Year of Commitment
My 2024 retrospective can now be found on last year’s theme.
Description
January 3rd marks the end of my first year of full-time employment. This year was simultaneously the most and least productive I’ve been in a while.
It felt like most of my energy just went into my job. I’d get home and pretty must just laze about or hit low hanging fruit on my to-do list.
Typically, if I come up with some non-trivial task or project, I’d add it to my to-do list for Saturday for later processing. As time went on, my Saturday list just kept growing, and instead of actually working through each item, I’d end up just moving the due date to the following Saturday.
- Infinite procrastination.
At some point, postponing tasks seemed almost equivalent to checking them off - both actions struck them off the list. However, one action was clearly easier to do than the other.
Repeating this process for an entire year, and I ended up with a huge backlog of work.
The goal of the year of commitment isn’t to get all of this done - in fact, I want to purge a lot of the stuff I don’t care about. I think that one of the reasons I procrastinated on a lot of things this year because I wasn’t able to fully commit to anything. Something else always seemed to pop up and take my attention away. I want to get in the habit of sticking with a project for the long-term, as well as actually being able to finish what I started, or at least get to a point where I’ve achieved some tangible outcome.
If the goal of last year’s theme was to focus on a greater number of things, then this year’s theme will be about focusing on less, but over a longer timeframe. My efforts will concentrate around the following 4 categories, roughly ordered by importance:
- Coding/Career
- Blogging
- Biking/Health
- Reading/Small Projects
Ideal Outcomes
Really any sort of progress on these main categories will count. This year is all about making consistent, long-term effort.
Coding/Career
Finish eShopOnContainers.
Work through roadmaps:
- Backend
- ASP.NET Core
- API Design
- Software Design and Architecture
- System Design Primer
- Software Architect
Blogging
From last year:
Continue maintaining the blog, and incorporate more
blogandnotesposts.
Biking/Health
Bike to all the local libraries.
Come up with a healthy meal plan/shopping list.
Everything Else
Finish 3 books unrelated to the above categories.
Resolve some lower-priority tasks on the backlog.
Daily Themes
I’m actually gonna forgo the daily themes this year. I don’t get much value out of habit tracking this way, and I never checked my daily themes last year.