2024 in review

10 minutes
Reflection
Table of Contents

Recently, I considered writing a follow-up for My Time and Focus posts, titled «My Time and Focus. 2 years later». I thought I couldn’t finish writing it in one day, so I didn’t start.

This post is what I am writing instead. It will touch on some of the topics I wanted to bring up, but won’t go into as much detail. This is a spontaneous decision, I am doing it instead of other plans. But today is a holiday, so I am fine with it.

I have a bunch of thoughts that are floating around and waiting to be formulated and refined. I am using this post as a tool for reflection – both the process and the end result are valuable. As a side-effect, this may also end up being interesting to other people 🤷

Key events of 2024

2024 has been an eventful year, full of stuff that was new to me.

I will come back to some of these in more detail 🙂

What makes 2024 different

Honestly, I am surprised by the sheer volume of the previous section, even though I must’ve missed something! It is encouraging.

Since the early 2023, one of my background goals has been to learn accepting «good enough» as a way to overcome perfectionism. I’d say that cumulative effort from working on that and some other goals is one of the reasons why I was able to get this far.

The other reason is… people.

This year I made a lot of friends and also noticed some of my existing friendships getting stronger. I met some of the new friends at Edinburgh Hacklab. I am grateful for having so many people about whom I care and who care about me.

In the previous two years in Edinburgh I felt somewhat isolated – I didn’t know where and how I could meet people, and my attempts were not very successful. It was especially difficult as I was trying to «stay afloat» in life, feeling depleted all the time, and struggling to find a way to change anything.

Such is existence

1.5 years ago, I started taking ADHD medication. It was immensely helpful, as it unlocked more ways for me to control what was going on. However, I struggled making it sustainable long-term. I see it this way: the medication allows utilising more resources of the organism, allows overriding some behaviours, but it doesn’t inherently increase the amount of said resources.

I think this is why it is so important to use multiple methods to work with ADHD. The medication may just help on its own, but in many cases it won’t be enough. Likewise, therapy may be enough on its own to find healthy ways to cope and reach the «stable plateau», but often it won’t suffice.

I’ve come a long way in these 1.5 years.

From the My Time and Focus posts you may infer that I have been continuously working on improving my time and task management skills. When writing those posts, I was worried about their interpretation – as I don’t like «productivity» just for the sake of it. I focus on it so much because I feel like I have no other choice, really.

Over time, I found an approach to daily planning that works for me, and later found a way to plan my weeks. I even tried planning months and setting goals for quarters, but there was too much in the way for that. I also felt like there was a lot in the way of my desire to take and review notes for journaling and learning new stuff.

Despite the huge improvements of the last 1.5 years, this time has been challenging. It was as if I had run out of options, and yet the changes were insufficient. In short:

A bit over a month ago I started taking antidepressants. Short-term, it feels like it may be the missing puzzle piece for achieving net positive existence! Nevertheless, it is too early to know what it’s going to be like long-term, so I am cautious.

I have been sleeping slightly better. I have been feeling like I have more time and energy in my days. I have been enjoying video games again. I managed to combine doing work, solving Advent of Code and playing Factorio. I even surprised my friend by agreeing to go to a parkrun with him, lol.

I don’t want to take the positive changes for granted. I also don’t want to risk wasting the opportunity to improve things. In other words – the work is not over, but I am looking forward to it.

What I want from 2025

With the additional energy and time unlocked, I can target some things that I find important, but that were not available to me. I guess there are two main groups of goals for 2025. One is «please fix it because how else», and the other one is «yay projects» 😛

«please fix because how else»

I want to be more mindful of on what I spend my time and energy, and how exactly I do it. This is about deciding what is worth my time, about focusing on it deeply, and about switching off when its time is over. Crucially, this is also about having proper rest. Inevitably I will have to find «workarounds» to come up with an ADHD-compatible solution for this.

I want to get better at utilising the state of flow. It is quite spontaneous, and often it is also when I do my best work. I need to make it more comfortable and safe to enter the flow and to stay in it for longer. I noticed that without that, sometimes I can’t allow to give up the control and sacrifice something that the flow would «eat».

I want to improve my long-term planning. I think that at the moment there are three blockers for that:

  1. I need to remember that said long-term goals exist and take them into account when planning short-term
  2. I need to think of concrete steps I can take to approach said goals
  3. I need to review the progress and reflect regularly

«yay projects»

Most importantly: keep doing my best at treating others with respect and kindness, even in challenging situations.

I also want to:

Thank you

I mentioned that the people is one of the things that made 2024 so different. I want to thank all the people that provided support, advice, listened to me and simply existed (in no particular order).

Thank you Mom, Alla and Oleg.

Thank you Mel, Artem, Taylor, Dylan, Chris, Miron, Syvl, Ilya, Nina, Emily, Blake, River, Soph, Jules, Yara, Eugene, Vanessa, Edinburgh Hacklab and others.

You made my year.

Happy holidays! ☃️