Another post about the beginning of the year! This time, it’s about my monthly challenge for January so technically it’s not just about the beginning of the year. I’m in my 4th year of using the Volt Planner and the monthly challenges and I’m really excited to see what I’m able to get done this year!
My challenge for December was to plan for my challenges this year. I had some very abstract challenges in 2018 and it became easy to slack off on doing them because of that. Maybe I needed a bit of a break from my monthly challenges, but I wanted to get back at it in 2019. So I went easy on myself again in December and used that month to plan for the future. I have seen so many lists of ideas for monthly challenges and my plan was to check out a bunch of lists and pick out the ones that seemed good for the coming year.
While I did look at a ton of lists and see some amazing ideas, I wasn’t able to plan the way I hoped to. I think part of the monthly challenges is to see what inspires you and what you want to work on at that time. To plan out what I want my challenge to be several months from now just doesn’t work for me the way I was hoping it would. I found lots of challenges that I liked, but I didn’t decide what months they are going to be for. But I’m hopeful that by having a list of options available to me that it will be easier for me to pick challenges each month.
And for this month’s challenge, it was inspired by my circumstances and not exactly by the list I found. I mentioned this briefly in my 2019 goals post, but my challenge for this month is to take different free online classes. There are a bunch of different websites I have access to for free through the LA Public Library system, but I have decided to start with the classes I can find on lynda.com. I’ve heard good things about that site through other people who have used it and it seemed to have a good variety of classes I could take.
I spent a few days last week going through the site and seeing what options I have and I picked out a bunch of different ones. Some of them are related to making this blog better, some of them are job skills that I’d like to brush up on, and others are jobs skills that I don’t have but think could be good for me to know with my current jobs search. The plan is to work on a lesson for a bit every day and to get through whatever I can. I might be able to finish some in a day if they are fast, but I don’t want to have to set a rule for how quickly I need to get something done. If I’m learning a new skill, I want to allow myself time to figure it out and understand it before I move on.
I do feel like this goal has a couple of benefits for me. First, like I mentioned above, is that adding new skills to my job resume might help me in my job search. Things were slow with job hunting during the holidays but they are picking up again and I want to find a new job as soon as I can. I’m not happy being this stressed out about money and what will happen. I have had some interviews and second phases of applications, but I’m hoping now that the holidays are done that I will get more and maybe a job offer soon. And the second benefit I see this having for me is that it will help me be more productive during the downtime at my current job. I don’t want to waste my days doing things that won’t help me in the long run, and taking classes online is a great way to stay productive!
I’m pretty excited about this challenge and seeing what other classes I might want to add to my list as I go through them. It seems like there are a ton of options in so many subjects, plus I also have a few other online class sites I can use for free through the library that I can move to if I don’t find more through lynda.com. I’m also happy that I found something that is free since a few different educational things that I do are apps that have an annual cost. Anything I can find for free is good and I want to take advantage of them!
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My 2019 Goals (or Another Year Of Planning Some Big Things)
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