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My 2022 Theme: Year of the Spotlight
Well, 2021 is over, and with that my Year of Intention has come to an end. Last year was the first time I decided to set a theme for the year instead of making up goals or resolutions-and it definitely did not go as expected. What started out as the year where I was supposed to be focused and “intentional” with everything I did, ended up as a year where I un-intentionally did something entirely different. I’m taking the lessons I learned from my Year of Intention and making them the central idea of this new theme: the Spotlight!
If you’re not familiar with the idea of a yearly theme, I recommend CGP Grey’s video on themes. If you’ve never done a theme before, watch that video and I think you’ll want to give it a try :)
Reflecting on last year’s theme
Last year I was so excited to try my first yearly theme. After the mess that 2020 was, I thought that a good theme for 2021 could fix it all. Turns out, no matter how intentional you are, you can’t fix everything all at once. In 2021, I set my theme to be the Year of Intention because I wanted to be intentional with everything I did. I was tracking my time, journaling, developing good habits, making daily self-improvement Instagram posts, creating a home workout routine, organizing my life on Notion, working, all while trying to have a major pivot in my career. For the first few weeks, I could keep up with everything and I enjoyed filling out my habit tracker while journaling my thoughts and applying to 20+ jobs on LinkedIn; but if you can’t already tell this got old fast.
My first habit tracker, I went from tracking nothing to tracking everything and eventually couldn’t keep up.
So, I eventually stopped trying to do everything and focused on one thing at a time. Instead of a full year of intention, I had a year of many themes that occurred naturally. January-April I had a Winter/Spring of learning while I was in my coding bootcamp and focusing on building projects and studying machine learning. Around May I had a Summer of Diligence where I focused all my attention on finishing my bootcamp and finding my first data science job. And finally…
