In my previous post, I talked about passing MLS-C01 exam, developing a small Golang app, working out regularly, building a simple Supermarket Chatbot and posting here regularly. These goals are high level goals and I realize that I am not good with goals. Not in the sense that I hate having goals but I simply work better with milestones. To do that, I have to break down each goal into regular tasks and blocking out time to complete them.

1. Pass MLS-C01 exam

I am aiming to take the exam in end Apr/early May. At the moment, Tutorials Dojo only offers 11 MLS practice sets. If I aim to complete 1 practice set a week, I could technically take the exam in end Mar/early Apr instead. I would need to schedule regular 1-2 hours time block so that I could focus on studying.

2. Develop a small Golang application

When I first made the decision to learn Golang (but failed), I was aiming to migrate some of my highly used endpoints I’ve developed for work to Golang instead Django server. The reason for such change is to improve the performance primarily. Anyway, before I could even migrate, I would need to learn the basics of Golang. I would need to book out time on my schedule to learn and gain hands-on experience. After all, programming is often best learned hands-on. Once I’ve learned the basics, only then I could try to develop and test a simple server in the development environment.

3. Build regular workout routine

This is an important goal. I have 3 regular routines, each for a day, that I have been following since start of last year. However, I did not follow through with it. For now, I have blocked out timeslots within my schedule for my exercise. It may not be the most intense workout but what I am looking to achieve is consistency. I am aiming to go to the gym 3 times a week for a weight lifting session. Nothing fancy, nothing complicated.

4. Build a simple Supermarket Chatbot

I have collected an amount of data but I did not proceed to preprocess it. This is because I did break down the goal into smaller tasks but I felt overwhelmed by the list of tasks. To deal with that, I would set out the weekly and monthly tasks and milestones so that I could move forward and eventually build a Supermarket Chatbot. Considering that I have other goals in mind, I would have to space them out so that I don’t feel overwhelmed again and to make the workload more consistent and sustainable.

5. Make regular github post

A more realistic goal would be to post at least once a week. Why I am would want to post regularly is to first brush up on my writing and communication skills. I would be writing down my experiences in words and I could practice communicating in a brief and concise manner while having clarity. It is very easy to cheat with LLM models like ChatGPT, Gemini etc. but that would do me a disservice.

And why once a week? That would mean 52 posts for 2025. That may sound a lot but if I were to reduce the frequency to, say, 2 weeks, I would be post 26 times and any higher frequency would take up a lot of my time and mental load. I should be able to learn something each week, be it from work or personal life, and if I don’t, my life is not very inspiring.