Develop Yourself

Planning to Develop Yourself

One of the things I’m working on around here this year is professional development. Working from my home office provides me a calm and solitude I need to get many of my client’s projects completed. However, it also leaves me feeling a bit lonely and sometimes out-of-touch with what’s going on in the world, personally and professionally.

I tend to try and stay away from a lot of social media (Twitter, Facebook and don’t even get me started on Pinterest) as it has a way of sucking my time. Before I know it, I’ll have whiled away 3 hours doing nothing but surfing the web. You can imagine as a sole contractor, my time is better spent producing billable work than allowing my mind to wander aimlessly.

No one is saying it’s not important to allow your mind to dwell on other things aside from work, but rather that a focused wandering might be better suited to the person, like me, who only gets a paycheck if they do actual billable work. Who doesn’t want a paycheck?

To that end, I’ve decided I’ll signup for a monthly course for each month of this year. January has already come and gone. Not much I can do about that. So, I’ll start with February.

This month, I’ll be taking a free “30 Days to Learn jQuery” course from TutsPlus.com. I already use jQuery quite frequently, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to have a formal introduction. For the coming months, not quite sure what the monthly class will be. Guess I’ll have to keep an eye out for new things.

So what about you? Do you have plans to develop yourself this year?