Lately I’ve found myself experimenting a lot more with what I’ve been building – trying to develop more efficiently, building things that aren’t necessarily needed but are nifty and challenge me to try stuff that’s outside of the usual features and functions.

I’ve been having so much fun just seeing if I can actually implement a lot of the random ideas I have. They’ve taken a few hours out of my afternoon, but by the end I am so ridiculously happy with actually building something that I didn’t think I could.

A sharable image that's auto-generated using GD Library

It starts out simple: Let me put some text on background and save that as an image. That grows into “OK, I need to deal with multi-line text.” Which turns into “Crap, what about long words?” And, finally, “Oh, you know, I should probably put a logo on these! How do I put an image on an image?”

Each time I get a little better at it and it’s slightly less frustrating.

I think I’ve finally reached a point where I can have an idea and just set about building it instead of being intimated by whether I can actually do it. It’s an amazing feeling.

Coding is actually fun for me now. Maybe it’s that I’m coding something I really care about. Maybe it’s that I need to up my game and try to build things that are more complicated, but for the first time I feel completely literate – like I’m just waving my hands over the keyboard and the code comes out without having to think about it.

So that got me thinking: Where does the Accompl.sh codebase stand right now?
I ran sloccount to find out:

Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
php: 33801 (99.25%)
xml: 159 (0.47%)
python: 95 (0.28%)

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 34,055
Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 1,097,568
(average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

34,000 lines of code.

I found an old sloccount output from the end of October 2011. According to that I’ve written about 10,000 lines of code since I left Etsy. That’s not even counting all of the terrible and redundant code that I’ve deleted in the last few months. Even discounting the few libraries I have on the server (to hook up to things like AWS and SendGrid plus some JS/jQuery things), it means I’ve written about 30,000 lines of code over the last 2-ish years.

Granted, I have no idea how this compares to other web apps, and the number of lines of code != a great app, product, etc, but those 30,000 lines of code have finally gotten me to a place where I feel like I actually may know what I’m doing. Maybe.

(P.S. Want a sneak peek at another one of my experiments? Check out the visual list page.)

1. Figure out what matters.

An obvious first step, but an important one. If you don’t know (or aren’t told, as the case may be) what’s important to you, it’s pretty impossible to focus on it. These days there are a few things that matter to me:

1. Growing Accompl.sh (70%)
2. Cooking more / Eating better (15%)
3. Growth / Learning (15%)

Knowing what you want to and need to focus on helps to filter out all of the noise and distractions. Assigning a weight to a certain bucket in your ‘what matters’ list helps to eliminate the need for a lot of time-consuming decision-making.

2. Figure out what’s hogging your attention

There are two ways to attack this one: Become extremely self-aware or use an app that does it for you. A combination of both is most effective.

Start paying attention to how you spend your time. How many times a day do you check Twitter? How many days a week do you find yourself sucked into the 8-11PM TV shows? How many times did you check Facebook before your morning coffee? I’ve been using RescueTime for a while now and though I don’t actually check on my stats very often, two things are working in my favor: 1) I know I’m being tracked so I’ll tend to be on my most-focused behavior and 2) When I DO check my stats, I can see where my huge time-sinks are.

3. Kill those things.

Get them out of your life. Or at least minimize their potential for distracting you. Notifications / status icons are a gateway drug. You THINK you can just check one or two, but before you know it an hour has gone by and what have you accomplished? Nada.
Some things to consider killing:

• Growl notifications – I turned these off during college and never looked back.
• Twitter notifications – You know – the ones that make the icon in your menu bar turn blue whenever there are unread tweets? Disable that now.
• Alert Sounds – My exception to this rule is the “first IM received” notification in Adium. You’ll especially want to kill things like the sign-on/sign-off alert in your IM client.
• Your TV – If you have one: unplug it from the wall. It makes it a lot more difficult to just casually flip it on for a show and get caught up from 8-11PM.

4. Get Stuff Done

Now that all of the distractions are out of the way: get to work! You’ll be amazed at how much more time you have in your day now. Maybe you’ll use it to get more work done, maybe you’ll finally get to go out to dinner with those friends you’ve been ignoring for the last few months, or maybe you’ll find a new project. The options are endless! Enjoy it!

Rinse and Repeat

Keeping your time in check is an ongoing process. Every couple of months (or couple of weeks if you feel yourself slipping), stop and take an audit of your time again. If you have something like RescueTime running, you can just check in on your stats and adjust as needed.

Don’t forget to have fun

Productivity is great, but balance is better. Don’t forget to build in time for play. Not everything you do needs to fit into your ‘what matters’ buckets. Sometimes you just have to turn off your brain. Burnout is a much bigger problem than losing a few hours to a movie or aimlessly poking around Facebook. Don’t forget to have a social life. Don’t forget to water your plants. Don’t forget to have fun. Most importantly: Don’t burn out.

