2022

My yearly theme for this year was Follow Hard.¹ It was intended to remind me:

To have direction, momentum, and break a sweat. A follower doesn't have to be perfect, they just have to follow.

I think my theme did help me stay on target, although like many years it took searching over my journals to see the theme manifest itself.

A large part of my dissatisfaction with this year was a little out of my control: a six-month funk from May to October. I'm still processing the reasons for it, but I'm grateful to God for my loving family to help nourish me out of it. Seeing discipline and momentum slowly restored over the last few months has been encouraging. However, the Funk of May shows up a lot over the next few sections.

Creating

This year I wrote 40 posts to this blog, 10 less than last year. Half of the 40 2022 posts were written before the Funk of May, and it tapers off dramatically after that.

Part of the issue was the lower energy and motivation in the Funk, but another aspect was a newfound joy in making private loom.com and youtube videos for my friends.

I fell in love with loom as a tool in 2020: the power to quickly "let me just show you" with a keypress is intoxicating, but I couldn't stomach the price just for me showing off weird Obsidian and vim things. I wound up jury rigging a similar setup using OBS and have been using it almost daily since. I plan to try and move some of the better concepts for videos into blog posts… or perhaps to start making public youtube videos. Unsure yet.

Another reason that I've written less for y'all is that I've written more for me. git says that I've created, moved, or worked on 1205 notes in my personal wiki this year. 400ish of those are journal entries, but that's still a lot of thoughts, saved links, and in-progress thought chains.

Some of those bubbled out into actual blog posts. Here are some of my favorite essays of the year:

• Review: Corne-ish Zen
• Frustrated with 11ty
• Indieweb Replies
• A Micro Office in a Tech Pouch
• The Road Goes Ever On and On: Tolkien’s Creative Journey

While I am proud of these, I need to stop pursuing perfection and getting hung up on these giant posts.

Reading

I read 20 books this year, up from 15 last year. I've found a couple places in my schedule where reading can happen regularly. I find this encouraging. Looking at my list, I do need to read more fiction. It's freeing and inspiring and I think I overwhelm myself with my non-fiction pile until it becomes a chore and not a joy.

Work

My day-job has been a combination of hurry-up-and-wait and a lot of individual contribution. It continues to provide a problem set that is easy to get passionate about and wonderful people to work with. I'm hopeful that this year will allow me to be more strategic about how we serve folks, and do a bit more leadership and research than specific UI design.

The Funk of May means that there's a good bit more Unintentionality recorded. I also got a lot more strict about what Unintentionality means: it's anytime I set out with one intention and found myself doing anything else. That includes a lot more than true goofing off. Now that I have a more accurate picture I want to be a lot more intentional in 2023

I probably am due for a rethink about how I track time: I don't want to just record, I want to encourage and protect the most important use of my time. I could stand to recategorize a little bit to protect and encourage more strategic thinking over tactical contributions.

Spiritual Life

Hopefully I'll never be satisfied with this, but this year is no exception. 🤷‍♂️

Many of my goals for the quarters were slowly building back discipline in my spiritual practices. In Q3, this was my Goal 1, and I was relatively faithful.

I can report with the time spent in prayer and in the word that I only find that I need more. I am more aware of my faithlessness, my impatience… in short how much I need the savior that has chosen to call me to himself. Investing time with godly men and investing in a small group at church has helped.

Praise the Lord. He will carry to completion what he has begun.

Health

Health was stable the last two years… and took a nose dive (from a measurement perspective) this year.

I intentionally put health on the backburner to focus on family and spiritual life. I don't know that I used that time as wisely as I ought (too many video games!) the main reason for the decreased numbers was that six month funk from May to October. Strava was nice enough to visualize it for me.

I also don't remember being quite this sick this many times any previous year. Cost of having toddlers I suppose.

To give praise to God: I haven't gained significant weight. I was able to run 2x 10k runs in a week recently. I had my first checkup in a long time, and all my tests and bloodwork came back good.

Relationships

One deeply meaningful measurement this year was that I started a spot in my weekly reviews for meaningful conversations and meals. I've been able to count over 35+ people who have encouraged me in person or on the phone in a one on one conversation. I reached out in thanks to as many of you as I could remember… if I forgot I'm sorry. Y'all have really built me up this year. It's been neat to see how many of you were blessed in return.

We had some fun trips and times with the family. I'm planning on tracking yearly "good meals" alongside trips and memories to try to increase that. What gets measured gets better.

2023

I always reserve the right to change my mind, but my current choice for 2023's theme is Wake Up. For me it means to stop dreaming about what I want to do and make it reality, as well as the daily discipline to literally wake up and start with the most important things.

May God be glorified. Happy new year!