Year in Review

This year had so much potential and after two tough years in a row, I was really looking forward to a better one. If I focus on myself, the year was okay: I switched jobs for the better and worked on improving my overall approach to productivity. But as soon as I widen the circle even slightly, it becomes clear it was a bad year. There are no two ways about it: The year’s end made it impossible to call it anything else.

An Awful End

The year took its most challenging turn when my partner lost her job in December. It was sudden and unexpected, but she handled it with incredible grace and professionalism. Despite our frustrations with the political climate affecting jobs, we need to learn to adapt and find new paths. We will be fine, but there’s a lingering sadness over losing the relative safety we felt through all these challenging years since the pandemic.

Health Concerns

Additionally, towards the end of the year, my grandparents' health became more of a concern, reminding me to cherish every moment with them. I’m particularly proud of my grandpa’s bravery as he has started to undergo severe cancer treatment in December.

Christmas Woes

Despite our careful planning and genuine excitement, Christmas turned out to be less than ideal. A series of small mishaps unfolded: the toilet in our train compartment was broken, we initially got the wrong type of hotel room, endured a terrible experience at a shopping mall, narrowly avoided a traffic accident, struggled with Napu’s sound sensitivity that cost us a lot of sleep. I also fell ill on Christmas Eve, spending the day in the hotel room instead of with family. These issues, even though not that bad on their own, taken as one left us feeling quite upset. This was especially sad for me, because I had looked forward to the holiday in a way I hadn’t in many years.

However, I want to think there is a silver lining in this experience. We’ve learned some valuable lessons for future holidays, like the benefits of taking a car train instead of driving over 800 kilometers ourselves and choosing to stay in a hotel for space to decompress and rest.

Brighter Moments

Amidst these challenges, there were highlights in the first three quarters of the year. I’m thrilled about my new job, which I started in July. I have not only nice colleagues, but nice bosses, too. The work environment is open to my ideas and the tasks are challenging but well suited to my skills.

Our summer was wonderful, including a memorable trip to Finland’s Perämeri National Park, visiting Kilpisjärvi once more and finally hiking through Malla’s strict nature reserve. Perämeri is special, because it’s challenging to visit (it consists of a group of islands and you need to hire a water taxi to get there).

Beyond these trips, there were countless wonderful moments in our day-to-day life, too: solving jigsaw puzzles, watching TV, hiking day trails and collecting berries. Despite ups and downs, we had many opportunities to laugh and enjoy each other’s company - and we did.

Two bowls full of blue berries are held in a forest environment. The hands are stained red from blue berry juice. In the background a dog is visible.

While interacting with Napu this year, I learned the importance of understanding trigger stacking, letting her make choices and providing her with a safe and positive environment to learn and grow. She was a joy to have with and around us.

A dog is laying belly up in front of sofa. There are toys and a chewing bone next to her head. She is watching into the camera.

Personal Growth

Even in a bad year there’s things to learn and take with me into what comes next. Here’s an incomplete list of some of the things I found valuable to have learned this year:

  • I am pretty sure that I’d like to focus my efforts to grow professionally in the direction of code quality and software architecture. This is not the same as trying to become a tech lead or manager. And it’s good to know the difference.
  • I have learned that it’s okay to watch VODs of the same Slay The Spire Streamers on Youtube while playing Dead Cells. This is my way to relax. I don’t need to impress anyone while relaxing. If this is what my brain wants to do after a hard day, that’s fine.
  • Between 10 am and 1 pm is my crunch time. This is when my brain is the most capable and my environment permits the most undistracted work. It hasn’t always been that way. I was able to do some of my best work in the evenings before but this has changed. I feel like it’s immensely helpful to know when I can do my best work, because that means I know now which time slot needs to be protected the most.
  • I learned that positive emotions make the biggest difference in habit formation. If I can bring myself to authentically feel good about doing a thing, chances are high(er) that I will do the same thing when I encounter the same trigger later. The old view is that habits form through repetition alone, but it’s actually the immediate positive feedback that I can induce myself by celebrating right after I did a thing that makes all the difference.
  • Skipping breakfast as a form of intermittent fasting is actually not that hard.
  • LLMs may be ethically and environmentally questionable but they are tools that are insanely helpful. They are here to stay. I have found great use cases and have had a chance to play around with more advanced features thanks to a GPTPlus subscription through my company.
  • I took steps to improve my productivity setup this year and a couple of things that I feel like I finally understood:
    • Use one tool to keep a certain kind of data (Task? OmniFocus, Note? Obsidian, Event? Fantastical. Misc. Reminder I can’t miss? Due.), link tasks and notes, but don’t write notes into your task management app and reminders for tasks or notes into your calendar. Have bright, clear lines what tool you use for what and remove redundancies ruthlessly.
    • Use only what you need, when you need it. Sometimes I only need a note. Sometimes I only need a reminder in Due, sometimes I need to do elaborate planning and tracking in OmniFocus, with a canvas and lots of notes in Obsidian, time blocking in my calendar, etc. The important point is that the ratio of work to “meta work” should be correct. If I work more to organize my work than actually doing my tasks I’m in trouble.

