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.
Reflections
January 2025
This theme honestly seems quite broad, but given that I’ve limited it to a few main categories, I think it’ll be alright. I kinda came up with this last-minute, so this was the best I could come up with unless I wanted to procrastinate some more.
September 2025
I’ve had the feeling for a couple weeks now that the yearly theme just won’t be able to be completed this year. Looking back, I still think these goals were doable, but not without effort I didn’t take into account when first writing them. I’ve made the decision to abandon the theme for this year, or at least put it on best-effort status. I will continue to develop a theme for 2026, but for now I’m just trying to get my life in order.
Around the beginning of this year my family had decided on visiting Japan sometime in July. I ended up switching gears pretty early on and spent a good amount of my time working on the itinerary. I was in charge of figuring out the transportation between all of the different sites.
Most of the time I would have spent working on the yearly theme projects went into either researching transportation options or looking for bikes (blog post coming soon). I did manage to do some theme-related tasks in between though.
My productivity slowly died down as the Japan trip grew closer, and by the time we came back my productivity was completely shot. All I could do was just go to work and come home.
November 2025
I’ve finally gotten around to working on this draft after basically not touching it since the last update. I’ve since gotten out of my unproductive slump, but most of my productivity gains have been funneled into my job rather than on the blog.
I reread my reflection from last year and noticed that simply forgetting about your theme is a pretty realistic scenario, at least with the way I’m currently implementing the yearly themes. In hindsight, omitting the daily themes might have played an outsized role in killing the yearly theme for me. Being able to track your progress is what allows the theme to stick in your mind throughout the year, and helps when evaluating milestones and next-steps.
Looking back, I don’t think this theme was particularly hard to accomplish. I think my ideal outcomes were pretty reasonable, especially given that I had a year to do everything. This is obviously a lot easier said than done since though. I’d be fine with porting some of these over to next year’s theme.
eShopOnContainers is on hiatus for now. The last complete version of eShopOnContainers was developed under .NET 6 before being abandoned in favor of the eShop project. I still think eShopOnContainers still makes for a good reference project though. On a related note, it seems that making use of LLMs for coding also helps fill the same role as these reference projects, but it feels like I’m losing something with every line of LLM-generated code I accept.
Roadmaps - I like the idea of these, and I want to get back into a reading habit. However, I want to experiment with LLM-augmented leanring projects more.
Blogging - I haven’t been blogging, but for what it’s worth I have been writing more things in my journal, and I do have one more post I want to make this year. Blogging might not make too much sense as an ideal outcome every year since I’ll always say that I want to put more things on here.
Biking - I never actually ended up visiting the libraries. However, I’ve gotten a lot more confident on my new bike and can definitely feel myself getting faster, stronger, and more willing to spend time riding in general. I’ve slowly been investing more money into bike stuff as well, which I’ll count as having contributed to the theme.
Healthy eating - I’ve been eating very well lately. I find that ChatGPT is good at making healthy adjustments to recipes, though it’s no substitute for an actual human-made recipe.
3 books - only finished 2. I haven’t been reading as much as I’d like. I still manage to keep up with things on the Hacker News front page, but it doesn’t always scratch the same itch or provide the same amount of value as a dedicated book.
Low-priority tasks - I think I can mark this as complete. My Saturday tasks (I typically do miscellaneous tasks on Saturdays) have been relatively static now, which is probably a sign that my low-priority backlog hasn’t really built up.