{ Adam Griffiths Development }

The past few years I've always set myself some goals. In 2010 I wrote a list of 101 Things to do, which was an epic task and I managed just over half of those things. This year I'm going to take a different tact, there are a few things that I want to do, and want to do well. There are some things that need to be addressed next year, some things I need to fix and get right, every day.

Schedule my time properly

One of the things I have learned during the past 6 months of full-time freelancing is that the most important part of running a freelancing business is proper scheduling, good productivity and more personally to me, choosing to fix my sleep schedule, or embrace it.

Scheduling

I'll be the firs to admit I'm not very good at switching between projects, transitioning between finishing one project and ensuring I'm filling up my time with paying projects. I now realise the importance of accurately estimating the time to finish projects, and sticking to that for the benefit of my clients and myself. It might take another half year to work out the best way to run my business, but it will happen and when it does I'll be able to be happier about working and so will my clients.

Productivity

Every day I set three MITs (most important tasks). I need to get much better at completing all these tasks all of the time. Maybe that means working harder, or maybe that means realising what can and can't be done in a day.

Sleeping

Some people who follow me on twitter may have read some recent tweets of my battle with sleep. More specifically, lack of sleep. I don't usually have trouble sleeping, but I do have trouble sleeping at socially acceptable times. I can sleep for hours, just it's usually during the day. Some of my clients think I'm in Australia some of the time due to my odd sleeping times. I need to work out whether I want to "fix" my sleep and sleep at socially acceptable times (if that's even possible) or embrace my odd sleep schedule and work with it, rather than against it.

Expand my business

I've had my first taste of managing other freelance developers this year, and wish to carry that on into and throughout 2012. My end goal for my business is to expand into a full-fledged web development shop, although I don't expect that to happen this year I can lay the foundations for it.

Make more connections

I know how important it is to have connections in the industry, and whilst I have X many followers on twitter, a bunch of people I can talk to on Skype, it's always nice to expand your network. I'll be doing this in 2012 by attending conferences. Kicking off the year I'll be giving a talk at CodeIgniter Conference in London in February. Another two conferences I am looking into going to, and evaluating their value is DIBI and the Web Developers Conference. Not only will conferences help me network, meet old twitter friends and make new ones, but I should learn a lot that I can bring back into Adam Griffiths Development to meet my other business goals. More connections means both web developers I can outsource to and manage, as well as clients

Get more clients

Another way to expand my business is to get more clients. I get plenty of requests for development work, some of which I can't take on because I'm a single developer, some I can't take on because it's not a right fit or the budget isn't right. With more freelancers working under Adam Griffiths Development, the range of projects we'll be able to take on will be much higher.

Take charge

I realised that people hire me for my skills as well as my opinion. Next time I'm working alongside another developer, for example a smartphone developer, other backend developer or even a frontend developer. If someone doesn't read my documents, and something doesn't work, it's more likely they just need to read the docs than something I've not done right. I need to start exuding more confidence with my work, and not be afraid to pull rank on someone if needed.

Realise the potential of EventLog

When I first released EventLog, everyone who saw my tweets and/or signed up told me how much of a great idea they thought it was. Unfortunately, I haven't seen a massive uptake, although I do have almost 100 users now. I need to revive EventLog, start to add more features and work out the best way to market the product to more people who like the idea. I've been using it on projects and have found it to be very useful for tracking events through applications, but there are some things I want to build in, like graphs to show more events over a a longer period of time. But enough of the spoilers, next year I hope will be the year of EventLog, and the year the project turns a profit.

It takes a lot for someone to do what I've done here, say where they went wrong and where they know they need to improve. I hope by posting this blog post people will see what my goals are, and realise I'm taking steps to become a better freelancer, and achieve some good goals over the next year. I hope to see other peoples plans and goals for 2012 posted soon.