2021 → 2022

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Although I do an annual review every year, as I grow older and accumulate social experience, and since what I do each year is quite different, the way I review each year is actually quite different.

But this year I finally found a review method that I am relatively satisfied with:

Ask myself some big-picture questions first
Organize my weekly journals
Roughly see what I did every day from the calendar

Some big-picture questions aka Soul-searching questions

These eight questions are not difficult to answer, but they can help me think through several important aspects of the past year. Below I will talk about "Three Most Valuable Lessons". I won't list the others one by one, everyone just needs to have their own answers!

Goals and achievements reached this year
Unexpected goals and achievements reached
Three most valuable lessons
Three best decisions
Three most adventurous things
Three best books
5 people who influenced you the most this year
Happy things this year (no upper limit, happiness is unlimited)

Weekly Journal and Calendar

Basically, a weekly journal is a running account of what happened each week. Every Sunday night, I set aside half an hour to write down my evaluation of the week and what I did. Sometimes I thought I didn't do anything, but unexpectedly achieved some things, or I didn't do much, but actually I was quite happy and it was interesting.

The calendar faithfully records what I was doing every hour of every day. Occasionally I feel that I remember things a bit too trivially, but having a record gives me confidence. When I am in a slump or doing an annual review, I can know what I usually do, and thereby find ways to adjust my life state faster, or even feel that I am actually doing great! (X

I really feel that doing this set is very helpful. It makes me understand that even if I didn't achieve my annual goals, it doesn't mean I was messing around all year. It avoids me magnifying my failures or negative emotions, only remembering what I didn't do or didn't do well, while ignoring other things I silently achieved.

Or I might arbitrarily set some goals at the beginning of the year, but those are just things I "felt" I "should" do. In my heart, there represent other things I wanted to do more, and I actually finished them without knowing it.

For me, a big benefit of the annual review is this:

Be aware of the things that are truly important to me, rather than doing things to conform to social perceptions, others' expectations, or old self-identities.

If I continue not to clarify what I "feel I should" do versus what I "want" to do, I will feel more and more disconnected from myself, always busy but just busying blindly, missing the point, 🦐.

For example, I have a goal of reading books almost every year, and in 2021 I also set a goal of "reading 20 books", but in fact, I only read 3.

At first, I couldn't accept myself like this. This completion rate made me very disappointed in myself. But later I saw that I actually learned a lot in programming this year, made up for a lot of technical debt, wrote for the Ironman contest to sort out the knowledge of component libraries, got good Feedback when sharing in the study group, tried out the three mainstream frontend frameworks, and finally started writing backend, etc.

This made me realize that my original purpose for setting 20 books was "knowledge" and "self-growth". So what does it matter if I didn't get it in the form of "books" today? And if I really finished 20 books and absorbed knowledge from various industries and fields, but was not familiar enough with web development which I rely on for a living, wouldn't that be putting the cart before the horse?

The preface seems to be too long, let's come back to talk about 2021.

In terms of introduction, development, transition, and conclusion, this year is "development" (continuation).

Beginning of the year: Just came back from military service, still adapting to society and work;

Mid-year: Moved house, had a higher degree of control over life, and also took advantage of the epidemic level 3 alert period to spend a lot of time with myself and talk to myself;

End of the year: Changed jobs, more confident in my web development ability, economic status tended to be stable, and also had spare energy to develop other interests, such as hiking, fitness, writing, running self-media, etc.

2021 actually had a lot of pain for me, and there probably weren't many happy times, but correspondingly, I grew a lot. Mainly, the imposter syndrome of switching to a software engineer has alleviated with the increase of knowledge. I started to be able to weigh inputs, practice enjoying the process, and finally tried many things I always wanted to do.

About the three valuable lessons of 2021

1. I cannot keep all friends, fate cannot be grasped

I've always heard a metaphor from somewhere — "Even a webbed hand cannot hold all the water in it" (The protagonist I heard about at the beginning was even Buddha, but I can't find it so I won't mislead people).

This metaphor says that when we cup water in our hands, the water will flow away through the fingers. And if we have webs, although it won't flow away through the fingers, most of it will still flow away from the edge of the palm, leaving only a small puddle of water in the palm. For me, friends and fate are like water, and we can only try our best to keep what we can, and inevitably watch most of it flow away.

My past self really tried too hard to hold on to all the friends I knew and wanted to keep in touch with everyone, but this only made me burn out. The result is that those who will leave will leave.

2. Leave time for myself, live with "myself" as the starting point, learn to say "no"

This is somewhat related to the first point. It was also because I wanted to maintain all relationships too much, so I paid a lot of time. At the same time, I wasn't very good at refusing many gatherings. I always convinced myself that it was rare to get together or to relieve loneliness, and gave almost every night and holiday to others. The result of continuous accumulation was that I couldn't focus on the moment when I was with friends. I only thought about what I hadn't done in my mind. The result was low social quality and things that should be done were not done.

And the previous step of time management is "leave time for yourself". Only when you have time can you manage it. I always missed the point, constantly iterating management methods, but ignoring the most important premise.

"Leaving it to yourself" actually means "reducing gatherings", "learning to say no" and "solitude".

(If contact is lost because of leaving time for myself, then that is "fate")

Some roads can only be walked by oneself, and only after walking through can one get along with friends in a more complete and healthy state.

3. Enjoy the process, not the result

After entering society, hard work no longer has an end. You must constantly satisfy yourself in the process.

This point is the same as what I read in Atomic Habits (shilling the 📖 Atomic Habits book summary I wrote before). The general idea is that we often feel that we can relax and be happy only after achieving something, but in fact, this idea constantly postpones enjoyment. When we achieve a goal, the next goal follows, so we can never really be happy.

But if we can enjoy what we are doing, we don't have to wait until we "finish" it to be happy and relax.

This point is the hardest of the three. I am still gradually adjusting now, but this year, after I used the concept of Atomic Habits + OKR to think and plan my life, the difficulty of enjoying the process has been greatly reduced.

The concept is to first clarify "identity", have a vague understanding of oneself (Objective), and then think about which things I am doing or want to do correspond to these identities, and which things I am doing do not, so as to find out a few things in life that I will regret not doing (Key Result). The rest is simple. Just split the tasks into things to do for the year, quarter, month, and week, and adjust at any time according to the status. (In the next article, I will share how I use Notion to implement this process!)

In summary, although the goal achievement rate in 2021 was a mess, I am actually very satisfied with myself at the end of 2021. It sounds weird, maybe I really set a lot of things that I didn't need to achieve, and at the same time achieved some things I really wanted to do?

Finally, thank you to everyone who saw this. I hope everyone is well in 2022!