I’d love to hear how you manage your distractions or what you’re doing with your new-found extra time. Leave your tips/updates in the comments! ↓

Wedding aside (story for another time), when it comes to nerd-cred I had a few learning curves to adjust to:

• I moved to Linode – my first non-managed server. (with the indispensable help of kastner)
• Being on Linode also means I need a pretty solid grasp of Unix commands. Going into this I was a master of cd, ls, pwd, and the occasional rm.
• Using the Terminal so much more means that I also had to get a lot more comfortable with vim. Luckily I had a pretty good primer in vim at Etsy.
• I moved to github – which I’ve now come to realize is the best. thing. ever.

I’m pretty sure I’ve leveled up in nerd-cred at least a few notches.

So that’s the elementary part. What’s this about “rudimentary”?

I’m a perfectionist by nature. And as a Product Manager for the last few years, my least favorite thing to do was pare down a given project to its barest minimum to hit some sort of deadline or resource constraint. I also think very “big picture” – how the system should look and function in the end state, how all of the pieces play together, etc.

On the flip side, I’m a huge fan of iterative development. As with everything else, there’s a certain balance that needs to be struck.

Over these last few weeks, I’ve had to tame my perfectionist habits and remember that being a perfectionist is only helpful when there’s something to perfect. If all I have is a perfectly designed site with amazing UX but no users and broken bits all over the place, what’s the point?

So, when it comes to actual coding the individual features to fit into my “master plan”, I’ve adopted the approach of rudimentary first, perfection later. Build it fast and a simply as possible. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It needs to work. Build the lowest level of functionality first. If it works, go from there. You need a button to handle some sort of action? It doesn’t need to be perfectly designed and AJAXed right away. Just get the damned button working. You can shine it up later. You want an activity feed? It doesn’t need to do roll-ups and weight for people you’re more interested in hearing from right away. It needs to show you updates. Preferably with minimal repetition, but nothing too crazy.

Make it rudimentary. If it works, make it a little better. Rinse and repeat.

Perhaps it’s because I haven’t done much development in a traditional setting before, but while it seems pretty common-sensical, the realization that it’s perfectly OK to throw a half-baked system out there, let real people bang on it and find the holes, and then patch it up and give it the coat of gloss it needs was a bit of a leap for me.

In fact, as a result of this realization, the Challenges system on Accompl.sh has been practically re-written 3 times now as I ironed out the kinks in the architecture, the interactions, and the concept in general. A waste of time? Absolutely not. Each time it got a bit better. And thanks to the intrepid first players and their feedback I was able to finally put together system that should be able to hold up to whatever they have to throw at it!

The Results

So, having worked out the issues with my server, gotten up to speed on unix and github, and finally getting down to code, where do things stand now? Did going back to basics help at all?

According to github, my two weeks of coding went here:
+8184, -5185*

In real terms:

• A new activity feed on the Dashboard
• A new Challenges system re-written nearly from the ground up (more on this in another post possibly)
• Addressing issues with UX consistency, like a global user card
• An invitation system to encourage your friends to join Accompl.sh
• 34 issues closed, 32 opened (and still open)
• 100 commits**
• On track for 200% month/month growth (vs. 105% last month)
• A 96.79% increase in pageviews compared to the previous 2 weeks.

So where does that leave me? Now that I’m finally hitting my stride with development, I’m also starting to shift focus to the marketing / promotion / growth side of things. The site itself is in a pretty stable place so now it’s a matter of seeing if I can hit my goal of 10,000 registered users by Jan 1. I’m also working on the partnership aspects of the site that I spec’ed out way back in my apartment in SF well over a year ago. Those powers combined should make for an interesting next few months!

I also wanted to take a second to thank everyone for their tremendous support and encouragement over the last few weeks! It’s meant the world to me to know that so many of you believe in both me and Accompl.sh!

———
* git log --numstat --pretty="%H" --after='2011-10-26' [commithash]..HEAD | awk 'NF==3 {plus+=$1; minus+=$2} END {printf("+%d, -%d\n", plus, minus)}' (via stackoverflow)
** git log --quiet --author="Jenn Vargas" --after="2011-10-25" --pretty="oneline" | wc -l

I left my job. My awesome, amazing, fantastic, ridiculously cool job where I got to work on interesting things with even more interesting people.

WHAT?! WHY!?

Yeah. That’s been the common reaction. And honestly, I think the answer only makes sense to me, since it’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite a long time now, but here’s the gist:

1) I need a new / different challenge.
2) I want to try to create my own future – maybe it’ll still be doing Product Manager-y things, maybe I’ll be a freelance web something or other, maybe I’ll go work in a photo studio, or maybe I’ll go get my masters. I don’t know. That’s what’s awesome about it.
3) I don’t want to have lived this perfectly by-the-book life. I’ve gone to the good college, I’ve gotten the good jobs. It’s all been so prescribed so far. I don’t want to look back and regret not trying things that I’ve wanted to do.

Could I do all of that while keeping the awesome job? Possibly and probably. But I know how I work – if there’s any excuse NOT to do something I’ll probably use it. I’m too comfortable. I need to make myself uncomfortable, because I know that’s when I work best.

Leaving Etsy has been one of the toughest decisions I’ve had to make in my life so far. It’s been such an incredible experience. I’ve learned so much (can you believe I use git and almost prefer vim these days?!). My coworkers are really just some of the coolest people you’ll ever meet and the toughest part is going to be missing out on the chance to spend more time working with them. I hope I’ll be able to take the spirit of Etsy with me into whatever I do, because that place is pure magic.

My dream has always been to run my own company – a web startup, a photo studio, a soda shop, the industry has never really mattered, but the dream has always been there.

So that’s what I’m going to do. And I’m going to go all-in. I’ve been working on Accompl.sh for nearly 2 years now and it’s about time I gave it the full attention it deserves. New Years resolution season is coming and I plan to make the most of it.

Here we are. The leap of faith. It’s going to be an interesting adventure, that’s for sure. The future is, for once in my life, a complete mystery, and I’m beyond excited to see what’s in store.

If you’d like to help at all, please join Accompl.sh, start a list, and send me your feedback! Or, if you know of anyone who is willing to lend a hand, have them get in touch (jenn at accompl.sh) – designers, developers, general advice, marketing, I’ll take it all!

The following is an article of mine that was posted on Women 2.0, a blog/community that encourages female entrepreneurs. It’s a bit of a redux of my Relinquishing Stubbornness post, but nevertheless I want to cross-post it here for posterity. You can read the post in its original context at women2.org.

I’m about 18 months into the journey of taking Accompl.sh (formerly 101in365) from a little weekend project to automate my own annual goal tracking to a living, breathing web application.

Taking the “long way” of being a solo founder, I found working on Accompl.sh as a side project has been a crash course in time management, community building, product development, design, coding, you name it. But the most difficult part of all has been making the big decisions about the direction of the project itself.

Without a co-founder to help rationalize my own thoughts about the future of the product, I was stuck in a bit of a quandary — Do I stay on the path I originally set out on, potentially limiting the growth of the site, but staying true to my original design? Or should I compromise a bit and open the doors for even more people to use the tool that I built and believe in? The answer may seem obvious, but when you’re up until 3 or 4 in the morning working on your pet project in virtual isolation for over a year, it’s not as clear.

Decisions, decisions. Over the last few weeks I’ve made a few major decisions about the future of Accompl.sh — decisions I’ve been struggling with for well over a year but that I finally took the leap and acted on. I’ll share a bit of the process with you all in hopes that it’ll help you avoid the traps that I fell into.

Trap #1: Not fixing the things that bother you about your product

I was tired of explaining why I had so many arbitrary rules in my product every time so I shut down physically instead of just fixing the product.

A few months ago, I stopped enjoying working on Accompl.sh (then 101in365). My spirit was dampened by the stress and defensiveness that came along with explaining my product to people — specifically why users are required to come up with 101 goals in order to even use the site and how it’s actually less difficult than it seems.

This was a huge problem and I knew that I needed to take steps to address my inability to explain my product or let the product/project die. The latter wasn’t an option in my mind, so it was time to take a more critical look at the site, reconsider some of my decisions from early in the development process, and start making changes.

Trap #2: Allowing for complexity

Shape your product to fit user behavior. How you build something may not be how people actually use it. So instead of making your users adapt, make your product simpler and better.

I saw that users were falling into one of two groups. Many who developed 101 goals and locked in their lists actually created a second account to have a second list because 101 goals wasn’t enough. On the flip side, there were the users who started a list but gave up after running out of ideas for goals to satisfy the 101 goals requirement and never came back. The average number of goals in a list was 42. There was obviously something wrong with the model. And while there were more people in that second group than the first, I wanted to take them both into account when deciding where to take the project.

Trap #3: Not letting go of your past work to get where you want to go

Be willing to change directions even though you’ve already done so much work. There’s an important aspect of goal-setting that I, sadly, hadn’t applied to my own project — there are always multiple ways to reach your end goal, and you may have to try a variety of those methods in order to get there. As long as you’ve defined your vision, you will be able to determine whether you’re on the right path.

The Pivot

I want to build a community of people that motivate and inspire each other as we all work to achieve our own goals, and realized that the very first iteration of 101in365/accompl.sh was just one of the ways I could reach that end goal. But it wasn’t working. The site had hit a plateau. It was time to try something new. It was time to take the leap and pivot.

Taking into account my observations of user behavior, I changed Accompl.sh so that the user no longer has to set 101 goals. And with the addition of the Accompl.sh Credits system, you can have as many lists as you wish with any number of goals in each list.

I had feared that changing my product would undo everything I’d built up over the last 1.5 years. But now that I’m on the other side of the pivot and am starting to see positive results, I know the changes I made were tough but necessary and completely in line with Accompl.sh’s mission. I couldn’t be happier with the results. User adoption has been great so far: the number of locked lists mid-way through June has nearly surpassed May’s results and has blown the previous months out of the water.

Not knowing what my next stage is a HUGE problem

It’s a combination of not knowing whether I want to take it full time, whether I CAN take it full time, and generally trying building up the confidence to ask people for help (advice, funding, reality checks). I’m working on the latter at the moment — asking friends who’ve been though this what I should do next. I know that at some point down the line I want to work for myself, whether it’s accompl.sh or something else. Taking that leap petrifies me but at the same time keeps me up until the wee hours of the morning working toward the next stage, figuring out what where it might take me.

Despite the challenges and ups and downs, I can’t help but keep pushing forward. It’s worth it. Not only do I love the process of creating something from nothing, but it’s also incredibly inspiring. Every day I get to see people from all over the world log on, check off a goal they’ve been working toward, and share their successes with us — nearly 25,000 completed goals to date! With each new list, the entire community gets another set of goals that we can draw inspiration from. And with each new member that joins, I’m re-energized to make the site even better so that it can help even more people accomplish their goals.

When it comes right down to it, the big decisions are sometimes a burden and indecision/analysis paralysis can sometimes get the best of me, but it’s a burden that I welcome with open arms because it’s a chance to learn something new. Do I hope that someday all of this work will let me fulfill my goal of having my own company? Absolutely. But whether 10 people use Accompl.sh or 10 million, I’m going to keep going. At the end of the day I’m getting to play a small part in helping people achieve their goals and getting to work on something I love in the process. You can’t really ask for more!

It’s been a constant struggle for me – determining that line between “this is mine” and “actually it’s not MINE anymore.” I had a very specific vision for the site when I first pieced it together over a holiday weekend, but at the time I was really just building it for myself. For my very specific use case. And as a Product Manager I know better than anyone that that’s just NOT the way to build things to be used by the People of the Internets.

When we crossed the 10,000 completed goal mark, I posted a bit of a reflection on what I’d learned and, to be honest, I haven’t really looked at it since. It’s strange to realize now that coming back to reflect on these last few weeks, my thoughts now (and more importantly my actions!) are actually EXACTLY in line with where my intuition was leading me 8 months ago.

Over the last few weeks I made a few HUGE decisions, decisions I’ve been struggling with for well over a year but that my stubbornness and general feeling of complete ownership prevented me from giving in to.

What’s in a name?

The first step in accepting my problem was realizing that I wasn’t enjoying working on 101in365 and more importantly, I was completely unwilling to talk about it in person with anyone because I KNEW I would not only have to repeat the name a few times for them to remember the numbers but also because I’d have to explain why one would have to come up with 101 goals and how that’s actually not that big of a deal. Any excitement I had at the prospect of building this out was dampened by the stress and defensiveness that came along with explaining it to anyone.

I knew I wanted to change the name for a good long while, but could never come up with a good alternative. Then, one day, out of the blue, accompl.sh hit me. I checked for the normal spelling and the .com, of course, but as a noun my odds were pretty slim. Thanks to domai.nr I stumbled across the very web 2.0 spelling and domain. It wasn’t IDEAL but it was a step and after discovering it I couldn’t get the name out of my head. A few days later I sprung for the most expensive domain I’d ever purchased at a whopping $99! I felt an immediate sense of relief and spent that entire evening changing out the logos, the copy, and the links around the site. A quick blog post and accompl.sh was unleashed to the world. I felt a thousand times better already. And it was all done JUST in time for a blog post about me and accompl.sh to go up on the Evernote Blog. Things were looking up.

But you still needed 101 goals

Once the name situation was sorted out I sat back and gave myself a bit of a reality check. With the initial band-aid torn off I was a bit more open to reconsidering some of my decisions from early in the development of the site and ended up spending the next few nights fixing those. Thus, the Suggestion Box. It was my first admission that 101 goals was, indeed, a LOT of goals to come up with.

For me, coming up with my own list of 101 in 365 was an exercise I’d gotten myself used to over the course of a few years. It wasn’t until I started watching people use the site and listening to their reactions upon hitting their first brick wall of running out ideas that it really started to click. Not everyone is like me. And if the true mission of the site is to help people come up with goals and stick to them, then WHY is having 101 goals at all important?

I’d contemplated it pretty seriously for a few days but kept rationalizing for my own use case. Then, for some reason or other, not unlike the name epiphany, I decided on the elevator out of the Etsy office that I needed to ditch the 101 goal requirement. I still couldn’t tell you how or why that decision became so clear at that particular moment, but for whatever reason, within SECONDS I had made the decision and sent a text to Tilly:

OMG I think I just decided to pivot accomplsh. Yes. I said pivot.

