My 2020 Annual Review

It’s that annual review time of year.

During the last couple weeks of the year, I like to reflect on the past year and think about what’s to come next year.

This year, I was out of town during Christmas week, so I wrote most of my review during that time in installments on my iPhone.

Here is an outline:

• 2020 Highlights and Key Takeaways
• 2020 Lowlights and Lessons Learned
• 2021 Goals and Priorities

Feel free to borrow this format for your own reviews in the future.

2020 Highlights and Key Takeaways:

When it comes to 2020 highlights, there is one that stands head and shoulders above the rest:

Becoming a parent.

My daughter, Aya, was born in September.

I wrote a whole post on how becoming a father has changed me, so I won’t rehash all that here.

I’ll just say that having my daughter in my life for the last three months of the year has been one of the best things to ever happen to me.

And because of that, I believe I am one of very few people who can say that 2020 has been a great year.

The second best thing to happen to me this year was full-time remote work.

Of course, the circumstances of how this came to be (COVID-19) were terrible. Many people lost their jobs and many of those who kept their jobs lost their sanity being stuck at home.

But unlike many people, I don’t miss the day-to-day social interactions of being in an office. I’d much rather spend that time at home with my family, which is exactly what I got to do for the majority of the year because after March, my wife was either working remotely herself, on summer break, or on maternity leave.

By being forced to work remote full-time, my commute was eliminated, saving at least one hour per day. I replaced the time spent sitting in my car with frequent walks around my neighborhood. This was not only better for my physical health, but my mental health as well.

The third best thing to happen to me in 2020 was parental leave.

After Aya was born, I took six weeks of paid parental leave: two weeks right away and four weeks in December.

I haven’t had four consecutive weeks off of work in nearly 15 years, which sounds ridiculous but that’s the norm for most people in the US. I’m hoping this changes as companies adopt benefits that promote better work-life balance like parental leave and sabbaticals.

These six weeks were by far the happiest weeks of the year for me and it has really given me a new perspective on happiness and opened my eyes to how high that “happiness ceiling” can be for me.

All in all, I feel very fortunate that 2020 was a great year for me.

When I think about key takeaways from my highlights, it comes down to “How can I experience more of these joys (time away from work, more time with my daughter and family, etc.) going into next year and beyond?”

My solution to this has always been to put myself in a financial position where work becomes optional. This objective hasn’t changed, but I’m now finding new challenges surrounding it.

The main one being how do I effectively balance time spent working on projects that will accelerate my timeline to financial independence, time spent being present with family, and time spent maintaining my health (cooking healthy meals, sleeping enough, etc.)?

Now that I am a parent (a responsibility that I don’t take lightly), this allocation of time and resources will be my biggest challenge going forward.

2020 Lowlights and Lessons Learned:

Since I started writing this blog, I have published an annual review every year except for one: 2019.

The reason for this is that the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 was the most difficult period of my life.

Writing this section is hard, but I feel like I need to include it in this review.

This is also the first time I’ve written about this, so maybe it will help to get it out.

December 31, 2019 was the worst day of my life.

My father passed away that day from a heart attack in his sleep. It was sudden and very unexpected. The call I got from my mom still haunts me when I replay it in my mind.

The first two weeks of the new decade were physically and emotionally draining. Family flew in from out of the country and we had to quickly make funeral arrangements.

The months that followed were mentally draining. I stayed with my mom for a few more weeks to help her organize her finances and tie up loose ends.

All the while, trying to make sense of how this had happened (because that’s my nature). On the surface, my dad was very healthy and relatively young (he had just turned 62). But obviously, something wasn’t right. If I had to guess what the main issue was, I’d say it was stress.

For me, the scariest part of it all was the irrational fears that crept into my mind.

Like if I had bad genetics or something, maybe the same thing could happen to me.

Maybe my diet isn’t optimal.

Maybe my stress management can be better.

Why isn’t my bloodwork perfect? (I got my labs done twice between May and July)

These are thoughts I’m still dealing with.

It didn’t help that after things settled in my family, there were many more reminders of death this year.

First, there was Kobe Bryant’s freak accident.

Then, there was COVID-19, the worst global pandemic we’ve seen in over a century, that claimed countless lives.

Just last month, one of my sister’s good friends, who is younger than me and has a 2-year old daughter, died unexpectedly.

And earlier this month, one of my father-in-law’s closest friends died.

While there are many benefits that come with my personality type, perhaps the biggest curse is my tendency to overthink and overanalyze things.

So, lessons learned from this…

Obviously, that we can’t take life for granted.

That we can’t control everything.

That the best we can do is give ourselves the best odds of living a long, healthy life.

That our thoughts can consume us when something bad happens and that managing this is a skill that can be learned.

And maybe, even then, it may take time for the mind to settle after a traumatic event.

