2022, I barely knew you. This year seems to have moved so fast, I can’t believe it’s over.
Welcome to another Year in Review post where I spend a bit of time reflecting on what happened last year to hopefully position myself better for the year to come. If you are interested, check out my 2020 and 2021 reviews.
My method
As a refresher, I manage my yearly goals in Evernote with a note titled fittingly `2022 Goals`. I then refer to this note throughout the year, documenting accomplishments, adding new items, and providing clarifications as needed. However, the number of times that I refer to the note has diminished over the last couple of years. Can I make one of my goals to check my goals more often?
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 annual 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.
2022’s Word of the Year: Manifest
At the top of my 2022 goals in Evernote I wrote the following, “This is the year to manifest what I’ve been wanting to do for so long. This could be personally or professionally—with tangible outputs. This includes traveling more, publishing code, creating products—stop bullshitting and actually do the things I’ve talked about.”
When looking back at the year and wondering if I manifested as much as I wanted, I’d have to say I’m on the fence. I’ve had some wins and some losses so overall I’m feeling I did good. I certainly didn’t crush it but I also didn’t leave 2022 scattered with unfulfilled promises.
So, let’s take a look back at how my 2022 played out.
Professional Areas
This section covers both my full-time role in my career as well as the part-time work I do here on this blog and for personal branding.
In 2022 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.
While I won’t go into all of my itemized company goals, as they wouldn’t be very interesting to you, here are a few of the more notable professional goals from the past year.
✅ Achieve AWS solutions architect certification
Yes. Yes I did. This goal has been a goal of mine for I don’t know how many years. This year I had a bit more time to focus on it at the beginning of the year and I really dug in to make it happen. I employed my best Deep Work practices to dedicate time every day over a number of weeks to finally check this one off.
At some point in the future I may put together a blog post on what my approach was and the tools I used but for now, I’m incredibly excited that I finally accomplished this goal!
❌ 52 blog posts (1 blog post per week)
Ha! This was a fail…again. I typically overshoot my goals with the number of blog posts I expect of myself. I don’t know why I keep doing it. I published well below 52 blog posts this year. Probably single digits, low single digits.
❌ 12 YouTube videos (1 per month)
I’m not even going to…just never mind. Zero posted.
❌ Get one article published on larger platform
For this to happen, I would’ve had to actually write a blog post (see above) and then submit it to said platform. You guessed it. Didn’t happen.
✅ Maintain deep work discipline and time-block scheduling
This one I count as a win. I did really well managing my time this past year and staying committed to deep work principles and time-block scheduling.
In case you were wondering, deep work is a term coined by productivity expert and author Cal Newport that refers to the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It is the state of being able to fully immerse oneself in a task and bring one’s full attention and effort to bear on it, without being interrupted by distractions or multitasking.
Time-block scheduling is a time management technique in which individuals schedule specific blocks of time on their calendar for specific activities or tasks. Time-blocking involves setting aside dedicated blocks of time for deep work, as well as for other activities such as meetings, email, and leisure.
I believe utilizing these two approaches provided me with the tools needed to accomplish many of my goals and to have a successful year professionally.
❌ Host at least 1 Community of Practice meeting and 1 Lunch and Learn per month
This was technically a fail as I didn’t meet the quantity of meetings however we did continue the momentum by holding a number of meetings throughout the year. These are opportunities for employees to get together with like-minded individuals on a particular subject and to discuss the news, technology, impacts, ask questions, share knowledge, etc.
The particular community of practice that I lead is focused on all things Digital Identity. I’m hoping to increase the number of occurrences in 2023 as there is quite a bit of interest across the company and it is really our core capability.
Lunch and learns are a way for employees to share knowledge with others. We’ve essentially doubled in size so the number of employees with unique and interesting skill sets and technology exposure provides the opportunity in 2023 to host even more lunch and learns.
Personal Areas
Here are how my personal goals shaked out last year.
✅ Return to running or regular exercise
While I’m not yet able to run like I used to due to a hip impingement issue I discovered last year, I did return to the gym as a replacement. Getting back into lifting weights, and walking on the treadmill at max incline, are currently working out well when it comes to working out. More of this to come in the new year especially after I gained some weight during the holidays.
✅ Reach out to friends and family once a month
While the frequency may not have been once per month, I still did this quite often. I made a concerted effort to reach out and to engage more with friends and family and plan to keep this going in the new year.
