This post almost didn’t happen. 2015 holds a lot of dead-air from me in the blogging world, but I’m so compelled by my routines that I felt that I had to do it! Honouring a self-made routine/tradition is my achilles heel and my biggest strength at the same time.

Reflections on 2015

2015 wasn’t a good year for sticking to my goals, but I still learned a lot on the way:

• Brew Beer - Didn’t do well here since I didn’t brew a single batch, but there was a lot of taste testing!
• Nurture a Healthy Habit - The year was off to a great start until I injured my leg. I attempted to get back into running a bit too strong and injured myself again. If there’s something positive I can take from this though is that I still wish to run. It’s been a very frustrating year as a result because I missed running in Berlin during the best time of the year! I ended up gaining weight, which made me not feel so good about myself and other healthy habits collapsed as well. The good news is that the desire is still there and I just need get back slowly.
• Think More Critically - This one is a strange one because I don’t have anything countable to associate with it. In the end I feel more clueless about everything. As I put a critical focus on anything it opens up complexity that I had never imagined. Now I’m not sure how people are so sure about anything! I need to stop listening to so many economics podcasts ;-).

That being said, I kicked arse on a 2014 resolution which was to learn Docker! Docker is a core piece of technology in what I was working on at SoundCloud.

Looking back, 2015 was a difficult year to make such goals. I’ve found a lot of interesting tactics on James Clear’s article about good habits. How would things been different had I set the goal to 1 run per month? Even with my injury I’m sure I would have been more proactive in testing the waters with a single 3k run each month. Also, why not make the beer brewing goal a single brew for the entire year? I held back on brewing because I was intimidated by the equipment I would have had to purchase and store. If it was one brew, I would have simply brewed with the few people that I’ve met in Berlin that do home brewing. Then again, it’s easy to say that in retrospect.

Goal for 2016:

This year I’m going on a bit of a tangent from previous years. I feel I pushed 2015 too hard. It was more work than I had anticipated. A good challenge but I set my expectations too high. 2016 is likely to be similar with moving to a new city and starting a new job (post on that coming later this month). So I’m only going to make 1 goal. I see it as a realigning goal, a course correction from the journey that started when I left ThoughtWorks back in 2014.

Write in a Journal

I have the urge to write, but the public forum doesn’t feel right. A real physical book where my text doesn’t flow through prying eyes wanting to find patterns, so that they can serve me better ads. I’ve been fairly public with my life and I’m curious about taking that down a notch. My head feels like a swirling mass of ideas that hasn’t quite found its outlet (though those who have been out drinking with me when the topic of economics comes up, would beg to differ).

Think of it as close-sourcing my thoughts. Once public, it’s hard to make things private, but the other way is certainly possible.

Summary

A bit of a change from the usual. Let’s see how things are in a year, shall we?

This post took 2 pomodoros to complete

• yearly-goals