That was it. With no other thought given to the rationale or going through my usual pro/con list, I hashed it all out in my head it all out on my walk to the subway. I attempted to read a bit more of the book I had on my Kindle, but I couldn’t concentrate. Out the Moleskine came and I started scribbling furiously.

By the time I got home the plan had been hatched and I fired up my Terminal, Transmit, and TextMate (T^3. The tools the internet is built on) and started ripping out the bits of code that affected how many goals you needed to have. Strangely the only part that was at all difficult was getting the Javascript to place nicely. Once that was sorted, panic began to set in.

What the hell did I just do!?

It was all too easy. The whole thing just came together way too quickly. I freaked out. Why was it so easy? Was it so easy because it was the wrong decision? Or so easy because it was the right decision? What was I forgetting? I HAD to be forgetting something! What if the people who’d stood behind me on my stubbornness around 101 goals were angry that I gave in and reduced the limit? What if it just ruined everything that I’d spent 18 months building? Needless to say I was overcome with analysis paralysis. This was one of those times where I really wish I had a co-founder or someone to just sanity check me. Some of these decisions just shouldn’t happen in a vacuum.

Screw it. Just push the button!

Over-analyzing everything is one of those character traits that can be a blessing and a curse. I stepped away from the laptop for a bit (to get a commit cookie ¹, of course). It was at that point I got a DM from a member who said a mysql error was popping up on a particular page. Crap. That meant I had to either revert my changes for that particular file in order to push the fix, or I’d have to fix it and push it all together. Gotta love forcing functions. So that was that. I HAD to push everything or the production site would have this nasty mysql error hanging around. And I’m not cool with mysql errors ruining my designs.

The new restriction-free accompl.sh was alive.

So what did I learn?

• Just because it’s how you first built something doesn’t mean that’s the way it needs to stay.
• Changing a major piece of a project doesn’t necessarily mean you’re admitting defeat.
• Sometimes you have to make sacrifices in one area to grow in others
• Sometimes taking out the one nail that you’ve been hanging everything from opens the doors to solve a lot of the problems you haven’t been able to find solutions for (more to come on this)
• The only cure for stubbornness seems to be impulsiveness.

Going Forward

While I’m a bit sad at having just finished hacking up my “baby,” and, honestly, I’m still SLIGHTLY worried that I may have made the decision a bit too impulsively, I’m excited for the future of this new system. I already have a few new bits up my sleeve that didn’t make it into the MVP for fixing the goal restrictions, but that I think will add a whole new range of possibilities for where I can take the project.

At the very least I’m interested to see what I’ll have to say about this decision 8 months from now when the effects will be fully realized and I get around to writing about them again!

A lot has happened in the last few weeks.

I’m no longer at Flickr. It still feels very surreal. Like I’m just on a vacation or a long weekend or just working from home. It’s kind of cool and it kind of sucks at the same time. I no longer work on the site that I’ve called my internet home for the last who knows how many years and I don’t get to work with and hang out with some of the coolest and smartest people I know.

But it’s given me time to think about what’s next: what I want to accomplish in the next few years and what I want to do in the longer term. While I haven’t sorted out much about the long term, the answer to the short term is pretty clear: I’ve been thinking about moving back east for some time now and there are definitely some cool tech companies there. The vast majority of my friends have settled around the New York area and let’s face it: I NEED SNOW. I’ve really enjoyed my time in SF and the people I’ve met here, but it’s time for me to try something new.

So that’s the plan. Penny and I are packing up and headed to Brooklyn in January. (Actually, Penny is going in a few days with my mom). I’ve accepted an offer to work as a Product Manager at Etsy and Penny has accepted a position as Office Dog #3 (it’s about time I put her to work!). It’s been a bit of a debate, after all I currently live in the mecca of the web world, but in the grand scheme of Life > Career > Project, I’m pretty sure this is the right decision for me right now. Etsy has a LOT of really cool/interesting/product nerdy problems to solve and they’re totally cool with (and even encourage!) PMs getting into the code and making stuff happen.

There’s lots to do and not very much time to do it, but I’m looking forward to this new adventure. And to the snow.

I’ve put a good bit of it on craigslist over the last few days and that’s worked out well, but I figured I’d put some of the more miscellaneous things here. If you’re interested, drop me a line to stuff at jennvargas dot com or, if you’re a friend, just shoot me a text, IM, dm, whatever. Some things are yours if you get to them first. Some of the more valuable things might have a price. Again, if you’re a friend, and I think you’ll make good use of it, we’ll see!

