Personal 2021 Summary and 2022 Expectations
This post is originally published in my personal blog.
I usually have a master plan for the upcoming year and visit my status from time to time to review my goals. Unfortunately, 2019 and 2020 were not planned at all. I had to start my life in a new country with a new job in a different domain than my expertise. So I was not able to decide on any goals.
SMART Goals
There are different camps while setting goals. I know about the SMART and OKR, and I believe on a personal level setting SMART goals are sustainable and the OKR method is more suitable for groups or organizations.
Let’s shortly recap what SMART means,
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time bound
My goals for 2021 and 2022 perfectly fit into the SMART framework, as they are clearly described, they have a numeric target to measure, they are not impossible, they are relevant to the categories I will mention shortly, and they have a deadline of 31st of December.
2021 Status
Around the end of the first quarter of 2021, I revisited my notes and my expectations from the year. It was still under a pandemic’s shadow yet I felt the need for a more concrete plan and goals for the year.
I can categorize my goals into different buckets I have career goals, personal branding goals, financial goals, personal development goals. I will not share my exact goals for the year, but until November 2021 I had 9 goals. In November I added 2 more to the list thinking that I may achieve. All in all, I had 11 goals for 2021 and 5 of them are failed.
Still, I am happy with the outcome. I learned my capacity, shortcomings and development points. Looking at the success fail ratio it may seem otherwise but the successful ones were way over the target. Which let me rediscover my interests and strengths.
Looking forward to 2022
As I said I reviewed my outcome for 2021, and I am happy to see that content creation becomes a habit for me again. I really love to think, write and share my learnings or findings. So I can add some small things into the global knowledge hub, the internet. I have also seen that after a long day at work, I am usually exhausted to create a technical tool or script. Actually, I want to stay away from the keyboard after work some days. Reading and learning is always a great asset for me and I am happy to grab a physical book to read after a long day.
In the light of those discoveries, I decreased my tech creation goals and increased the content creation goals. I also increased my reading and learning goals to the next level. Since I changed my professional path to management, I have lots of new things to learn and there are a lot of good books to read about becoming an engineering manager.
So in 2022, I have 11 goals from start. These goals may evolve, new goals can be added during the year. Categorywise my goals are
- Career development: 3 goals
- Personal development: 1 goal
- Personal brand / content creation: 5 goals
- Financial: 2 goals
Of course, numbers are just quantitative, qualitative properties of those goals differ e.g. I strongly believe 3 goals of career development is much harder than 5 goals of content creation. Hence numbers above are not meaningful without knowing the goals themselves yet I would like to keep my goals personal.
Thanks for reading so far! If you want to share your goals feel free to comment if you wonder about my goals’ status. Let’s wait for the end of 2022 post 🙂
