2020 End of Year Review

Kamran Ayub -

It's time to reflect on the year and my what a year it's been. I'll start by saying that COVID-19 is no joke and it's still just as important today to stay safe and mask up. 😷

Thankfulness

I don't typically choose "themes" for the year but for 2020 I think it was chosen for me: thankfulness. There was a lot to be thankful for myself and my family and friends during a horrible time.

I am thankful that no family members close to me have been taken by the virus but nearly everyone has gotten it, some with very minor symptoms, others with moderate symptoms, and still others with longer-term effects like fatigue and loss of smell/taste. It has passed through the household without lingering effects so far.

The pandemic has been a terrible event and we have friends who have suffered health-wise and job-wise from it. I'm thankful that we've been able to stay healthy as a family and remained at our jobs.

2020 Positives

I'm an optimistic and positive person and even though 2020 was a dumpster fire for the world at large, it helps me to focus on the many moments for me as an individual and us a family that were positive.

  • 👩‍💻 My work turned 100% remote which for me was a positive and a long-time goal that I want to maintain going forward.
  • 🌲 We spent a lot of time exploring locally, in Minneapolis. I think we visited at least a dozen new-to-us parks and outdoor areas around the metro.
  • 🚲 We discovered a renewed love of biking and we included the kids. This was amazing for our wellness and was a fun family activity in the evenings and during the day.
  • 🚙 We bought a used minivan and we bought it in cash instead of financing it which was a major accomplishment. We had saved for over a year to achieve that!
  • ✊🏿 We partipated in protests and activism. At the site of the George Floyd murder, we stood in solidarity with others in our community to stand up for Black Lives. We tried to attend as many rallies as we could safely do and we even had the kids help clean up in the aftermath to show them what it means to be involved.
  • 🐱 We got a kitty named Gus, after Octavius from Cindarella
  • 🔨 I was able to finish some projects in the basement!

Despite the hurt and the sadness, both in our local community and the world as a whole, we managed to carve out those positive moments for ourselves and that's something to be very thankful for.

2020 Goals in Review

The first thing I want to say, to anyone, is that if you are writing or reflecting on your own 2020 and you got less done than you planned... give yourself a break. Our way of life was upended, the pandemic has affected all of us in some way or another. If you got anything done, you should be proud. For many, having motivation to "get things done" and "be productive" was far from their minds.

Let's review what I had set out to do for 2020 and where I ended up.

Content

Financial

  • ⛔ Get Keep Track of My Games to make a profit
  • Still no dice yet, while it has earned some revenue, I instead focused on starting a community with Discord integration in 2020
  • ⛔ Get Looks Good to Us to make a profit
  • LGTU has not made a profit but it has earned revenue which is still an impressive feat for a 1-year old blog! It earned exactly $16 but there is still earnings yet to be paid out that bring it into the $20-30 range. That's almost profitable 😂
  • ✅ Passive and 1099 income should cover 10% of our annual expenses
  • It actually covered 19% of our expenses (after subtracting Cassie's income), including the lump minivan payment. With the van, we spent more in 2020 but without it, we spent less than 2019 💪
  • ✅ Maintain a 40% annual savings rate
  • We blew past 40% and reached a 51% savings rate for 2020 😲 Even though we technically spent more in 2020, household income increased for the year by 34% which resulted in higher savings. 📈 Want to track your own savings rate? Use my free ReachFI PWA app!
  • ✅ Have one sponsor on GitHub
  • I did it! I had ONE sponsor in 2020 for ONE month for $5. 🙏

DIY

  • ✅ Finish the last egress window cover
  • I did it and blogged about how I built it.
  • ✅Finish one basement-related project
  • I actually did two projects technically, a closet around a sump pump and a new doorway to our utility room.
  • This was huge for me. Learning how to frame, drywall, tape, and mud was all brand new!
  • ⛔ Stretch: Finish an upstairs home project
  • The basement projects took about 3 months to complete and that took me to the end of 2020.

Unplanned Accomplishments

I like including this because it goes to show you can't predict everything for the year!

Reflection on accomplishments

When I start these year-end posts I forget about how much I actually accomplished in 2020, wow! I have a system I started in 2019 where I track work for my "hustling" on Trello. This lets me easily bring up what I've accomplished for the year which makes me feel great! It also is just an effective way to manage and plan my pipelines of work (more on that below).

Two Impactful Books of 2020

In 2020, I didn't end up reading as much as I usually do since I tend to listen to audiobooks but there were two books I read that made an impact on me. Atomic Habits by James Clear and The Practice: Shipping Creative Work by Seth Godin (affiliate links).

In Atomic Habits, James speaks about the power of habits and systems in lieu of having goals. The idea is that you cannot effectively reach your goals without having the proper habits in place to achieve them. And once you have a system in place or develop a habit, you will naturally reach goals because that is just who you are as a person. This is a book to keep physically as a reference as it has useful summaries of tools and techniques to help build and break habits.

In The Practice, Seth shares his many years of wisdom on what it means to ship creative work effectively to build "a practice." In other words, what does it take to move from being an amateur (in the pure sense of the word) to being a professional? Hint: you just keep shipping and iterating and making things better, even when you don't want to. The book is about doing good work, not striving for perfection on everything, and shipping your work to customers. I really appreciated all the bits of wisdom in the book, it read like a meditation almost. It's not for everyone but I tend to love his newsletter and podcast.

2021 Habits and Systems (to reach my goals)

With that in mind, for 2021 I want to try and focus on improving the systems that are working for me, introducing new systems, and breaking out of bad habits that work against me. Now of course, in order to know what habits you want to build and break, you need some vision of what you want in the future. The type of person you want to be. I know Kent C Dodds talks about his mission statement -- this is also an effective way to frame who you want to be. I can't say that I exactly have that pinned down yet and but my hope is that by being the type of person I want to be will help me discover what that purpose is. I know that a good mission is in service of others, I just am not sure yet what that means for me other than educating through my courses right now.

