It’s January 1 again. The last 365 days have been fascinating for sure. The road to recovery doesn’t always take the straightest path. 2021 brought some of the the normal things back to us but we’re still not quite there yet. With that in mind, I wanted to look back at some of the things I proposed last year and see how they worked out for me:

• Bullet Journaling: This one worked really well. When I remembered to do it. Being able to chart out what I was working on and what I needed to be doing helped keep me on track. The hardest part was remembering to do it. As I’ve said before, I always think I have a great memory and then remember that I forgot I don’t. Bullet journaling helped me get a lot of my tasks prioritized and made sure that the ones that didn’t get done got carried over to be finished later. I kind of stopped completely at the end of the year when things got hectic and I think that is what led me to feeling like everything was chaotic. I’m going to start again for 2022 and make sure to add some more flair to what I’m doing to make it stick for real this time.
• More Video Content: This one was a mixed bag. I did record a full year of Tomversations episodes as well as the Rundown and various episodes of the On-Premise IT Roundtable podcast. The rest of my plans didn’t quite come to fruition but I think there’s still a spot for me to do things in 2022 to increase the amount of video content I’m doing. The reason is simple: more and more people are consuming content in video form instead of reading it. I think I can find a happy medium for both without increasing the workload of what I’m doing.
• More Compelling Content: This was the part I think I did the most with. A considerable number of my posts this year were less about enterprise IT technical content and more about things like planning, development, and soft skills. I spent more time talking about the things around tech than I did talking about the tech itself. While that does have a place I wonder if it’s as compelling for my audience as the other analysis that I do. Given that my audience has likely shifted a lot over the last decade I’m not even sure what people read my blog for any longer. Given the number of comments that I get on IPv6 posts that were written five or six years ago I may not even be sure who would be interested in the current content here.

Okay, 2021 was a mixed bag of success and areas for improvement. My journaling helped me stay on task but I still felt a lot of the pressure of racing from task to task and my grand ideas of how to create more and do more ultimately fell away as things stayed busy. So, where to go from here?

• More Analytical Content: Some of the conversations I’ve had over the year remind me that I have a unique place in the industry. I get to see a lot of what goes on and I talk to a lot of people about it. That means I have my own viewpoint on technologies that are important. While I do a lot of this for work, there are some kinds of analysis that are better suited for this blog. I’m going to spend some time figuring those out and posting them here over the year to help create content that people want to read.
• Saying No to More Things: Ironically enough, one of the things I need to get better at in 2022 is turning things down. It’s in my nature to take on more than I can accomplish to make sure that things get done. And that needs to stop if I’m going to stay sane this year. I’m going to do my best to spread out my workload and also to turn down opportunities that I’m not going to be able to excel at doing. It may be one of the hardest things I do but I need to make it happen. Only time will tell how good I am and turning people down.
• Getting In Front of Things: This one is more of a procedural thing for me but it’s really important. Rather than scrambling at the last minute to finish a script or get something confirmed, I’m going to try my hardest to plan ahead and make sure I’m not racing through chaos. With all the events I have coming up, both work and personal, I can’t afford to leave things to the last minute. So I’m going to be trying really hard to think ahead. We’ll see how it goes.

Tom’s Take

My January 1 post is mostly for me to keep myself honest over the year. It’s a way for me to set goals and stick to them, or at the very least come back to the next January 1 and see where I need to improve. I hope that it helps you a bit in your planning as well!