Day 1: A laundry list of things to do

A new year demands a new start and so it is with this blog. Starting everything afresh from day one, I will be regularly writing about what I'm working on, the books I'm reading and to some degree or another the successes, failures and the journey betwixt the two, of being a one man startup.

The aim of this post is to mark 2012 as a sea change from how I treated this entrepreneurial adventure in the past. During the past year I have been altogether too willingly and sometimes unwillingly distracted from the main task at hand by job interviews, contracts and frankly lethargy and all-around disinterest. Add Reddit and a healthy dose of late night to early morning video games and you have a recipe ripe for being unproductive.

Reading between the lines here is not much of a task: I consider most of 2011 pretty much a white-wash as far as achieving my intended goals, or much of anything for that matter.

 So, what are those goals specifically? Well, it's hard to quantize ambition but here's my best attempt at codifying what I want to achieve before 2012 is out:

1. Establish a company in name or function, which has high potential.
2. Develop at bare minimum one successful mobile application.
3. Begin work in earnest on a much larger project.
4. Read, comprehend and make notes on every book I bought in 2011.
5. Keep a personal journal of notes, thoughts and ideas.
6. Regularly update this blog with how things are progressing.

 Wishful thinking notwithstanding, it would be really nice to:

1. Earn enough through software sales to legitimately call this my full time job.
2. Develop a simple but useful app which deploys to all major mobile platforms.

The above wish lists aside, the main goal of the year will be to begin working towards making the one man startup a realistic and achievable goal. I am currently lucky in that I can live and work at home at little to no cost, but living with your parents is not a long term ideal, far from it.

Being financially independent while still being your own boss is the real goal here. So achievement or no of that goal will be the true measure of the success or failure of 2012 for me personally.

All that said, I'll be spending the next few days to a week organising things, clearing out the office of distractions, working on a schedule, making up predictable to do lists and basically just getting on with the matter at hand. So I'm not sure what I'll be able to come up with to talk about on the blog, but I'm sure I find something.

Today however, being Sunday is a day-off. Not the best start, but a promise I have made to myself is to never allow the lines between home and work become as muddied as they have been in the past. That means no working weekends and work day ends at 6pm no matter what. We'll see how well that progresses in the coming year, I fear it may be somewhat too wishful. 

More to come as it happens.