After rigorously choosing the items I am willing to share in this cyberspace, here is how my 2022 went:

On my Focus Time

According to Forest App, or to be more accurate, according to how often I remembered to trigger the application as I went with my activities, I had a good amount of focus logged in 2022, peaking in September. I find that the inaccuracy in this app is caused by my inability to be consistent in using it rather than a lack of focus. Nonetheless, through the app I managed to see how much I don’t use it relatively measure how much time I spent on various activities.

It’s quite obvious that I spent most of my time working. I work 5 times a week, 8 hours a day after all. I’m also painfully aware that I only remembered to turn my Forest App on when I was at work and in the middle of a meeting (who doesn’t get distracted during meetings? lol). Entertainment also took a huge chunk since I devoted several hours binge-watching Netflix (Spy x Family is a must-see) and Youtube videos (Going Seventeen is also a must-see).

I’m a bit proud that I managed to record how long or frequently I read but I refuse to believe that I only spent 91 hours on it.

For 2023, my plan is to work on the other tags I created in the app like specifying what I am actually studying and removing ‘Exercising’ since I use a health application for it. I may or may not touch on this topic in my next post.

On Reading

I only read a handful of novels in 2022 and reviewed some of them. Most of the novels I received for review were so outstanding that I began asking myself why I hadn’t been working on my novels.

As for articles, I decided to lay low and recalibrate. I noticed that I read a good amount of articles to compensate for days when I didn’t have time to read novels but moving forward, I want to have a certain focus on the topics I read and write about e.g. literature, science and tech, and psychology.

On Other Media and Content Creation

• Digital Art – I might not have posted a number of my drafts on this site but I managed to create colored digital sketches and there’s a huge improvement from my old technique.
• Youtube videos – Can you believe I created fifteen Youtube videos in 2022? Five of them were digital art related. When I get older, I’ll have videos to watch and criticize lol.

On Career

I spent a good amount of time improving my career-related skills in 2022. I wrote about it in these posts:

As much as possible, I contained my training or workshops during my workdays and used the time not alloted for meetings to sharpen my skills instead of my personal hours. In my head, at least that makes sense.

On Writing

I wrote 18 posts in the past year, most of them being book reviews. That number was significantly lower than my 2021 record.

It’s a shame that when it came to my own passion, it seemed that I was burning low. This may sound like an excuse but my younger self had developed a system (e.g. read books/articles, write a review, post) and got used to it that my current version didn’t want to get out of my comfort zone. Saying that there wasn’t anything wrong with the system is a lie. I got habituated so much that instead of proactively practicing my craft, I succumbed to the appeal of efficient content creation without evaluating whether my skills in writing improved or not. A change is needed.

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That’s how my year went –or at least some parts of it I chose to divulge. I have another post in the drafts for my plans–in fact, I created it much earlier but decided to post this one first to provide context on what things will change or remain in the succeeding years and why.

Until the next retrospective, I remain,