Reflecting on 2023: A Year of Missed Opportunities
It’s 2 AM on December 10, 2023, and I just ordered chicken rice on Swiggy. I realise that I’ve wasted the entire year. I’ve been drained and procrastinated. At the start of every year, I plan my goals for finance, career, and personal development. But unfortunately, this year I couldn’t focus on those things. I made so many wrong decisions this year. Usually, I’m the kind of person who takes every step with clear and cautious moves. I research everything extensively before trying anything new. I think about the best way to do it, how it will affect me, and what to do if my decision goes wrong. But this year, I made mistakes. Here are my mistakes of 2023 and how I plan to correct them in 2024.
Failed to read books
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
The first mistake was not reading enough books. From my childhood to this day, I’ve read lots of books. In my school days, I lived in the library. There was no television at home, no neighbors nearby, and my family lived in the garden, far from my village. Books were my only entertainment and I read lots of comics, history books, and even tried to learn computer basics there. I tried as much as I could and did many mini-inventions with those learnings. Books helped me improve my creativity and knowledge. At some point, I even tried to write books myself, but I didn’t get a chance to improve that. After college, I didn’t focus on reading that much, which made me think negatively about myself. Books provide a visual representation of the things we’re reading, giving us a different perspective on the author’s creativity and ideas. With books, I was able to gain knowledge about finance, personal development, and leadership quality, and learned from the experiences of different people. With these learnings, I helped many people make correct decisions. Although I have many books to read, I failed to do so. Instead, I gained content from videos and podcasts, but books are far better than these sources. This mistake made me doubt myself, which is the worst feeling. In 2024, I plan to start reading new comics related to books to gain a little bit of confidence about myself. I need to give more time to reading books and gaining knowledge.
Procrastinating on completing courses
Unfortunately, I failed to complete the courses related to my career this year. Do courses or certifications showcase your knowledge? Not necessarily, but courses provide a structured way to learn important topics about a subject. They often tell where we can learn more about a topic. In my case, courses helped me in various areas. As a software developer who primarily codes in Javascript, I was able to find my previous coding mistakes during a course. Next year, I plan to allocate a few hours a day to improving my knowledge in development.
Poor Time allocation
Being a software developer in a product-based company, I have to allocate tasks to my team members, work on architecture, code quality, logic improvements, code reviews, and collaborate with the product UI and management teams for requirements. Alongside all these responsibilities, I still have my own work to do. It’s my responsibility to manage everything, but due to poor time management, I failed to effectively prioritize my tasks. This led to inefficiency and stress. I acknowledge this mistake and am determined to correct it. Currently, I’m exploring time management tools to help me resolve this issue, and I plan to read “Productivity” by Ali Abdaal. I believe that by implementing better time management strategies in 2024, I can avoid repeating this mistake.
Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash
Failed to Create Content
My biggest goal currently is content creation. At the start of 2023, I set a goal to publish at least one blog every two weeks and create a single YouTube video per month. In 2022, I experimented with YouTube videos and now I want to revamp my approach. However, despite my intentions, I only managed to publish 2 or 3 blogs and didn’t create a single video. Nevertheless, I am determined to create at least one video before the end of this year. Additionally, I will make sure to provide reviews of courses and books that I’ll be learning in 2024. I guarantee that I will follow through on this commitment. Similarly, I will focus on improving my video creation skills. I’m determined to get back on track.
I understand that this may seem boring, but it truly upsets me. While I acknowledge that there have been some significant achievements this year, I still feel disappointed about the unfinished tasks. It’s crucial for me to focus on completing them. If you have any suggestions or advice, I would greatly appreciate your input and support. Learning is key for me to get back on track. I am determined to correct my mistakes in 2024. Please feel free to share any suggestions you may have. Your help and encouragement mean a lot to me. Lastly, I wish you all the best in overcoming your own mistakes from 2023. Cheers!