Here goes:

Books / Reading Materials

• Startup Lessons Learned (Vol 1) from Eric Ries – Only read the first few pages. Looks shiny and new! ($8)
• Nearly every Wired Magazine from the last few years – If you’re looking for a specific issue, I probably have it.
• JQuery for Dummies – no making fun! ($10)
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany – Steve Blank. Brand new. Still in shrink wrap!
• a whole ton of books listed on half.com here

Furniture-like Things

• IKEA BJURSTA dining room table [craigslist posting] – just over a year old. used ~2x. black
• 2 IKEA LACK side tables in Birch Effect – about a year old. been hanging out unused in my closet almost that entire time. [craigslist posting] ($12)
• IKEA LACK large coffee table in Birch Effect – about a year old. been hanging out unused in my closet almost that entire time. [craigslist posting] ($25)
• 3′ x 4′ whiteboard of awesomeness [craigslist posting] ($50)
• mochi floor lamp – because it looks like a mochi! only about 6 mos old. nothing wrong with it. just don’t want it. [craigslist posting] ($35)
• HUGE canvas print of the Flat Iron bldg in NY [craigslist posting] ($75)

Movies

• Mr & Mrs Smith
• Coupling (BBC version) Seasons 1-4 Boxed Set

Techie Things

• 4GB Eye-Fi WiFi card. In box. doesn’t work with my camera. boo!
• acer 20″ display – it’s VGA. matte screen. works just fine, i just wanted a bigger display. it’s this one ($make an offer?)
• Wireless Rock Band guitar ($38)

Miscellany

• Moleskine 3pack of Plain Journals. Still in shrink wrap. ($7)
• 9′ tall artificial pre-lit christmas tree [craigslist posting] ($70)

Instruments

• Casio ctk-611 electronic keyboard & stand [craigslist posting] ($60)

I should add that you should probably be in SF and willing to pick this stuff up yourself.

(last update: 1/1/2011 at 2:55PM)

Throughout the year I really enjoyed having my list to come back to when I was feeling bored, unproductive, or reflective. It was great to have a tangible set of things that I wanted to do that I could check off along the way. It’s why I created 101in365. I wanted to do it again, but even better this time around.

I rarely made a conscious effort to accomplish one of the items on the list. I generally just let life happen and along the way hope to tick off as many as I could. I’m disappointed that I couldn’t finish a few of them but overall I’m happy with what I was able to accomplish this year. So, without further ado, the list:

START: January 1, 2009
END: December 31, 2009

In Progress
Complete
Didn’t Complete

New Experiences:

1. Go skiing.
2. Master something I’ve never tried. – This is a tough one to determine completeness. I definitely learned that I need to make these goals more specific. I’ve done a lot of things I hadn’t tried before over the course of the year, but did I master any of them? Some more than others. For example, I’m excellent at dealing with my bills and things now, but I wouldn’t say that’s something to check off. Not like becoming a black belt having never done martial arts before. Let’s call this one a push.
3. Ride a Segway. – This one wasn’t for lack of trying. I’ve looked into Segway tours pretty much everywhere I’ve gone just to try it out but they’re always so darned expensive and not really worth the cost. Adding this one to next year’s list.
4. Road trip from Northern CA to Southern CA.
5. Tour Europe. – DEFINITELY accomplished this one. And it was the best decision I’ve ever made. I would do it again in a heartbeat. (See travel.jennvargas.com)
6. Travel to a country I’ve never been (Canada doesn’t count). – I consider this one kind of cheating since I’d never been to any of the countries I visited in Europe, but yes, this one gets the check mark.
7. Try real sushi – like raw fish sushi, not crab/shrimp/veggie sushi. – I’m not sure whether to check this one off. I’ve had raw fish, but I don’t know if it would be considered sushi. Raw fish is still a huge step for me considering seafood is probably one of my least favorite things, so I’ll call this a win.
8. See at least one Broadway show that I haven’t already seen.
9. Visit 3 states I’ve never visited.
10. Visit a place where I don’t speak the local language. – Another one that I can group in with the cheating list. I didn’t speak the local language in most of the places I visited in Europe.
11. Watch the sun set over the Pacific.

College Things:

12. Avoid senioritis at all costs. – I worked my rear end off for my final semester. I think it had to do with taking classes that I actually liked.
13. Become a morning person again. Up at 8 or 9AM, none of this 11AM nonsense. – I have to say that this one didn’t actually happen until after college, but I definitely wake up early now.
14. Go to the top of the Clocktower for a chimes concert. – This is the one I’m most disappointed about not accomplishing. I even had a chance when I went back to Cornell in October, but I didn’t have the time to go. I WILL get to the top of that clocktower.
15. Have lunch with a friend at least once/week. – Did this during school and arguably still since I have lunch with my coworkers.
16. Read at least 3 school/major-related books. (3/3) – I really should have written down the names of the books but I know Here Comes Everybody
    was one of them.
17. Try to complete as many things possible on the “161 things to do before you graduate Cornell” list — in one day. – Did pretty well with this one. Can’t remember how many I ticked off, but it was a decent number.
18. Go to sleep before 11PM twice/month. – Sadly I go to sleep before 11 more than twice/month these days. I usually fall asleep around 10:30 watching TV and then doze on and off until I actually go to sleep in my bed. This whole getting up early thing is a killer.
19. Hand off the Photo Department to Matt in a state that I can be proud of. – I like to think that I did a pretty solid job with the Photo Department during my time as Photo Editor and I think Matt got to start his term on a strong foundation. (02.28.2009)