In 2021 I'd like to work towards being a developer educator, a DIYer, and an indie hacker (in no specific order). It's important to note this isn't all I want to be but where I want the focus to be. I thought of some other terms like "entrepreneur" or "solo founder" but I think indie hacker embodies more of the approach I tend to take. Knowing this, when I have a decision to make I can say to myself, "Is this what someone who is an (educator || DIYer || indie hacker) would do?" I can also start to ensure I have the right systems and habits in place to become the type of person I want to be.

Here are some concrete examples of the systems I already have in place related to these focus areas.

Systems I have in place

🎥 Having a pipeline of work for Pluralsight

Contributes to being an educator

Since 2018 or so, I have tried to ensure that I maintain a pipeline of active work through Pluralsight. What this has meant so far has really been to ensure I apply for at least one course opportunity a year, if not more. I also try to do some smaller gigs with them such as assessment reviews, writing, or in the future, other types of content.

In 2021, I would love to improve this system even more by applying for a course opportunity twice a year, once in January (which I did!) and once in September.

🔨 Seasonal DIY projects

Contributes to being a DIYer and educator

In 2020 having seasonal DIY projects helped a lot. I knew for Spring/Summer, I wanted to finish the egress window cover and do outdoor improvements (we planted a tree!) and Fall/Winter to do indoor projects.

Due to working at home I no longer have a commute. The schedule I have found that works well for my days is to do DIY projects before work in the morning. It gives me set tasks that I can do, it makes me sweat, and it feels great. I am usually a much more positive person the rest of the day!

While I did blog quite a bit in 2020 about my DIY learnings, I only started leveraging Instagram near the end of my project. Now in 2021, I would like to use Instagram to do more real-time sharing of progress and maintain the blogging cadence to do the more full write-ups.

📝 Consistent schedule for freelance writing

Contributes to being an educator

Taking on RavenDB as a client to write for wasn't something I planned but it's been working out well and I ended up doing about 1 article a quarter in 2020. In 2021 I've already lined up all the articles I'll be writing for the year with them and this is something I'd like to ramp up if I find I have the time in the future.

👨‍💻 Regular cadence for working on apps

Contributes to being an indie hacker

I regularly worked on Keep Track of My Games in 2020 and I want to ensure that continues into 2021. I also set up my LLC for the other income streams I have. This makes it much easier to track what I do on the side as a business separate from personal.

Systems I want to put in place

🎤 Having speaking gigs lined up

Contributes to being an educator

I do not yet have a good system around applying to CFPs. I did start something in 2020, maintaining an active checklist of conferences and dates to apply to. I already have TODOs for applying to 2021 conferences. But I need to build a habit of forming my talk abstracts going into the year so that I can just shop them around, rather than doing it so ad-hoc like I have before. In other words, I need to be more intentional about this.

I just put out a poll this week about what topics might interest people and I have two solid ideas of what I'd love to speak about. I think in the interest of doing an incremental improvement to this habit, I will choose one topic I'm passionate about and have that fuel my CFPs for 2021 to see how it goes.

✍ Consistent blogging schedule

When we started Looks Good to Us we had a consistent 1 post per week schedule. I learned soon that I tend to like writing more guide/article-type content rather than quick thoughts. As such, my posts tend to be on the order of 2000-2500 words and they are usually a series of posts for a project. My intent is to maybe try and aim for 1 short post on the 2 week schedule and 1 long-form post a month. To form that habit I have to probably schedule time so I do it as I tend to only work on it ad-hoc while Cassie is much more habitual (and thus writes twice as many posts 😅).

Habits I want to continue doing

These all contribute to the type of person I want to be in general: a happy, optimistic person that takes care of his mental health, wealth, and wellness.

  • 🌞 Daily morning meditation (I use Headspace)
  • 💊 Daily vitamin supplements (for us and the kiddos)
  • 🚶‍♂️ Daily exercise (walking or biking)
  • 📖 Daily reading (We have Reading Time with the kids before bedtime)
  • 🍕 Weekly meal planning (we've been doing this for 2 years now)
  • ✅ Task planning and outsourcing to Todoist
  • 💸 Monthly savings and investments

I have already started many of these habits, some since the summer so I want to ensure I continue doing them.

So what are my goals?

I don't have any to list on here! But now maybe you can see: I don't have to list any 🤯 As long as I continue to invest in my habits and systems, naturally there will be accomplishments produced. For some of my systems, they are helping to build a practice that will naturally build a body of work. That is want my previous Unplanned Accomplishments was trying to tell me.

For example in 2020 I had a goal to do 2 speaking gigs. Well, if I am a speaker, I will speak and it isn't so much about the number or the goal itself of 2 talks but that the fact that I talk out of habit. It's more of a mindset shift than anything if that makes sense.

Do I still have medium (2-3 year) and longer-term (10 year) goals? Yes, I talked about "having a why" in the 2019 review. Some of it is around having more options, more freedom to choose what I work on, others reasons center around my family. I've talked to Cassie about all of that so we have a North Star to guide us.

In order to get there these habits and systems are helping me become the type of person I want to be so short-term goals don't matter as much anymore. The important thing to reflect on and track will be how well did the systems work? What improvements did I make? Is there anything that I felt wasn't contributing to who I want to become? Are they effective? Tweaking and improving the systems will inevitably lead to better and better results. That's the idea, anyway.

Have a healthy, safe, and fulfilling 2021!