Mid-December to late January is usually a quiet time of the year for me (writing blogs and socially -excluding family that is), due to me reflecting on the year, focusing on the broad strokes that I want to do next year (now this year) and then ending with my Think and Motivate week in late January where I put all that thought together and dig into some detail to get motivated for the rest of the year and put some goals to lead me to the next level of my life. So what I am saying is: I won't be blogging much until late January unless I really have something valuable for the community (like the geek dinner I will be setting up later today for January).
The wonderful thing this year is the blogging community. This year leading up to my think week I am doing a lot of browsing of blogs of people who have put out their end year reviews and goals for next year - printing them out (yea killing more trees - nothing compared to the amount of Christmas trees killed recently) to revisit the week I take to focus on this stuff. Last year there weren't as many blogs that would have helped me in my research of that sort. Research of this sort is like how I do my career planning, which goes a little like this:
1. Start off with a simple question - “If I could pick any position to be the next position in my career what would it be?”
2. Do some searching of job sites (Microsoft's job descriptions are one of my favorites for this), career sites, talk to leaders in the industry, etc to find out what the posibilities are.
3. Really think about the different possible positions and what I like/dislike about the ones I find interesting
4. Find some that will be stretch goals for me
5. Decide on a broad description that will require some foundation being built
6. Build a two year plan to meet those goals
After my think week I will post the reading materials that I focused on and some of what comes out of the week, but I will most likely not post at all during the week (will be at the geek dinner though). I am hoping the week is going to be creative enough to also lead me to my “side projects” that I want to focus on for the next 6-7 months too.
Does anyone else out there do these sorts of personal retreats to do goal setting, career and financial planning? If so I would love to here the process you use, I am always looking for new ways to approach problems/subjects.