Welcome to another Year in Review—where I spend a bit of time reflecting on what happened last year to hopefully position myself better for the year to come.
My method
To manage my goals for the year I create a note in Evernote with the name `2021 Goals`. I then refer to this note throughout the year, documenting accomplishments, adding new items, and providing clarifications as needed.
At the end of the year I revisit the list to check my progress and use it as an input for the coming year’s goals. This is a very rough and rudimentary method for managing goals, but it works for me for now.
Each year I also choose a word that will be used as my core guiding principle or theme for the year.
2021’s Word of the Year: Growth
Coming out of a rough 2020, 2021 was set up for a rebound. The word growth seemed like a great option for rebuilding from the lost time of the pandemic. Unfortunately, even with the arrival of an effective vaccine, we’re still in the midst of the pandemic with no real end in sight. So, my growth in 2021 was sort of stunted.
2021, the struggle continues
Yep, we’re still suffering through the pandemic. For some reason far too many people made the vaccine political, spread/believed misinformation, or are just too scared to get a shot. As a result, we continue to see variants of the virus pop up with the latest being Omicron.
Polio would still be a thing if we approached it this way back in the day. However, back then we were a strong and united nation that got together and fought collectively against a common enemy. Today, our country is a tribal mess. It doesn’t make a lot of sense and is quite frustrating but we’re dealing with it and we carry on.
So, let’s take a look back at how my 2021 played out.
Professional areas
In 2021 I continued my role as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Dignari and split my time across a few different focus areas—delivering for new and existing clients, supporting business development, and continuing to build out core company capabilities and culture.
Looking back at some of my itemized goals I put down for 2021, I failed at many of them. Here are just a few of the stinkers.
❌ Achieve AWS solutions architect certification before March 31
I did dedicate some time at the beginning of the year to knock this out, but got sidetracked again and never revisited it. One of these days I’ll complete this goal that I continue to carry year over year.
❌ Publish one blog post per week
Ha! This was certainly a fail. I ended up completing 2 official company blog posts and 7 blog posts here on my personal site. Terrible.
❌ Post one YouTube video per month
Abysmal. No videos published in 2021. Zero.
❌ Run two company hackathons
Building on the momentum from 2020’s hackathon, I set my sights on running 2 in 2021. Unfortunately, zero happened.
❌ Host at least one Lunch and Learn per month
Again, I failed. I think we did one Lunch and Learn in 2021 and that was early in the year.
Now you’re probably thinking, what did you accomplish in 2021? So let’s look at some of the good.
✅ Business development…and more business development
A big part of what derailed many of the the above goals was the relentless work associated with business development. I lost track of how many RFIs, RFPs, and RFQs I worked on this year. These are time consuming efforts but are necessary to grow our company. The good news is that we won some new business last year that should position our company for growth for many years to come.
✅ Launched Communities of Practice
As part of my team’s agile schedule, we use our daily standup on Fridays to simply hang out. I implemented this during the pandemic to take a break from Zoom fatigue and to just connect better with each other personally. We talk about life, sports, books, technology, and generally anything that’s top of mind. During these times we often dig into particular technologies and kick around ideas from each person’s unique perspective. I wanted to bottle this experience up and formalize it with a larger audience. So I decided to create a Communities of Practice capability at Dignari. Our first community was launched this year focused on Digital Identity and I’m proud of the engagement we’ve seen so far.
✅ Initiated internal skunkworks project
I like to encourage innovation and offer our employees the freedom to explore new technologies. In support of this, I brought together a small team of developers and data scientists this year to focus on building a product that would provide the company with strategic insight into our competitors and the larger federal government contracting space. More importantly, it offered them the opportunity to flex their technical muscles with no pressure and full freedom to use technologies they were interested in. It was a fun project and something I’d like to repeat moving forward.
✅ Continued company maturity
We are a young company that requires quite a bit of work to move into maturity—including processes, procedures, and tooling. I spent a fair amount of time this year focusing on defining career bands, itemizing corporate training plans, and solidifying our technical environment for long term growth. Things we might be able to get away with as a scrappy small company become more difficult as we grow. There is still a lot to do, but work this year started to chip away at that mountain.
✅ Client delivery
And I can’t forget all of the work done to support new and existing clients. This included my team delivering a full stack solution we’ve been working on into the client’s Production environment. This was an exciting step and I look forward to seeing how the product matures and grows in their hands. In addition, I continued to provide research and analysis on a number of emerging technologies relevant to their mission space.
Each of these items required dedicated support from a larger team and could not be done by me alone. I’m thankful for the people I work with and their desire to deliver value to our clients and to each other.
Personal areas
I had quite a few personal goals I wanted to focus on in 2021 and unfortunately many were derailed due to the continuing pandemic or other extenuating circumstances.
Let’s take a look at how some of my personal goals turned out.
❌ Run 40 miles per month
I started out the year great as I was training to run a half marathon at the end of the year. Unfortunately this was derailed after I started experiencing pain in my right hip while running. At first I battled through it but after it progressed into a chronic issue, I decided to get it checked out.
