The new year is here and every­thing is, well, new! New job, new city, new friends, new social net­works, new toys. With all of this new, I best try to use it to improve myself and maybe even help oth­ers. Here are my New Year’s res­o­lu­tions for 2010:

1. Save and Invest

This is the first year in my life that I will earn more than I spend. There’s no more tuition to pay and I’m one of the lucky 2009 grads to have a pay­check. I have some man­age­able debt in the form of stu­dent loans, but for the most part I’m look­ing to get my income into a 401k, IRA, sav­ings account, or some other form of invest­ment before I can go spend it.

I’m not mak­ing gobs of money (yet) but if you need $10 or $100 or $1000 to do some­thing awe­some, send me an email. I fig­ure the eas­i­est way to start giv­ing back is by donat­ing to design­ers and devel­op­ers who give out their work for free and have lit­tle char­ity pages setup.

2. Opti­mize Infor­ma­tion Intake

Since start­ing my new job, Google Reader has become unruly and my Read It Later List has grown to nearly 200. I need to take an hour or two a night to knock out 10–20 old links and do a bet­ter job fil­ter­ing or scan­ning new arti­cles as they come up. Sur­pris­ingly, I feel like I’ve kept up with Twit­ter and other social net­works pretty well.

3. Read More Books

I read a lot on the screen, but never on the page. I couldn’t tell you the last book I fin­ished cover to cover. I’m hop­ing to read one book a month but per­haps more depend­ing on how much I fly and how crazy the new TSA rules are. I think I’ll try to keep a spring­pad list of books I read.

4. Return to the Dark Side

For the past 4 years, I’ve done every­thing in my power to get away from Microsoft to the point every­one in my fam­ily now owns a Mac or runs Ubuntu. Join­ing the cor­po­rate world has forced me to sub­merge myself into every­thing Microsoft once more. I knew it was going to hap­pen so I’ve been try­ing to learn more than fight.

I also have a Win­dows Home Server that I’ve neglected for months, so now that I’m back into deal­ing with Win­dows headaches I should hope­fully be able to trick it out. I want to enable remote access so I can access all of my media when I’m on the road, auto­mate tor­rents (legal ones) to down­load to it, and explore what our house­hold XBox can retrieve from it to play across the house.

5. Pro­duce More

I want to put out more blog posts, more videos, more designs, more code, more every­thing and not just get things started but actu­ally fin­ish them. I want to focus on get­ting things done. I have tons of ideas and half-cooked projects started, but noth­ing is com­pletely done and out in the wild. I want to be able to show more from 2010 than I can from 2009.

6. Visu­ally Brand Myself and My Sites

My blog design is tired and nearly expired. I don’t have a logo. I want to fur­ther develop a brand so I’m more rec­og­niz­able across all 100,000 pro­files I have every­where. I really like what Kyle Hask­ins has done with how he’s kept his blog, Tum­blr account, and port­fo­lio all con­gru­ent. Both of the Hale broth­ers are putting the fin­ish­ing touches on their new designs which has moti­vated me even more to get my own out there.

The last few things I want to do this year are minor and I haven’t com­pletely fig­ured out how I’m going to do it. I want to play more bas­ket­ball and get back in shape. I also want to stop order­ing the same movies as my room­mate Alex from Net­flix weeks and months after he does. Any­one know of a col­lab­o­ra­tion ser­vice that can read your Net­flix queue?