How I'm approaching 2022
In the past year, I’ve slowly switched over from the mindset of living reactively to trying to live more intentionally. But before I explain why, it’s worth diving into why I was living reactively in the first place.
A key driver for living reactively was my old job as a consultant. As a management consultant, you often have very little visibility into what your life will look like in even a few weeks time. It was quite conceivable I would walk into the office on a Monday and be staffed on a project in another country and immediately need to head to the airport. While this volatility was fun, it made it quite difficult to commit to anything more than a few weeks out, and this attitude extended towards my own life plans. I rarely put any serious thought into what my life would look like in 2, 5, or even 10 years time.
Another contributor to my attitude was that a mentor (that I still respect deeply) had told me earlier in my career that planning out your career/life for the next five years was impossible as so many factors are changing all the time. I still believe this to be true, but on reflection I may have over-indexed and used this as an excuse to not plan.
While trying to predict the future is a fool’s errand and living reactively is often unavoidable, I find that thinking through a plan or strategy gives purpose, motivation, confidence, and also provides a measuring stick.
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything”
- Dwight Eisenhower
As part of this, I have started setting annual goals. In most years, I’ve used fairly standard frameworks around health, career, and side-projects. This year, I want to try something new and align all of my goals to one of the following four categories:
Body - This basically maps to physical health, an area I’ve begun to increasingly appreciate as foundational to all other goals (especially as I’ve grown older).
Mind - This maps to mental health, but also includes learning and self-improvement. I have a natural tendency to focus my time and efforts here, but am easily distracted by “shiny objects”, so setting goals in this area is essential for me.
Time - This basically covers any goal that relates to how I want to be spending my time. While this category overlaps with the others, my hope is that this area will cover approaches that either stretch across all aspects of my life or should be mentioned separately.
Money - This covers all my goals around my financial health. This will include most of my goals around my career and side-projects.
Body
Since the start of COVID-19, the volume of physical activity I’ve done has dropped dramatically. I’ve seen this impact my life in the form of lower energy and motivation levels. Instead of setting lofty targets, my goals here are really to get me to build healthy habits and consistency:
Start a regular team sport - I find team sports socially enjoyable, but also inherently enforces consistency. You can’t just skip a scheduled game and let your team down unless you have a VERY good reason.
It’s been years since I’ve hit the gym consistently. I’ve set a very achievable goal this year of reaching “baseline” levels on the big 3 lifts with good form: Bench 70kg; Squat 90kg; Deadlift 120kg
Average 10,000 steps per day over the entire the year
Mind
I’ve found my mindset, mood, and motivation strongly drives the quality and volume of work I can do. I’m still very new to goal-setting in this area, so please bear with me:
Try meditation for 30 days in a row - I’ve heard good things, but have never consistently tried it out. I’m hoping this year, I can have at least one 30 day streak of meditation.
Publish 12 posts to yangsnotes.com - I find writing to be a great way to clarify my thinking, I hope that by regularly writing I will be able clear up my thinking.
Read 12 books - High quality books can be life-changing. I bought a mountain-load of books at the end of 2021, I should read them.
Time
A change I’ve noticed in myself since moving from consulting to tech is that my ability to focus and my ability to do things that are not “fun” has declined significantly.
A symptom of this is that I often find myself spending my time in a fractured way, constantly switching between different contexts and tasks. This is something I want to reduce. I think this issue can be fixed with better habits, specifically, time block more exhaustively and use my calendar as a record of how I spend my time. While, this goal isn’t quantitative, when I look back on my calendar at the end of the year, it will be clear whether I have succeeded or failed in this goal.
A personal goal I have in this area is to spend more time talking to my parents. I won’t be tracking this, but I want to spend 5+ hours speaking with my parents every week.
Money
I have a lot of goals in this category, ranging from my personal finance, career, to side projects. In no particular order they are:
Invest $XXXX in ETFs every single month. I’ve been slacking on this for the past year, not because I haven’t had the money, but just because I haven’t bothered. While I believing people should take on greater risk when they are young, this should be balanced with lower risk bets to prevent a complete wipeout. This is one of my “lower risk” bets.
Regularly track personal finance. I am horrible at this, I have basically no visibility at the moment. This is a big one for me this year.
Build product-led growth or growth skills at work. We spend a lot of time at work, it's good to align this time to a personal goal.
Get 1+ new side project/product(s) to $5,000 MRR. I’ve been tinkering with Thumblytics intermittently for the last 2 years, and I’ve been changing my mind regularly on doubling down versus starting a new project. The heuristic I’m using to make a decision here is “Hell yeah, or no”. Doubling down on Thumblytics doesn’t elicit a “Hell Yeah” from me, so I will commit to getting a new project/product to $5,000 MRR.
Get Blogmade to $10k+ MRR. Blogmade is a blog automation service I’m working on with another IndieHacker. I’ve never built an agency before, so this is definitely very new to me, but we’re seeing good initial traction!
Finally, if you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering why I’m writing my 2022 plan at the end of January (almost a full month into the new year). Well, there are two main reasons:
I find that the New Years period is usually quite busy, and I don’t have enough time to sit down and reflect properly.
I was in Hawaii on holidays for the past 3 weeks 🙈
p.s. Even in producing this plan, I’ve come to see how my writing is a convoluted mess of my thoughts. I hope that as I continue to write over the next year, the clarity and persuasiveness of my content will improve.