Meet the New Year; Same as the Old Year...NOT!

SAS Programming Professionals,

Happy New Year to you, your families, and your colleagues!

This is the time of year when people make all types of New Year's resolutions.  According to the USA.Gov web site, the most popular resolutions are:

1. Lose Weight
2. Volunteer to Help Others
3. Quit Smoking
4. Get a Better Education
5. Get a Better Job
6. Save Money
7. Get Fit
8. Eat Healthy Food
9. Manage Stress
10. Manage Debt
11. Take a Trip
12. Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle
13. Drink Less Alcohol

And, these resolutions all make sense because they promote personal growth.  It is a new year, so why not start making the changes that you want to carry forward throughout the year?

Along with personal changes, perhaps it is also time to consider what changes you could make to improve your SAS programming skills.  There is no "most popular list of SAS resolutions" for us to reference, so I will suggest some:

1. Lose unnecessary variables and observations when inputting data sets
2. Volunteer to help junior SAS programmers
3. Quit writing programs without comments in them
4. Get a better understanding of the intricacies of PROC SQL
5. Get more sophisticated in your SAS Macro programming
6. Save time by re-purposing your old programs
7. Purchase some interesting SAS Press books... and read them
8. Join a local SAS users group and attend meetings
9. Get better at using the Output Delivery System
10. Take a SAS class
11. Write a technical paper for SAS Global Forum
12. Reduce processing time by writing more efficient programs
13. Subscribe to the SAS-L listserv

Hardly a comprehensive list, but definitely a good start, no?  And, I would bet that one or more of these resolutions resonate with you; that they are things you have been wanting to do, but have not quite found the time to work on in 2014.  Well, there are 364 more days of 2015 just waiting for you to dig into your own SAS resolutions.

Of course, you could simply sit back and do the same old, same old.  But, how could you continue to achieve personal growth as a SAS programming professional if you did that?

Meet the new year; same as the old year--Oh, we really think not!

Best of luck in all your SAS endeavors!

----MMMMIIIIKKKKEEEE

(aka Michael A. Raithel)

Author's Page:  http://www.amazon.com/Michael-A.-Raithel/e/B001K8GG90