My 2020 In Review

February 1, 2021

My 2020 In Review

Not leaving 2020 as the year of COVID

Everyone is going to remember 2020 in some shape or form, I know I will. What I did not want to do, was in effect write off 2020 as the year of COVID, where all my plans got thrown out the window. I mean that statement is true, COVID is what has dominated this year and I did have plans disrupted because of it. But at the same time, I know I still managed to do some incredible things and have fun while doing it. So, earlier in the month of January I performed an annual review on myself for 2020, to catalog a decent chunk of information so I would remember this year in a better capacity. I broke my review down into several categories, with the help of Todoist. It’s where I got the template to perform this review and if you already leverage Todoist, I recommend trying the template out. You can find the link to it here - https://blog.doist.com/annual-review/ . While I do go into much more depth in my version of my review, for the purpose of this post, it’ll predominately be high level. I also gave myself a grade in these areas, much like a tier list, with S being the highest and F being the lowest.

Work

I won’t lie when I say that work had some pretty big highs and pretty big lows. But when I consider some of the projects I worked on and delivered to the business, I can’t help but be happy. The highs of 2020 with work were me at some pretty pinnacle moments in terms of what I’m capable of and were incredibly motivating. The lows are still there and when you’ve been quite high, going quite low can feel quite stark. As a result, my grade for work in 2020 was a B. Overall quite good, but definitely additional room for growth going into 2021.

Productivity

When you can’t go anywhere, you can’t get distracted, meaning your productivity is quite good :D Joking aside, I know I can look at my side project backlog and what I completed and see how productive I was in my personal life. Naturally as hinted in the previous section on work, I both feel and have the feedback that I was incredibly productive given the challenges we faced. What’s key for me now going forward, is to find a sustainable high level of productivity that I can in effect, maintain indefinitely. That’s just to ensure I maintain the performance I’m accustomed to without completely destroying my energy reserves. But with that feedback in hand, I was quite happy to give myself an overall grade of S for productivity in 2020.

Health

While I was only ever physically sick and out of work for a protracted period of time at the start of 2020, overall my health was the area I took care of the least in 2020. I had innumerable opportunities to go for walks, to break out the weights at home and I never took them up. I’m not overweight by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m definitely not a fit person. Believe me I’ve already taken steps (literally) to rectify this. To put how bad I was in 2020 in perspective - My average weekly steps since changing my routine in 2021, is higher than my average steps overall for 2020. We’re only a month in to 2021 and I’m already walking more than I did before. It’s a decent start, but the journey is only beginning. As a result in 2020, Health got a big fat E from me. This being the lowest grade I got in this review.

Finances

My personal finances in 2020 are definitely in the middle of the road. Initially in 2020 a decent amount of my money was spent on travel, which now all sits in the value of gift cards from airlines. In retrospect getting the cash would of been nicer, but I figured “ah sure we’ll be back to normal soon”. How naive of 2020 Evan. The rest of the time, I never really felt a pressure financially, I was able to increase my charitable donations month to month, start my side project fund which has paid out with new pieces of gear. But, my overall real savings are non-existent and an increase in credit card usage is not exactly healthy either. The aim is to resolve these challenges in 2021, some of which involves just cutting back on some hobbies (looking at you cloud computing) But overall, my finances got a C for being fairly in the middle of the road.

Relationships

I think 2020 definitely gave rise to many opportunities for rekindling old friendships. I’m quite fortunate that I had several opportunities to do so and I took advantage of those opportunities. Getting back in touch with old friend groups has been lovely and doubling down on some other relationships I have with folks has been nice too. I’ve a tendancy to wall myself off sometimes from folks and I’m trying my best to reduce that habit, I think 2020 definitely helped me in that regard. Seeing the improvements I made to myself, I felt I deserved a B for my relationships, with the aim of going higher with this in 2021, without overloading myself.

Learning

Finally, we have the learning aspects, what did I learn in 2020? I definitely learned a lot about myself but also I learned a relatively decent amount of information when it came to technology and what have you. I do know that I’m quite terrible for purchasing online courses and then never doing the courses, but I never actually do the courses. I think in part I struggle with the format sometimes, but that might just be down to me needing to find some more courses in tune for me. With that in mind, I again gave myself a bit of a middle in the road grade when it came to learning, of a C. Overall, this is just a high level peek at what I did for my review. In reality, it’s incredibly detailed and I’ve a clear picture on my areas for improvement in 2021. This post is going up on the start of February and I can already tell you that in the last two weeks of January, some of these grades have improved. Which is also to say that some of these grades have not improved or gone down in grade. I’m obviously not perfect and it’s impossible to strive for perfection. But I’m definitely happier doing the various changes I’m doing in my life and I’m looking forward to seeing where they lead me to in 2021 and beyond!

Thank you!

You could of consumed content on any website, but you went ahead and consumed my content, so I'm very grateful! If you liked this, then you might like this other piece of content I worked on.

Thoughts on being at home long term

Photographer

I've no real claim to fame when it comes to good photos, so it's why the header photo for this post was shot by XPS . You can find some more photos from them on Unsplash. Unsplash is a great place to source photos for your website, presentation and more! But it wouldn't be anything without the photographers who put in the work.

Find Them On Unsplash

Support what I do

I write for the love and passion I have for technology. Just reading and sharing my articles is more than enough. But if you want to offer more direct support, then you can support the running costs of my website by donating via Stripe. Only do so if you feel I have truly delivered value, but as I said, your readership is more than enough already. Thank you :)

Support My Work

GitHub Profile

Visit My GitHub

LinkedIn

Connect With Me

Support my content

Support What I Do!

My CV / Resume

Download Here

Email

contact at evanday dot dev

Client Agreement

Read Here