I can’t for the life of me remember a louder year than the one that ends next Tuesday. Personally, professionally, politically, it was a hectic twelve months. In retrospect, concrete and measurable goals (AKA resolutions) are probably what kept me alive and sane amidst the chaos. I’m no self-help guru or productivity genius, but I feel like I have survived a sink-or-swim situation over the past year, so I’ll share some thoughts on living with a hobby in the real world. First, I’ll pat myself on the back for my accomplishments:
Finish master’s degree:
- Done! The last year and a half were a challenge (my daughter was born spring of 2017), but I somehow found the energy, motivation, and focus needed to finish my MBA. I hope that being done with school will now free up the mental space for other parts of life (family, friends, projects).
Post to blog every week:
- 99% successful! I missed one or two weeks and not every post was laser-focused on tubes, but I’m happy that the blog and website survived a hectic year for me.
Exercise regularly:
- Exercise is an important ingredient for mental focus for me personally. I also have my exercise equipment in the same room as my electronics workbench and the multi-tasking kept audio projects moving forward (albeit slowly). My explicit goal for this year was to get into the 1,000lb club (weightlifting) and I did it with some room to spare.
I’m a big fan of quadrant prioritization to keep daily life in perspective (this idea is credited to Eisenhower, I believe). The gist is that we should rank our goals as high/low importance and high/low urgency and pursue them accordingly. I draw one of these diagrams at least once a week:
If we spend our time in quadrants I and II, we’ll get the important stuff done. The hard part is understanding your goals well enough to see the difference between urgency and importance. There is plenty of subjectivity to this importance/urgency classification and not everyone would come to the same conclusions.
For me, tube projects are a solid quadrant II item and that isn’t going to change this year. However, being done with school now means that high urgency and high importance things are screaming a little less loudly. That lets me spend a little more time on long-term goals.
This is all just a long way of saying that I intend to build more this coming year. On the short list are:
- EL34 push pull mono-blocks (see pic for one very near completion)
- Transformer-coupled line stage (to pair with above, probably DHT)
And on the list of schematics-in-waiting are:
- EL84 push pull stereo amplifier
- Line stage with integrated phono
- SMPS-powered 6V6 SET headphone amp
- Battery-powered experiments
On top of the workbench and test equipment projects that builds usually create, I’ll be happy if I can finish four of the above in 2019. I’d really like to return the website to its roots as a practical resource for projects and reading for beginners in the tube audio hobby. As I told someone else recently, my goal with this is creating the resources that didn’t exist when I started in the hobby. While this may not be urgent, it is important!
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