✅ Maintain healthy lifestyle and complete all annual health checks
Once I turned 50 I rededicated myself to my health. I think this is natural for most people when they hit a certain age. Being a nerd, I created a spreadsheet to track and maintain a record of all of my health checks.
I continued to eat less meat and more fruits and vegetables, continued a robust skin care routine, and got back in the gym. More of this in the new year for sure, including finally getting the colonoscopy done.
✅ Read one book per month
I missed a couple of months reading as I focused on achieving other goals including my AWS certification, but I still ended up sneaking in the 12th book just in time. I’d like to read more than 12 per year but I at least hit the minimum that I set as a goal.
Here are the books I read this year:
- January – Seveneves (Neal Stephenson) ❤️
- January – Technology Strategy Patterns (Eben Hewitt)
- April – Termination Shock (Neal Stephenson)
- April – Born a Crime (Trevor Noah) ❤️
- May – Stop Playing Safe (Margie Warrell)
- June – Coders (Clive Thompson) ❤️
- July – How I Built This (Guy Raz)
- October – Probable Impossibilities (Alan Lightman) ❤️
- October – How the World Really Works (Vaclav Smil)
- November – The Revivalists (Christopher Hood)
- December – The Myths of Innovation (Scott Burken)
- December – Red Rising (Pierce Brown) ❤️
❤️ = a favorite
All of these books were really good and I definitely recommend you checking them out. I’ve read a bit more fiction over the last couple of years and that trend kept up this year. I love science fiction but prefer it to be somewhat realistic. I recently received the Red Rising book series so the beginning of 2023 will be focused on those books for sure.
✅ Code every day
This goal was probably set up for failure and I need to adjust expectations in the future. With that said, I did start off the year fantastically. I kept up my momentum at the end of 2021 and continued my daily coding well into 2022. Here’s a look at my GitHub contributions from 2021 and 2022. You can see the beautifully heavy volume from November to March.
It helped that I was building an application for my daughter. She’s a professional dancer and she is always trying to keep track of her gigs and related income/expenses. I was happy to build and deliver gighitter for her to use in the coming years. It’s still a product I’d like to build out further and offer to her colleagues but when and how I do that is still TBD.
The application is built in Vue.js with GraphQL and DynamoDB. It’s hosted on AWS and was built utilizing their AWS Amplify toolkit. Given I built and launched this product, I’m going to count this goal overall as a win.
✅ Speak to a financial planner
This is another one that I’d put off for many years. I’m glad I finally sat down and did it. If you haven’t, I highly recommend it. Just as your physical and mental health are important, so too is your financial health. I use Fidelity so it was easy to set up a free call with one of their advisors. Now I need to focus on actions from that meeting in 2023.
✅ Complete house renovations
We’ve been planning to do some home renovations for some time so I’m glad to report that we started the ball rolling in 2022. We updated our master bathroom and can’t wait to start the next project. Of course I didn’t do this myself. While I could do it, it would take too much time and it’s easier just to pay someone. If I don’t have the time to code, I certainly don’t have the time to do major construction.
✅ (Unpublished) Learn spanish
This is a goal that I didn’t write down in my official goals yet something that I committed to throughout the year. I’ve been wanting to learn Spanish for many years. In school I mistakenly took French for 4 years and wish I would’ve taken Spanish instead. Not that there is anything wrong with French, it’s just that Spanish is much more useful. I will say this, my French foundation isn’t a complete waste as there are many similarities in the languages. This has helped me move quicker with learning Spanish.
While I still have a long way to go I have committed time this year and have improved quite a bit. I mostly use Duolingo and am currently riding a 164 day streak! I supplement the app with exposure via Spanish TV, radio, and YouTube videos. At some point I may employ iTalki which is an app where you can video chat with native speakers and tutors to further enhance your conversational language skills.
Summary
There you have it. My look back at my 2022. Overall, it was a good year. 👍
Professionally our company continued on an upward trajectory and nearly doubled in size. We won significant new business that is application development work and more in line with the technical delivery that I’m most interested in.
Personally I continued to evolve, and I think improve, as a husband, father, and human. I’ve maintained a healthy lifestyle and continue to push myself to learn new things.
Hopefully you have a chance to look back at your year to take stock of the good and the bad. I think it’s important to do this in order to not only continue personal improvement but also to remember all that you’ve accomplished. Too often we get mixed up in lamenting what we didn’t do vs. remembering all that we did.
Cheers!