Tyler's 2022 Goals (Revisited)

It's a little late, but better late than never! It's a bit of a bummer that my only posts in the last year have been my review and goals for 2022 but I refuse to feel bad about that! A lot of great things happened this year.

My goals for 2022:

1. Be curious & continue learning
2. There's more to life than tech
3. Monitor my attention budget
4. Become a homeowner

Be curious & continue learning

I kinda fucked this one up. I know that my learning style is pretty chaotic and a lot of that has to do with my ADHD. It's super hard for me to focus on videos, textbooks, and other kinds of tutorials.

My goal here was to spend more time deepening my knowledge in the technologies that I use at work and broadening my knowledge. I really want to stay sharp as an engineer and find other ways to be creative and effective at work.

I do want to learn but I find that if there's no pressure or sense of urgency that I end up wandering off and doing other things. I have been repeatedly trying out new things with the Haskell programming language and it's slow going but I've been having fun.

I'll roll this goal into 2023, but the main reason why I don't feel successful here is because I decided to spend more time with my friends and family than I did on my computer... not mad about that.

There's more to life than tech

Amen to that! My reflection in 2022 was that I'd effectively burned myself out on having tech as an identity. I felt like I never really "escaped" work because of twitter, podcasts, and having most of my friends in the industry.

In an effort to combat burnout at work, I tried really hard to stop working such long hours and focus on being more impactful with the hours during work.

I've really leaned into cooking as a hobby and photographing what I cook as a second hobby 😅. Earlier in the year I spent a bunch of time reading articles from the New Yorker but that didn't really stick. There was a point when I was looking to cut costs and that was the easiest one. Maybe I should subscribe again...

Monitor my attention budget

This one is still rough. I'm a doomscroller.

My goal was to minimize on time sinks like Facebook and Twitter, and for a time I think I had the Facebook app deleted but there's a strong volley between which app is worse. Especially now that Twitter is mostly meta-posting about Twitter or complaining about Elon Musk.

I will say that I don't find the doom scrolling to feel nearly as paralyzing as it was before. There's been a lot of bad stuff this year but I feel like there's been a lot more good to counteract it. It was harder when we were deeper into the pandemic, at least this year has been a lot more social for me.  

I don't think I'm going to name it as a goal for next year, because I don't think it's realistic. I do hope I use Twitter less but I think it's going to happen organically as the platform gets less stable and less interesting.

Become a homeowner

Holy shit! I did it!

The process was so stressful but I'm so glad I bought when I did. I had a lot of anxieties about the process. One of my biggest concerns was moving too far away from my friends. Thankfully, that hasn't really been an issue.

It's been such an amazing experience.