Rajath Ramakrishna

2022 - Year in Review

Posted on — | 9 min read

This post is part of the year-in-review series.

I’ve been doing the “Year in Review” series for a few years now. At the end of every year, I take some time to think about what went well, what didn’t go well, any side quests I ventured into to get a perspective on how my life is going and what kind of changes it needs.

What went well

Reading

I read quite a few books in 2022. Some of the notable ones are Blood, Sweat and Pixels, Building a Second Brain, Immune, Flow and Thinking in Bets. I read few more books that I didn’t end up finising. However, I did make it a habit to read every single day and right now I’m on a reading streak (30 weeks / 142 days in a row). Kindle’s gamification has certainly helped me read more. I don’t like the idea of setting a reading goal in terms of number of books. I’ve been a victim of trying to finish a dense and dry book and then having the dissatisfaction of not finishing it nag me for weeks. That’s one thing I really want to overcome.

Working out

After having couple of incidents of lower back issues and a bunch of physical therapy sessions, I finally decided to join a gym, get personal training and be regular. That’s what happened in Q4 2022 where I started working out regularly and also eating healthier. I see a huge difference health wise and I only wish I started sooner. Nevertheless, this is something I want to keep doing my whole life. Cardiovascular fitness only gets more and more important as we get older.

Journaling

I have been very regular with journaling and it’s one of the things that’s very underrated, but adds a lot of value. Whenever I’m stressed/overwhelmed, journaling has always been my goto. Doing a weekly, monthly and quarterly review really helped me identify areas for improvement that I would have otherwise missed.

12-week year

I read a book in Jan 2022 called The 12 Week Year and I really liked the idea behind it. It’s basically what the title says. Instead of planning for an entire year, you plan for 12 weeks at a time (plus one week buffer) and then do a review at the end of 12 weeks. The main reason for this is that humans are not great at projecting far into the future. Long term goals get more and more unlikely to get done and it’s easier to project what you can do in the next 12 weeks. This has been a game changer for me and I’m still doing it.

Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

This is a lecture series on YouTube and it’s absolute gold. Somebody on /r/InsightfulQuestions subreddit mentioned this in one of the comments for a question I don’t even remember and I’m in love with this series. John Vervaeke is so passionate about the topic and is so great at explaining things. There are 50 episodes of about 1 hour each and every single episode is packed with so much information. I couldn’t binge on it because after each episode, I had to take some time to think about what was explained. I really like thinking about philosophical topics and I’m very curious to learn and understand how people in the ancient times thought about things. I highly recommend this series. I’m only on episode 18. I’m planning to complete the series this year. I also take lot of notes for each episode I watch and I publish them online.

Started 2 other blogs

I started 2 blogs. One is called Knowledge which contains book notes or lecture notes (as mentioned above) which is published in a documentation format. The other is called Codex Vitae which means Book of Life. I got this idea from Buster Benson and I really liked it. They’re both very rudimentary at the moment. I haven’t thought much about hosting and theming. But I’ll make some improvements and contributions to them. With Codex Vitae, it’s probably going to stay as a GitHub repository since there’s lot of value in tracking version history. Because, especially in this context it shows how my thinking has changed over the course of time.

What didn’t go well

Guitar Practice

This is a weird one. I practiced guitar in the beginning of the year and didn’t touch it for months. Then picked it back up at the end of the year. While I’m not happy about the lack of practice for the most part, I’m glad I picked it back up and now I’m seriously trying to practice at least thrice a week.

Reading

As mentioned in the above section, I’ve been on a reading streak for more than half a year and most of that is quite effective. However, I’ve never been super happy with the way I read. I’m the happiest when I read without any distraction for a good chunk of time (at least an hour), make notes, make connections with older notes and form ideas. With a busy lifestyle, I never really got a chance to do all of that. While my reading has been consistent, I do want to take it to the next level and improve it.

