2013: Do (only) Awesome Things

All kinds of things happend last year. This year I hope less things will happen, but that they will be more awesome. This means achieving ‘flow’ at the small and big scale.

First up is removing the little things that slow me down, simplifying things, and giving myself the room I need to acomplish great things.

• No more crazy projects that slowly creep out of the closet: While hack-night style projects are great, if pursued they turn into little time-sucking monsters. Reflecticle is shutting down, Portfolit won't be getting anything new, and I'll hopefully only be directing conceited effort towards big things that make an impact. This doesn't mean no more hacking on fun little things, but it does mean they won't accidentally grow up. Maybe Extract will make the cut, maybe it won't.
• No more Faster Mustache: While FM has been a great ride, it's time for me to bow out. I didn't race bikes at all last year which was _fantastic_ and I had a lot more fun mountain biking in the process. No more managing finances, no more coordinating race schedules, and no more race team e-mail list drama. That said, I'll still buy a kit or two and fly the FM colors on a bike this year.
• No more Gallery: Gallery has wound down, and the effort I put in isn't really helping me or anyone else. We may just wind down 'active' effort on the whole thing and see if anyone steps up to take care of the few things that need a hand.
• Things: If I have things I'm not using, they don't need to be in my face every day. Other people can get a lot more use out of some of the things I have than I can. A corner of my house is reserved for things to pass along, and hopefully friends and the Salvation Army are the better off for it.
• No more celebrating with presents and no more wantlist: Christmas 2012 with no presents was great. Family gettogethers, experiences, and a good time. My internet facing wantlist is gone, and replaced with a suggested places to donate if you'd like to reconize my birthday or a holiday. I asked people to donate to the Atlanta Community Food Bank for my birthday in 2012 and ~20 people did. Awesome!
• No more active ithought. It's mostly running itself these days and all the invoicing and bill paying is automated, so assuming there aren't hardware failures, this will hopefully stay out of the way.
• No more repetititive little things that I don't get any value from. Logging my commute with the Clean Air Campaign was fun, but a minute or so a day goes a long way to things that are useful.

So that is the ‘less’, here is the ‘more’:

• After merging with Highgroove, I'm now the Chief Operations Officer at Big Nerd Ranch. I am as prepared as I could be for this but mergers are crazy things and there is still a lot of figuring out to be done. Hopefully by the end of this year the merger will be 'complete', we'll have healthy processes and trust eachother, and The Big Nerd Way will be a thing. There will be a few more blog posts on this in the future here.
• Riding Bikes and Running with Friends will continue. A Monday run with coworkers, Tuesday night mountain biking, Thursday night hills on road bikes once it is alittle warmer out, and epic weekend adventures will continue. Hopefully a website update in the future here will make it easier to find those things, but for now just send me some kind of message if you're interested in any of them.

In short, I read a lot and think a lot, and hopefully by removing all the little things that take up so much of the ‘inbetween’ time I’ll create some time for me to figure out what exactly it is that I’m supposed to be mastering, and do just that. Onward!