As a way of procrastinating from writing my series of introduction posts to this blog I’ve decided to give you all a quick update on my progress, as measured against the goals I’ve set for myself this year.

I’ve been focusing all of my mental energy, and much of my time on finding a new job. I’ve also been following the 30 Days of Discipline program. That program is actually helping me achieve my goal of getting a new job. It’s getting me more disciplined and freeing up my time. This leads to me doing more interview preparation.

The job hunt has been hard. This is not due to there being a lack of jobs on offer, but instead my salary expectations, the set of requirements I have for a job, and difficulty in getting time off for interviews. So far I’ve interviewed for 5 companies. With one I bombed, and another I didn’t have experience in very specific areas. I’ve got through to the final interview stage at three companies, but have declined in two of these cases, and I thought the job didn’t match my requirements. I have my final stage interview for the last company in 2 weeks time. The job has loads of benefits: great technology stack that will help me out when I go contract in the future, free lunch every day and it’s even walking distance from my flat. For the next two weeks the main focus of my life will be ensuring I get this job. My mornings before work will consist of getting up at 5am and practising writing algorithms and making sure I know the differences between MYISAM and INNODB. What fun.

The 30 Days of Discipline has been going ok. I’d say I’m sticking to it around 80%. After this month ends I’ll probably have another go at it and get it to 100%.

I haven’t been chasing women at all. I’ve fucked one girl who I’d already fucked last year, and got one number from a girl I would say was a 7.5 but it looks like a flake. This will probably be the first month in a long long time when I get no new lays. The truth is “working on yourself” doesn’t magically get you laid. You need to go out and game hard too, and I haven’t been doing that. I have come to realise that you only have the focus and mental energy to do one big thing in your life at a time (on top of your day job). This means women have to take a back seat for now.

In terms of trying to save money the year has got off to a bad start. Managed to spend hundreds on useless crap, meaning a big percentage of last years savings have gone. As soon as I get my new job I’m going to switch my focus to get into the habit of being a penny pinching scrooge. My default mindset will be to say no to anything that costs me money. That combined with the fact I’ve now finished paying off my student loan and a pay rise I should just about scrape 10k in savings this year.