After an MRI and a few doctor visits I found out I had hip impingement. This is a condition seen in many folks who played a lot of sports in their youth. I stopped running in May and never picked it back up. I went to physical therapy twice but also let that fade as it was too far from the house and PT just takes too long sometimes to see results. I know what I need to do to get back out running, I just haven’t done it. Sounds like this one is ripe for inclusion in the 2022 goals. I miss running.
✅ Read one book per month
This goal was based on last year’s experience where I originally set out to read ten books, but ended up reading many more. Given the business development work I had on my plate early in the year, I didn’t hit the ground running on this one until mid-year.
Here’s what I read in 2021, in chronological order.
- June – The War of Art – Steven Pressfield
- July – A Promised Land – Barack Obama
- July – How to Avoid a Climate Disaster – Bill Gates
- July – Rich Dad Poor Dad – Robert Kiyosaki
- August – Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters – Steven Koonin
- August – Four Thousands Weeks: Time Management for Mortals – Oliver Burkeman
- August – The Alter Ego Effect – Todd Herman
- October – No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram – Sarah Frier
- October – Deep Work – Cal Newport
- October – The Introvert’s Edge to Networking – Matthew Pollard
- October – Ask Your Developer – Jeff Lawson
- November – The Master Algorithm – Pedro Domingos
- November – The Innovators – Walter Isaacson
- December – Seveneves – Neal Stephenson (still reading this one)
While I didn’t read as many books as last year, I still read a lot especially after starting halfway through the year. As you can see, I mostly read non-fiction and enjoy books about technology, startups, and significant societal issues. All of these books were enjoyable. My favorite was once again by my man, Walter Isaacson. The book, The Innovators, provides a deep and sweeping history of the creation of major technologies of our time and explains how a community of creatives nurtured them to mass adoption. Excellent read.
At the end of the year I find myself working through a fiction book, Seveneves, which is unusual for me. But, I picked it up for something different and am enjoying it so far. It’s a massive book that will take some time to get through that’s for sure.
✅ Deep work and general quality of life
I dabbled with deep work approaches in the past but tried to be a bit more structured with it this year. You can read more about how I screwed it up here. Toward the end of the year, I implemented Cal Newport’s time block scheduling techniques and saw an increase in my productivity and output. Highly recommend trying this approach. You can find the planner I use here.
I also tried to optimize other parts of my life. For example, I was pretty consistent with waking up at 6am every day, getting to bed a bit earlier, and cutting back on social media and watching sports on TV. In general, I reassessed what I was spending my time doing and then asked myself if it was truly a valuable use of time. I found that many times the answer was no, so I cut it.
✅ Increased focus on my health
I hit 50 toward the end of the year and with that milestone one typically starts to reassess their approach to health. So, that’s what I did. I created a Google Sheet to serve as my health tracker and started to document all of my doctor visits and major health events scheduled for the year and for a number of years out. Here are a few notables from this past year. I finally bit the bullet and started taking blood pressure meds. I started monitoring my weight and eating better and ended up dropping almost 20 lbs. I cut out most processed foods and snacks and introduced more vegetables and fruits. With my loss of running due to injury and my continued work from home, my physical fitness unfortunately took a hit this year. That will definitely be an area of focus for 2022.
Covid eventually caught up to me at the end of the year. Even though I was fully vaccinated and had the booster, I still ended up with Omicron for Christmas. Luckily it only felt like a basic cold and I was able to recover rather quickly.
✅ Spend more time coding
I’m pretty happy with the progress that I made with code in the past year. I wanted to increase my coding in 2020 too but fell short. So, in 2021 I wanted to be better. And, I think I was—especially considering that these days most of my coding is done outside of work.
Here is how my GitLab and GitHub profiles look at the end of the year respectively:
I know, I know, it’s rather sporadic and sparse but I’m especially excited by the consistency I’m having over the last month. I’m currently working on coding a full stack application for my daughter. She’s a professional dancer and choreographer and she needs an easy way to record and track her gigs. The solution I’m building helps her out while also letting me scratch my itch for coding. It is built with Vue.js, Vuetify, Vuex, AWS Amplify, GraphQL, DynamoDB, and federated social login with Google, in case you are interested. I’m definitely having fun with it and hope to launch it early 2022. At this time next year, I want my GitHub profile to be fully lit up!
Summary
So there you have it, my 2021. I feel this year, for all of its continued limitations given the pandemic, was still one where I experienced significant growth—both personally and professionally.
Turning 50 makes you turn a more critical eye toward what you’ve done not only in the past year but also across your entire life. You naturally question your progress, your place, and your plans. You start to realize that you’re closer to retirement than ever before. Are you too old to reinvent yourself? Do you want to take a leap into another direction? Or do you want to continue on the current path paved with past success? I feel this past year, and the coming year, will continue to invoke deep thought on how I see myself and my career progressing over this next phase of life.
In 2022 I plan to expand on some of these goals, add new ones, and look for areas where I may continue to grow as a father, husband, professional, and human.
Cheers!
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