with my sister and we had never been to Scotland and Wales before!
• I’ve launched a new homebrew D&D campaign that I’m very proud of. I’ve done a bit of world building and crafted adventures before, but this is the first entire setting I’ve written myself with it’s own nations and factions. Play sessions are going good so far!
• I’ve been running an AirBnB, successfully too I think! I’ve also found out that I don’t want to be running an AirBnB for much longer…it’s been a lot of effort and time for less payoff than I’m getting out of it.
• I worked on a chrome extension that calculates some fun statistics based off players’ dice rolls inside Roll20.