2010: Year in Review

At the beginning of November, I wrote a post on my Lifelist One Year anniversary detailing my lifelist plans for its second year of existence. As I mentioned, I have managed to cross off an incredible amount in the last year, done some amazing things and had some awesome experiences.

HOWEVER! My lifelist is not the only metric by which I decide whether or not the past year has gone well. I’d like to run through some of the main things that I am thankful that I achieved this year.

Full time UX job

Around this time last year, I was beginning my journey into the world of UX by interning for the very awesome moo.com. I cannot believe how far I’ve come from the bright-eyed intern that turned up at Moo HQ. I’ve freelanced my butt off, being exposed to diverse practices and companies, and learning a ton about how to treat myself as a business. However, in July this year, I took the decision that what I really needed at this stage in my career was a bit of stability – both financially and mentally – and landed a fulltime job at JustGiving as a UX designer. I’m incredibly proud of the journey I have taken and where I have managed to end up – hard work, passion, and a lot of knocking on metaphorical doors paid off.

Living ‘on my own’

I have wanted to leave my current situation for a long time. This process ended up dragging on and taking waaay longer than I had wanted it to. A big part of this problem was that I had a very definite idea that I needed to live with friends. This meant that when I was looking for a new place, I kept on finding myself dependent on a) finding friends to move in with and b) those friends committing to moving out with me. This was exponentially more difficult that I thought it would be. After a particularly frustrating day, I sat myself down and after sketching through some options, realised that what I needed to do was break myself free from this idea that I absolutely had to live with friends. The next day, I had lined up some viewings from some ads, and a couple of days after that, I had found a place in my ideal location, for a great budget, and living with 2 strangers. This was not as scary as I thought it would be. Taking the plunge was completely liberating, and resulted in finding myself a sweet little pad.

Driving Across Europe AND raising £3000 for charity

This year I got to raise a crapload of money for charity as well as have one of the most awesome experiences of my life. We drove through 11 countries, met countless awesome people and got way too acquainted with certain country roads in Luxembourg. Spending 3 weeks on the road, driving in all weathers, spending 10/11 hours a time in the car, eating in service station after service station, holding up irate Italian sports cars as your 16 year old Honda is puffing up a treacherous mountain pass – it was one of the most draining – physically, emotionally, financially – things that I’ve ever done, as well as one of the most adventurous and awesome.

Crossing off 22 Lifelist items

I’ve already written at length about this but its worth mentioning again as something that I’m incredibly thankful that I got the chance to do. Writing a lifelist is incredibly easy – you just think of all the things you want to get the chance to do. But its completely another story having the opportunity and the focus to actually cross your items off. And thats what the lifelist is fundamentally all about  - having those experiences.

Minimalism

I have only recently begun to embrace the minimalist lifestyle. I’ve been getting rid of (most of) the crap that I don’t need, as well as trying to train myself to get into the mindset of “Is this something that you really need and that will add value to your life?” This is something that I’m looking to improve a lot on in the coming year, but as achievements in 2010 go, getting this mindset right and actually taking a first pass at clearing out my life is something that I’m very pleased that I got to make a a start on.

‘The Fight Sequence’ Improvements

It was one of my big goals this time last year to really improve my blog, The Fight Sequence. I think that whilst I’ve got a long way to go in terms of generating more interesting and meaningful content, there have been lots of improvements made – the blog looks and acts better, its content is sorted in a meaningful way, and I’ve made much more of an effort to share content. I’ve set aside time over the holiday period to really think about the direction of this blog and what I want to do in terms of content, so watch this space.

Friends

It got to a point at the end of last year that I really felt conflicted about some of the people in my life. Whilst I have some really close friends that are amazing and in my life for all the right reasons, I also felt that I was carrying some “dead-weight friends” – by this I mean, people who I felt obliged to socially interact with and treat as friends, but who actually don’t help to improve the quality of my life, and instead drain energy from it. I know that we are meant to be polite, and friendly, and try to like everybody – but the fact is is that some of these so-called friendships can be pretty destructive and unproductive. I felt that it was time to put a stop to it, so over the past year, I have actively made an effort to cut these deadweights out of my life. This may sound harsh, and I am not advocating being mean or petty. Instead, taking a really considered look at whether you really need these people in your life and slowly phasing out contact, can really improve the quality of your interactions and thus your life. I am now in a place where I feel like in the main I don’t need to participate in these draining meet-ups and spend my time maintaining these faux friendships. I am also really lucky that I have got to make some new, awesome friends over the course of the year that help to make me happy.

Productivity

I recently wrote a blog post about how Pomodoro is changing my life. After trying GTD, trying my own thing, using Things/Omnifocus/paper, I am finally using a process that I have actually stuck to, and through which I can actually see where I spend most of my time, and therefore the problems inherently there. This year has been a constant experiment in how best to approach my work productivity-wise, and I seem to have hit on something that fits me well at the moment. I intend to keep tracking this closely and continually refine through 2011.

Those are some of the main things that I am thankful I have achieved in 2010. There are only 20 more days of this year and I will be trying to pack as much fun and productivity into these final days as possible. I can’t wait for 2011 to come around and to start this process all over again. 2011 is going to be a great year, and I’m going to achieve a lot of awesome things. Hope you will be along for the ride!