Wow what a year. It has flown by and as you can see I haven’t gotten to the blog since I upgraded the site earlier this year. Looking in my drafts it looks like I was intending to write a post about travel, but I didn’t get back to it. Anyway given that the year is rapidly ending I figured it was time to start looking back on it.

I never imagined how busy this year would be. We went from the start of the year where we created a plan on what we were going to build for the year to drive to an MVP. We were building out what we thought would be our alpha release, but discovered in user testing that we needed to pivot. Along the way one of my employees left. We then drove the new concept to an early access release grew the engineering team and it has been an amazing ride. 2020 is going to be focused on product market fit and hopefully upon achieving that, rocketing into a growth phase. Given how crazy it was to build what we have built on such a lean team a lot of my themes for the year fell to the wayside especially this blog. When you are super busy and tired this is an easy thing to drop.

I am late to the party. Normally I tried to take off until Epiphany before I return to work, but I needed to start working on the 2nd so I wasn’t able to get to this post until now. As is my tradition I set my themes for the year that I want to focus on. I find doing so helps me stay on track and make sure that I am growing and improving myself.

Introduction

As is tradition on this blog I always lay out some themes to focus on for the upcoming year. These were last years themes if you want to get an idea for the types of things I usually do. I haven’t spent as much time as usual pondering my list this year as I was very busy over my holiday break (at the start with sick kids, and at the end with lots of family activities). Given that today is my last day of vacation I decided it is time to get some things written down. Here are my themes for 2018.

Introduction

As is my tradition on this blog this is my annual post for my Themes for the year. Why themes and not goals? I feel like if you don’t hit your goals that feels like a failure, but as witnessed by my recap of last year I did a poor job of hitting my themes and was still very happy with how the year turned out. Themes are designed to be open ended and the idea is just an accountability tool for myself to make sure I am working on personal and professional growth. In the case of last year my life changes resulted in many of the themes not making sense anymore, but I still felt like there was a ton of growth so I call it a successful year.