Happy New Year HN! What are your plans for the new year? http | TomBen’s Web Excursions

Happy New Year HN! What are your plans for the new year?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746344

My goal for the next year is just to work fewer hours. Covid pushed my work habit to the extreme, and I need to rebalance.

1. Read more books, less social media/news.

2. Spend more time with my friends. I haven’t seen some of them IRL (In Real World) for more than a year.

3. Exercise more, play tennis with my daughter, spend quality time with my kids.

4. Spend more time with my parents. They’ve become visibly older in the last years, an observation that scares me.

5. Focus more on marketing for the businesses that I’ve bootstrapped. All the shiny new features that are developed are not as important as getting more people to use your product.

6. Promote open-source project to 1k GitHub stars. I know it isn’t very meaningful, but it’s just nice to receive a bit of recognition from the community.

7. Enjoy life, don’t stress about all the little things that happen along the way.

Happy new year!

I recently read Atomic Habits by James Clear, and also listened to some process philosophy from Steven West’s Philosophize This. One takeaway that I had was on the danger of setting goals. I am trying to build a mindset of ‘becoming’ or to embrace the journey of the goal rather than really trying to achieve a specific milestone.

I want to reduce/eliminate my alcohol consumption to become a person that doesn’t rely on alcohol for social distraction or self-medication. To achieve this I have stopped keeping any alcohol in my home. If I have a drink it will need to be out somewhere and by virtue a ‘special occasion’.

I want to improve my work-life balance by setting expectations that I am unavailable after 5pm. I aspire to be someone who can remain a high performer while also finding and following my passions. This year I will continue to shape those passions. There is no real milestone that I feel I need to set.

De-addiction of Tech News sites. Feeling like I consume too much time reading news, and too little doing on my side projects. Time to reverse it. i.e. more focus on shipping something.

My plan is to mediate more consistently. Hopefully every day. I’ve found it to help my mental health immensely when I am consistent and recently my mental health has been poor.

Wake up early and work on important goals first, before diving into day job and getting too tired to do anything
write an essay a month, however short
live and work remotely outside of home country, for 6+ months total
get a tattoo that would remind me that I’m still alive and how precious that is.