It is hard to summarize my 2023. But to describe it, well, 2023 felt like the year that a lot of things happened yet none seemed to matter. And for myself, two words kind of represented the whole 12 months: anger and exhaustion. The latter was what I felt throughout the year, and the former what I realized I had been for a long while.
The silver lining was that the realization required me to stop and do some retrospection.
What I did:
- Built a heatmap of areas in my life based on emotion and rewarding feelings for partaking in them
- Ran a quick breakdown of my time commitment
- Ran a breakdown on my effort allocation for my relationships and stakeholders
- Ran an 80/20 rule analysis of my personal life
- Ran an 80/20 rule analysis of my professional life
Brief conclusions:
- Lack of feeling of appreciation was a leading factor.
- Mental exhaustion led to physical exhaustion.
- Spurs-of-moment actions led to temporary spurs of happiness, yet leaving long-term impacts on mental health.
- Lack of introspection led to a skewed perspective of life satisfastion.
The action items:
- Create a process to remind myself more of life’s simpler joys
- Better condition myself to happy
- Be more disciplined and design and follow a routine that can be flexible and adaptable
- Document more
- Apply more project management to my personal life
As part of the first step above, for the last few days of 2023, I have been working on building a list of things I enjoyed. They are not comprehensive and I definitely missed a lot, but just listing them reminding me of the joys I got from them in the past.
2022 was a great year for me, and in retrospective, I was ambitious and arrogant heading into 2023. So moving into 2024, for me, it will not be about achievements. It will be about laying a stronger foundation for myself to be happy and feel good about life.
Some of the lists I am working on:
