Short review of 2022
Day before the last one
As this year reaches it's end, here I am as many others trying to keep up the tradition of making a short review of the year that is about the pass.
I am writing this on a family holiday in Austria. We just had 6 great days of skiing (most of us older folks are bloody beginners in the sport), so the year is getting a nice ending to it.
Stress, stress, stress
My biggest problem this year was just too much stress at work. As you can read in my previous posts I made a transition from an engineering job to a one in management about 1,5 years ago. The combination of this new role and a main project of my department (which is in a really bad state), led to a lot of stress, frustrations and bad moods this year. The good thing is, that my team (which I build up from scratch in these 1,5 years) started performing and they seem to really function as a "high performing team". There is also an re-organisation in the company taking place just now, so I hope this will also reduce some stress that was coming from the "friction" on organisational interfaces.
What also helps right now is to block 2 hours every day in my calendar, so that I have time to concentrate on actually doing the tasks I need to do and going thru my Emails. If I do not do something like that, then I am in meetings (invitations just come in) 08:00 - 18:00 and get nothing done. I also block an additional hour on every Friday, so that I can do some week reviews and sort out meetings and tasks for the next week.
Going back to old hobbies
I always loved listening to music and reading books. Around June this year I started to listen to music again, as a way to reduce stress and turn off after a stressful day. This helped me a lot. I got myself an "Amazon Music" subscription and that gave me access to a lot of new music. My definite favourite this year is the Band "Mastodon" who plays good progressive metal. I especially like their "newer" albums, starting from "Crack the Skye".
I read books mostly after I calmed myself with music. For a couple of months I reduced my Video-on-Demand consumption drastically, due to reading a couple of interesting books. This felt really nice.
The news consumption also reduced a lot in the last 6 months, because I really got fed up with all the bad news. It was replaced by books and music.
No sports
I did (almost) no sports this year. This was due to stress and lack of time. So I gained back the 8-10 kg that I lost in 2021. Which then spiraled to more bad moods.
Now after I spent 6 days skiing, I want to start jogging again when we get home. So wish me luck …
Emacs and other technical stuff
Emacs setup got simpler.
I had some experiments with Helm, elfeed, mu4e etc. but then decided I do not want context switching in Emacs. I use Emacs for task planning, writing notes, getting a grip on my work obligations, second brain kind of stuff … I do not want to read news, listen to music etc. in Emacs. It just messes with my focus.
My agenda views had a couple of variations (show 3 days of upcoming deadlines, sort with priorities, tried the effort estimates, …) but at the end I settled on just having a simple day view with a "Refile" (shows the during the day captured tasks or notes) section below it. So in those 2 hours I was writing above, I do all the tasks of the day and then refile the new ones (after either adding a scheduled/deadline date or a person tag, so that I can pick the topic in the One-on-Ones).
As I wrote before, I switched from Android to iOS and this reduced my smartphone usage a lot. It's a company phone so I do not install a lot of stuff on it. I would say I use it 80% for business and only 20% for private stuff. I do not miss my Android phone anymore, the iOS one works also.
All in all
It wasn't a bad year. I managed to get my work done in the company and on the private front some good old hobbies got revisited.
For 2023 I wish to have less stress, more sports, some kilograms less on the scale and more quality time with my children.