Food-related:

20. Bake more.
21. Cook at least twice/week. (You’d be amazed at how many meals of chips and salsa or hummus and crackers one can eat in a week.) – I was doing really well with this one during school but then once I moved I lost it. I have been traveling too much lately to keep food around but that’s definitely one of my goals for 2010.
22. Go back to Pinkberry. – Went with Meghan and Matt during winter break. Now that I’m in San Francisco again it’s not nearly as novel but I still love this stuff! (01.13.09 [photo])
23. Go back to Serendipity 3 (thanks Lissy!)
24. Go on a picnic. – Another cheating one since most of my food consumption while traveling was picnic style.
25. Have more dinner parties. – Another where I did well during school but lost momentum after graduation.
26. Learn to cook empanadas. – I KIND of learned, but I need to get my hands on the recipe.
27. Learn to like wine. – I no longer have a complete aversion to it so I call this a win. There are some wines I enjoy – mostly whites – but I’m slowing acquiring a taste.
28. Make chocolate covered fruits (strawberries in particular). – I bought one of those microwave melt chocolate things and dipped strawberries in them every day for like 2 weeks. That was fantastic. (02.18.2009)
29. Make macarons.
30. Make my own pizza from scratch. – I’ve yet to make my own dough so I consider this incomplete. I do make my own pizza, though. Wraps make excellent bases.
31. One last Cooking Extravaganza.
32. Order out at most once/week, but as infrequently as possible. – I set a rule for myself: eating out more than once a week is OK when it’s with friends. Every once in a while I stop by the Taqueria on my way home from the train station, but on average I don’t pick up dinner on the way home more than once a week.
33. Try a new recipe at least once/week.

Friendship:

34. Call a friend, no matter how busy I am, once a week to see how they’re doing.
35. Catch up with at least 4 old friends who have drifted away. – I’m really excited about this one. I got to reconnect with a lot of people over the course of this year and I’m so glad to be back in touch with them.
36. Hang out with Bayonne friends at least once before moving to CA. – more than once! Ioanna and Jimelle came to visit me at the shore and I also went up to Bayonne for the night just before I left for my going away party. I have to hang out with those guys more often.
37. Have Sunday Brunch with friends at least once/month. – This has become Saturday brunch but is still an almost weekly ritual.
38. Keep in touch with old friends: distance and time are not excuses.
39. Meet up with Natalie at least once (it’s been over 3 years!). – Natalie came to visit me at Cornell. (2/22/2009)
40. See Erin at least twice. – Sadly we only got to see each other once this year and that wasn’t in the happiest of circumstances. Hopefully Erin will be able to come visit San Francisco in 2010.
41. Snail mail is fun: send holiday/birthday cards. – I was SO CLOSE to finishing this one. In fact, the cards are all written, sealed, and addressed in my backpack right now. Life kind of got in the way and I never got to the post office to get stamps. Sad.
42. Spend more time hanging out with Margot. – Yep. We hung out a bunch. Now she’s in Ithaca and I’m in SF so that’s tough, but I did see her when I went to visit!
43. Visit Shannon in Portland. – Another that I’m really disappointed I didn’t get to do.

Habits:

44. Be less wasteful. – With all of the moving I did this year I was definitely very wasteful. I did have a garage sale and donate the things I didn’t want any more, but with all of the packing materials and boxes, etc., this definitely wasn’t a “green” year for me.
45. Blog at least once/week. – I did so well with this until I moved out to SF. With the lack of school and travels I’ve yet to find my new blogging mojo.
46. Don’t be a lazy typist. Use capitals and punctuation where necessary, but not unnecessarily. – I’d say I definitely got better at not typing like a high school student. Still a long way to go, especially in terms of accuracy.
47. Don’t sit at the computer for long periods of time. – HAHAH yeah. Right. Like this one is going to happen.
48. Don’t slouch, especially when I’m sitting at the computer for long periods of time. – I’ve definitely improved in this area though. Now if only I could get my hands on a Herman Miller.
49. Go an entire month without caffeine. (I don’t drink coffee or soda, but I do drink a lot of iced tea.) – This one wasn’t very difficult considering I don’t really drink a lot of caffeine in the first place. I basically just had to cut out iced tea.
50. Go outside at least once/day. Pajama days are better when they’re infrequent. – Not quite there yet, but making progress. I don’t have much of a choice now that I have Penny.
51. Make my bed every day for a month (bonus points if I can keep it up for longer!) – I tried. I just don’t get what the big deal is. I’m just going to unmake it in a few hours anyway.
52. Pick 1 day of the week and limit myself to email and classwork-related internet use. No twitter, flickr, facebook, RSS, or other time traps. More on that later.
53. Use the word “I” less often. It’s not all about me. – Made a conscious effort with this one over the course of the year. Tough to measure if I’ve actually managed to complete this one but let’s call it done.
54. Water is my friend. Drink it. – Water is good.
55. Wear my hair down at least once/week or get it cut shorter. – It still surprises me that I’ve actually managed to do this one. I used to HATE wearing my hear down, and to be honest it still bugs the crap out of me, but I do it.
56. Write more. You know, like with a pen. And while I’m at it, fix my handwriting. – I promise I tried, but my handwriting is atrocious.

Having a Job:

57. Aim for 30-under-30. – Nothing to report. Boo.
58. Find an apartment in San Francisco that I love. – Yep.
59. Keep up with new CSS things. – Made up a couple projects over the course of the year just so I could play around with the CSS3 things. Still a few more things that I’d like to try, but at least I don’t feel completely out of touch.
60. Learn my way around JavaScript and Processing.
61. Learn my way around RoR.

Money Things:

62. Have at least $3000 in savings account at the end of the year. – Yeah. Not so much. If I didn’t go to Europe it probably would have been a different story, but it was money well spent.
63. Have no credit card debt by the end of the year. – I follow the gospel of I Will Teach You To Be Rich
64. Finance a good portion of my trip to Europe by selling things I don’t use anymore. – Yep.
65. Learn how to do my taxes. – Postponing this one until next year. Graduation, moving to a new state, and all that other stuff make this one a year for an accountant.
66. Make good progress on paying back my college loans. – Grade period just ended. Now I just have a process in place, the progress part won’t be noticeable until next year some time. Hopefully.

Organization:

67. Don’t keep junk. I only need so many free pens.
68. Get my bank accounts in order and track where I’m spending too much money (yay Mint.com).
69. Keep my desk neat. Piles are the enemy.
70. Keep my room clean/organized/neat for an entire month. – This one is easy now that my bedroom is literally just a bed and a side table. My whole apartment is generally very neat though.
71. Throw away/sell/donate at least one thing I’ve been keeping “just in case” each week.
72. Organize my out-of-control music collection.
73. Plan aforementioned trip to Europe. – See travel.jennvargas.com.
74. Reduce my RSS subscriptions to <100 quality reads. – I think I’m around the same number I was last year. Some of the old standbys are there but more photography and less Engadget type echo-chamber-y sites.

Photography

75. Be in more photos rather than just taking them all the time. – Did well with this one, especially toward the end of senior year.
76. Find and organize non-digital photos from childhood. – Made good progress by digitizing a lot of the photos I found in the process of cleaning out my room for the move.
77. Finish my Project 365. – Matt and I agreed to end it sometime over the course of the summer. It made photography too much of a chore.
78. Print and frame at least 5 of my photos. What’s the point if they’re just sitting on my hard drive?I printed a lot of photos, but never framed any of them.
79. Try to make at least 1 HDR. – Tried and failed. I don’t particularly like HDRs.
80. Sell a photo. (I’ve sold a bunch of photo shoots already, but no photos that I’ve already shot)
81. Shoot and develop at least 8 rolls of film. – Far surpassed this one doing my Psych of Visual Comm final project

Just Because:

82. Build a snow man. – Just last week, in fact!
83. Buy a pair of awesome black heels.
84. Buy a really cool vintage camera. – Bought a bunch of them but still want more.
85. Complete the NYTimes Crossword Puzzle at least once/week (bonus for Sunday!)
86. Get the Sims 3, but curb my addiction. (read: practice self-control). – Got it, played with it, over it.
87. Go ice skating.
88. Go on a date (perhaps combine with #23?).- FAIL.
89. Learn 50 ASL signs that I don’t already know.
90. Lose 15 lbs. – Backpacking for 6 weeks helps.
91. Make decent progress on watching CSI from start to finish.
92. Make a “soundtrack of the year” with 20 of the songs that I loved in 2009.
93. Read at least 1 book by Jane Austen.
94. Read at least 3 non-school/non-major-related books. – Definitely read more than 3.
95. Re-learn Spanish. – Going to Spain really helped but I have a long way to go before I’m anywhere near fluency again.
96. Re-locate my imagination. – Still not where I’d like to be.
97. See at least 25 movies from the AFI Top 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) list – SO CLOSE! (21/25)
98. Sell something on eBay or craigslist.
99. Sell something on Etsy.
100. Try a sport other than volleyball, soccer or softball. – Unless paragliding counts?
101. Watch all of the Star Wars movies (I haven’t seen any!).

All I can say is thank god I don’t have to do that manually next year. 46 completed. Less than half, but definitely the better half. Almost done with my list for 2010. These things are tough! Check it out on 101in365: 101in365.com/jenn.