2020 has been the ultimate rollercoaster of years.

Losing my dad, COVID-19, and the birth of my daughter (all once-in-a-lifetime, life-changing events) happened within a 9-month span.

I talked about the positives from the latter two in the previous section. There is only one positive I can take from the former: that it has brought my family closer together.

I now talk to my mom on the phone for 30 minutes to an hour every day. She also stayed with us for three weeks after Aya was born, which was the most in-person time I’ve got to spend with her as an adult.

My sister visits us at least once a week.

All I want to do now is be there for my mom and my sister and help them through this time.

I want to be there for my wife and daughter too as we raise our own family.

I wish I could dedicate 100% of my time and energy to just these things.

It really bothers me that I can’t, but this just gives me something to work towards.

2020 was a crazy year, but I still have a lot to be grateful for.

2021 Goals and Priorities:

My goals for 2021 will be similar to goals I’ve set in previous years.

Not because I don’t have anything novel to aspire to.

But because the most important areas of my life warrant a ruthless focus on consistency.

Over the past several years, I’ve mastered some habits and struggled with others.

One of the habits I’ve mastered is my general activity level.

I’ve gone from taking under 7,000 steps per day, on average, to over 10,000. I no longer feel the need to set an explicit goal around number of daily steps because I don’t ever see myself slipping back down to the 6-7k step level.

In other areas like nutrition and writing, my consistency still needs some work. So I’m going to continue to set goals for these until I feel I have mastered them.

I like to prioritize no more than three goals per year so that I don’t bite off more than I can chew.

This year, these priorities will be nutrition, exercise, and writing.

My goals will also be process-oriented, not outcome-oriented.

Ali Abdaal, the popular productivity YouTuber, is often asked about his goals for his YouTube channel and his answer has always impressed me.

It’s not a certain number of views or subscribers that he’s after.

Instead, his goal is simply to “put out three videos per week.” That’s it.

The interesting thing is that by focusing on process, Ali’s outcomes have been exceptional.

He has grown his YouTube channel to over 1 million subscribers and he still just only one goal: to publish three videos per week.

So without further ado, here are my 2021 goals:

• Nutrition: Eat 21 servings of fruits and vegetables per week
• Exercise: Exercise for 30 minutes at least 3 times per week
• Writing: Publish 5 times per week

Now, I’ll discuss my thinking around each goal.

Nutrition:

I’ve had this goal for a while, but I’m still yet to get to the point where I’m eating three or more servings of fruits and veggies consistently.

My nutrition isn’t bad, by any means. I’ve got two to two and a half servings per day, on average, down pretty well.

So, I think there’s just a little more meal planning and preparation necessary to get me to three.

Maybe a couple more salads per week

A couple more green smoothies per week

Some roasted veggies a couple of times per week

That should get the job done.

Exercise:

When I say “exercise,” my focus is primarily on strength training. My goal is to strength train 3x per week (for a minimum of 30 minutes per session), but I also intend to run at least once per week.

This past year, I experimented with various home strength training routines during lockdown. I started with a traditional 3x per week (2 upper, 1 lower) split using my home gym equipment (pull-up bar, adjustable dumbbells) and bodyweight exercises.

After Aya was born, I found myself with less time for traditional workouts, so I tried to do more frequent 10-15 minute workouts instead. This didn’t go very well, because I only ended up doing these 2-3x per week also, so my volume was insufficient.

Now that Aya is getting ready to start daycare, I’ll be getting back into somewhat of a normal weekday routine (I was off work for six weeks in 4th quarter). I have joined a new gym close to my house and I believe it will be easier to train 3x per week during my lunch break like I was doing before COVID.

Writing:

My thinking behind publishing 5x per week is that I want to get into the habit of daily writing once and for all (literally, for the rest of my life).

Publishing gives me more motivation to write because I like the idea of getting views if I’m going to put in the time (it makes me feel like my writing is more productive).

I’m trying not to think about other metrics like email subscribers or monetization because I feel like right now, the most important thing is consistency.

Consistency is what has been lacking in my writing the past 3 years (I did pretty well when I started writing on Quora in 2017).

But consistency is is also the one thing that all good writers have in common, so I know that this is what I must focus on in order to improve.

So, those are my 2021 goals.

And this concludes my annual review.

If you have thoughts or feedback, I’d love to hear it.

Thanks for reading and best of luck with your pursuits in the New Year.

If you enjoyed this post, here are three more things you might like:

Trying Not to Suck at Life: My weekly newsletter with specific and actionable tips and tools to help you improve your health, wealth, productivity, and happiness

The Effort Matrix: My productivity book that centers on aligning your focus and efforts with your highest life priorities to maximize happiness

Your Personal Health Score: My book on how to measure your physical health from a score of 0-100, an ultimate guide to health and fitness for data enthusiasts