Looking Forward

Despite 2023’s terrible end, there were moments of happiness and growth. However, I’m approaching 2024 with cautious optimism.

I man is raising a thermos cup of coffee into the camera while sitting in a hilly forested nature setting, next to a dog and a woman.

What makes a good year is a smaller gap between my expectations and reality, leading to fewer disappointments. The new year will be about managing expectations and rolling with the punches. I’m prepared to do both!

Theory > Memories > Reviews

It’s maybe a little bit weird to start writing again by pointing to a post by Jakob Greenfeld I disagree strongly with. It’s about a book called 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. I’m not going to write a strong rebuttal about all of the claims in the post but rather focus on one important point and also add a few more general thoughts. But let’s start with a little context:

I do think embracing the limits of life to focus on what we can do is a good thing. I had written about the book myself a while ago. My main points were:

  • “I have to play the hand that I was dealt and resources (and everything is a resource) are not available in endless supply. If you take these two things together, it makes sense to go for a satisficist way of life.” - Or: privilege is not evenly distributed, but you can still forge a life out of what you got (just not every life).
  • “My here and now is not merely a transitory state in between the lacking status quo and an amazing future. Instead of improving things in the present moment, I would endure certain things simply because I defined my present situation as something that didn’t matter in the future.” Or: I am allowed to improve things in the here and now.

I think that Greenfeld’s post sees fallacies in Burkeman’s book where I see a not very generous reader. Greenfeld is a “hustle culture” kind of person whom I follow for useful notes on self help and productivity books but I do not always agree with him. One thing stood out as interesting to me in his post:

A cheap dinner with my parents is infinitely more meaningful than some networking dinner with strangers that costs me a fortune. In short, the amount of time/money you spend on something (and how much of it you possess) doesn’t dictate the meaning of anything.

This is a counterpoint against Burkeman’s claim that, because of the limited life span we possess, what we choose to spend our time on - and how much of it on what - becomes meaningful and defines our lives.

Greenfeld says that time = money. He then gives an example where spending relatively little money on an event doesn’t mean that that event couldn’t be more meaningful than another event that you spent more on. What Greenfeld has discovered is that you can’t compare single events like this but must compare topics: The question is how do you spend your time - over your lifetime? Comparing two singular events doesn’t make sense. But whether you spend your life mostly at networking dinners vs. mostly with your family does. This doesn’t mean that when you have disregarded an important aspect of your life that choosing to spend more time on it - even if at first it’s just a small amount - doesn’t feel meaningful. But the meaningfulness doesn’t come from it being a short event but rather from trying to rectify the neglect (or maybe exploring new frontiers).

I do think it can be worth it to read opposing opinions like this because it strengthens my viewpoint, it points to flaws in my approach or simply just widens my horizon. I am not convinced that what Greenfeld writes points out fallacies in Burkeman’s writing, but it still made me reconsider my own views, which is valuable.

The quoted passage for example made me think more deeply about my claim “everything is a resource” and how that relates to the sometimes very meaningful singular moments of life, as I’ve tried to untangle above. I think this passage especially hooked me for its relationship to my tendencies of sometimes living too much for a future that may never become a reality (it’s a risky investment strategy to always reinvest and never reap rewards). And that meaningful moments exist, reminds me how important it is to take advantage of choosing to be present for the things I am making my life about.

This post is also valuable because it’s an example of a person who is unwilling or maybe (as of yet) unable to recognize life’s limits. These people exist out there and they may not be easily convinced of the opposite. That’s useful to keep in mind. Greenfeld and I are holding different values that’s for sure and since values are personal one may be persuaded to think this is just a battle between differing subjective viewpoints. But the objective realities of life - e.g. that your lifetime is limited and being more productive doesn’t make life last longer or spending time fiddling with your productivity systems doesn’t make you enjoy the important moments more - do not care if you would like to forget about these facts (and rather work hard to grow your business or whatever). You will have to come to terms with them - if you like to contemplate these things, or not.

The post and its author is a useful counter example to my own life’s plan: A (relatively) small but reflected life in the here and now is more rewarding, more livable, more rational, more emotionally honest and also more ethically sound, than any sweeping pronouncements of a “big life"™ could ever be.

My mental model predicts that sooner or later everyone will have to open their eyes to the small life they are actually living and embrace it - or failing that will live with a lot of avoidable cognitive dissonance. Greenfeld suggests the opposite. We’ll see whose bet holds.