Investigating programmer productivity. Learning about the history of the programming profession in general, of the "software engineering" meme in particular, and detailed history of the "agile" meme. Learning some R and stats on the side.

Why - because there is a lot of leverage in looking at the question of why programming skills are what they are, and how they could generally be better, compared to just improving my own. There seem to be some low-hanging fruit, such as encouraging programmers to be more aware of cognitive biases affecting their work, or of the nature of probability and tools for working with it.