2017 is becoming a distant memory as I write this as 2018 comes to an end. The ending of a year doesn’t hold much to me anymore as reflecting on the time spent at any given moment is completely worth it. I’ll attempt to capture as much of the last year as I can and I hope recollecting events in a chronological order will help.
Focusing on a few things at a time is a fantastic way to improve. After many years of thinking that multitasking works, I spent most of last year focusing on one activity at a time. It would come as no surprise that I performed better when I would write code as opposed to watching TV at the same time. We hear about various productivity techniques but the one that stuck was Pomodoro. Tomato One is a wonderful app for macOS and it allows you to customize your breaks. I have attempted some variations of schedules - 20 minute work, 1 minute short break, 5 minute long break.
In late 2016, I switched my keyboard layout to Dvorak and now I’ve been using it for a little over a year. The progress has been personally transformative as I get to use all my digits and as a Vim user, certain keyboard shortcuts are much more comfortable. I used to occasionally feel pain and numbness around my wrist and some fingers and all that pain is slowly subsiding. I’m quite excited to see how it turns out 3-4 years from now.
The last thing I genuinely tried my very best at was understanding nutrition. I signed up for a three month program aiming to understand nutrition according to my lifestyle. I would have never known that this would be a pretty long journey which will actually play a very important role in fundamentally changing me as a person. The more I learned about what food choices we make, how we make them and potential impact on my health in the long run, the more I realized that everything is a long journey in life. If you spend enough time genuinely trying to learn something, you’ll bear more fruits from this interest. I now cook more than occasionally and really enjoy the food I prepare.
Sometime around the start of the year, I made the decision of moving to the US and I made the move in mid-2017. Now I live in NYC and work on Uber for Business products. This is the first time when I’m living in the US and the experience has been so far overwhelming. It’s a massive cultural shift personally and professionally which deserves an essay of its own.