It's the first time in three years that I'm writing a birthday post, ironically on the year that there's relatively little to provide an update on, but one that I think is important given the transitions that've happened and what I'd like for life to look like going forward.
The Least Productive Year of My Life
Most of my twenties has been about being as productive as possible, but for the first time, this past year has been different.
Where the last four years have been dominated by Video Husky and other companies took my attention previous to that, 2022 essentially became a sabbatical year.
Whether it was slowly letting go of my responsibility of Video Husky to the point that I only meet with our General Manager once every ninety days or trying and eventually letting of learning to code, the major theme of this year slowly shifted away from figuring out what I wanted to do productivity/career wise and instead focus on other areas of life that were also important.
Lyss and my relationship + nomading
That mainly meant spending time together with Lyss and safe to say life has changed a lot for us, with the first change being going from living in Hong Kong to doing a nomadic year.
While we've both traveled extensively individually and as a couple, this year was a special one for us. For one, getting to travel nine months in a row which we cherish and enjoyed immensely since it's such a rare opportunity. Beyond that though, it provided a reset and the perspective required to decide what did we want for the rest of our lives. Where previous to this year our lives were dominated either by Covid, the need to see family or one of our job's, we had none of that this year and gave us the opportunity to experiment with living in different places and ways whether in Thailand, Mexico or Barcelona.
One factor that we both enjoyed during this time was the autonomy we had and it's something we're both committed to continuing. At the beginning of the year, while we were already remote, Lyss was still working at her previous organization. Today Lyss has her own grant-writing business which allows her to work her own hours while keeping good steady income. Her starting her own business was an important step in our relationship. Like most couples as we've begun to build our shared life we've found things that worked and didn't for us and one area of struggle was the need to adhere to a specific schedule. Whether it was previously the rigidity of her 9-5 or my extended family's obligations when we lived in Hong Kong, we've found we're most content when we have the freedom to design our lives, and so the more that we're to do that in the coming years, the better.
What stuck and looking forward
With that said, this year hasn't been a complete write off in terms of productivity, especially when it came to notetaking. I've always been somebody who's taken a lot of notes, but struggle to use them beyond whatever it is I'm working on in the present. My hope was I could find a way to take and make better use of my notes. Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain course came highly recommended by a lot of people whom I admire and I got to take it this year and it did not disappoint.
The premise of the course combined two things I'm interested in by ensuring:
1) I don't forget things that I've read through organizing and processing
2) I never start writing from scratch by easily surfacing notes when they're needed
Figuring this out took much longer than I expected and nine months in, I feel like I'm only just getting the hang of this. Yet as I write more notes the more excited I am to see how this methodology can help me achieve future objectives and projects.
On a longer term "career" level though, between this and my attempt to learn to code at the beginning of the year, I suspect the next 1-3 years will be more devoted to skill development rather than starting a new company. While I might still consult on the side, I'm realizing that I don't have the skillsets necessary to start or run the type of company that I would want to. Where I know I could compensate by hiring or cofounding a company, I'm finding the idea of idea of a single-person SaaS quite intriguing, but to do that, I'd need to jack-of-all-trades it because what's exciting to me isn't having a SaaS company, but being able to build one myself (I'd imagine it's like the feeling you get when you've built your own house). With that said, as we've seen in the past few years, it's almost impossible to plan anything so I'll take it one step at a time and we'll see what the next year brings, if it's anything like the happiness of the past year, well, I'll have no complaints.