Respecting the Plan

I’m not very strict with myself about sticking to the plan I make at the beginning of every week. Lot of times, I won’t be able to do things that I planned. Some of them are due to other priorities creeping up and some due to my own laziness. What I didn’t do a good job of was being aggressive about it - by both reflecting on what I didn’t do and could have done, and also tweak the plans as soon as I notice that I won’t be able to achieve them. I basically gotta be more mindful about it.

Laziness

This is more of a root cause than a specific thing that didn’t go well. It was due to laziness that I didn’t practice guitar much, didn’t workout much (initially), didn’t meditate enough and didn’t do 100 other things. Again, being mindful of the failures and really digging deep to figure out why it happened would definitely help.

Phone Usage

This year, my phone usage was quite high. I was averaging at almost 5 hours per day. That’s a lot! Most of this was reading newsletters, blogposts. certain subreddits and also watching TV shows sometimes. I still want to reduce it and keep it under 3 hours.

Meditation

Very irregular at it. I know the value it provides and I really like meditating, since it gives me immense clarity and helps me calm down. But never made time for it.

Side Quests

Ergo Mech Keyboards

I fell down the ergo mech keyboards rabbithole and quite the rabbithole that was. I was obsessed wih everything about it and ordered a Moonlander. I also ordered a bunch of tools to build one myself and ended up building 3 split keyboards. I love using them and each keyboard I built was progressively better than the previous one. I also learned a ton along the way. Not only this, I evangelized it at work so much that I made 4 of my teammates get into building keyboards as well. I consider that more than a win.

Colemak-DH

While I was going down the split keyboard rabbithole, I also saw many posts about how QWERTY is the least efficient keyboard layout, and lot of people suggesting Colemak-DH to be a better one. I obviously wanted to make that improvement in my life since I use keyboard every single day for several hours and investing some time in learning a new and more efficient layout would pay off in the long run, even though it would slow me down drastically while learning it. I’m glad I made the switch to Colemak. It’s very ergonomic and efficient. This switch happenend sometime in mid-2022. My speed in QWERTY was ~100 wpm and when I switched to Colemak it dropped to 8 wpm. Now I’m getting closer and closer to my QWERTY speeds. Highly recommend Colemak. Also recommend keybr and MonkeyType for typing practice. And Tarmak if you want to progressively move away from QWERTY instead of going all in.

More Emacs

As with keyboards, I was also evangelizing about Emacs and got couple of people at work obsessed with it as well. I also kept tinkering the Emacs config and a notable package to callout is Meow. This made me move away from evil and made everything more ergonomic.

Learning stuff

Learned quite a few things this year. I dove into Gatsby, then NextJs and finally CSS. I’ve always been bad at CSS and never had the inclination towards learning it. This time I decided to learn it and it’s still ongoing. The Interneting Is Hard tutorial has been really good and I’ve been learning a lot. Besides that, I also discovered Helix Editor which is blazing fast with a different modal approach compared to vim and I really like it. That’s what prompted me to move away from evil mode in Emacs and switch to Meow.

Lessons Learned

Taking weekly plan very seriously

Like I mentioned in a previous section, I make plans every week but don’t analyze the failures at all. I just push them to next week. Digging deeper will help with many things - getting clarity on why I don’t feel like doing something I had planned, maybe my estimations weren’t right and I took on much more that I could handle, maybe some of the tasks weren’t needed to be done in the first place. Being more mindful while planning, doing the tasks and doing the weekly review will help with both better planning and better execution.

Doing tasks mindlessly is just time wasted

There’s difference between “meditating” (read sitting quietly with eyes closed) for 5 minutes just for the heck of it to check that task off the list and really being fully present. There’s difference between reading things just to keep the streak going vs really diving deep into the subject and understanding the core idea. The former results in a waste of time; time that we’d never get back and time that didn’t yield us anything useful. Even if it’s just doing 2 things in a day, if it’s done mindfully it’ll make the experience so much better.

Other posts in this series: