Happy New Year to everyone. I actually took the holiday season pretty well off this year, for possibly the first time in the last decade. I still did a little work for MetaFilter and kept up with email, but my posting frequency went down to almost nothing which is okay by me. So, I hope you had a good holidaytime.
I have a few personal resolution-type things over on jessamyn.com but I’ve also got a few work-related ones. Last year all my assiduous recordkeeping was interrupted by a hard drive crash, so I was doing great on keeping receipts and tracking invoices until about August and it fell apart. This year I’ve already got a weekly backup system in place so I’m anticipating no similar three month setbacks. A non-librarian mailing list that I’m on has been talking about 2009 plans and one of the main bits of wisdom that came down the wire in the last month was this
Resolution: Don’t be good at things you hate.
For me, what this means is just because I’m good at solving technical problems, it doesn’t mean I need to always do it as a job (or hobby), or do it for people who aren’t decent about it (whether that means decently polite, decently paying or decently convenient). I did a good job last year limiting the amount I was teaching — I love teaching but working within the chaos of a school environment was difficult and frustrating for me — and I think that really added to the ease of the other things I did in my life that I loved.
So, for 2009 I have some work related goals
– Automate the Tunbridge Library
– Maintain the VLA site to a degree that people are happy with
– Give interesting well thought out talks to interested people in neat places
– Keep teaching classes and drop-in time at a level that’s not exhausting
– Be a better “social” and real life networker and library friend to people new in the profession
– Keep writing for Computers in Libraries and try to get them to call what I write a column and not a department.
– Maintain this blog and launch fun new project blog (details forthcoming, sorry to be a cryptic jerk)
– Share as much of my personal work content as possible (see next post)
– Make a little movie about my many jobs
What are you thinking about doing?
In 2009 I’ll get familiar enough with manga that I feel comfortable putting together a YA booklist for shonen and shojo manga. Not sure about the rest of it–it depends on if I get the job I want….