Goal Progress–Wrapping up 2020 | Voice of the DBA

Goal Progress–Wrapping up 2020

This is the final look at my goals for 2020 and how I did. I am writing this a few days after the end of the year, and examining what I accomplished for myself.

Rating for the year: C

Details below, but really, I let the pandemic get me down, I didn’t focus, and I took lots of opportunities to get away from work and technical topics when I could.

That being said, I didn’t take advantage of the lack of travel to focus more on myself. I could have improved more skills in a focused way, especially around my goals. I also think that my goals were more of the “this would be fun” nature than carefully tailored around my career and the things that are helpful.

In short, I don’t think I thought enough about myself and where I am in my life when I started planning 2020, thinking about the practical aspects of moving my career forward, but in an evolutionary, not revolutionary way.

I’ll have to do better next year trying to set and work on goals.

Reading Goals

Here were my goals for the year.

• 3 technical books
• 2 non-technical books – done

Books I’ve tackled:

I didn’t finish one technical book. I had a few ones I was looking at, but never really dug into any of them. They were easy to put off, with my constantly citing current work and the pandemic. To be fair, I did also read 70+ fiction books, which helped me cope with the year.

All in all, I am happy with my reading progress here, getting away from fun fiction or literature and doing some reading in areas that will help my career.

Project Goals

Here were my project goals, working with software

• A Power BI report that updates from a database – 30%
• A mobile app reading data from somewhere
• A website that showcases changes and data from a database – 20%

I did manage to get Power BI hooked to a database, and some minor visuals, but nothing like I wanted.

I did build a few websites, using data from a database, but as static sites. It was simpler to just get things working like this, and I was worried about costs and value. The whole PASS failing thing also threw me at the end of the year when I anted to focus more on goals.

Nothing done on the mobile app. I think this was an aspirational goal at the beginning of the year, a chance to just try something, and I never took the chance.