Happy New Year 2023!
Today is the first day of 2023 and I think it will be a good year. Not exactly sure why, but given the past 3 years it could only get better from here, right?
A major topic for me in the new year is Focus. There is always way too much to do and never enough time to do it. And everything seems important. For some reason I still cling to my various miscellaneous creative projects - even though they demand a lot of my time and don't produce much monetary value. As opposed to my day job, which provides a lot of income but not much creative satisfaction.
But trying to tame the focus beast is a lifelong full-time job.
A tool I am using to attempt some sort of focus (or at least manage all of my notes) is a system called the Second Brain, from the book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. This concept appeared on my radar a few years back, and after going down the Zettelkasten route for a while, I picked up the book and re-organized my system over the holiday break to better follow this one. As I get closer to wrapping up that project, I’ll do a blog post about it.
The genesis of re-evaluating my personal knowledge management system was to manage the learning I am doing for a project at work. Until now I have mainly been a back-end developer and technical architect, but as of a few months ago I am working as more of a UX/UI analyst tasked with developing wireframes for a desktop application. The tool we are using if Figma, so I am diving into that and learning as much as I can to be an expert. It’s a powerful tool, especially for collaboration. Which is great, because I am working with a distributed team in Colombia, Texas, and India (for testing) - while I’m remote here in Michigan. This all part of a move to a new business unit at work called Custom Product Development, and I am working on becoming more of a Product Manager, or Technical Product Owner or something like that. It’s all evolving in real-time, so 2023 should bring some interesting developments in that area.
As my 10-year-old daughter just said to me, "I wonder what the new year holds". For now, I'll focus on enjoying this long holiday break before going back to work on Tuesday.
Posted: 1/1/2023, 11:16:49 AM
