2020 in review

For obvious reasons many people have found 2020 very challenging. It started with more and more evidence that climate change is real, it is here and it’s starting to seriously affect our lives. Then for a brief time there was a threat of a conflict between the U.S. and Iran. And then Covid started really getting momentum and our collective lack of pandemic preparedness became painfully apparent. Politicians in many countries (including my own) neglected the scope of the problem and failed to act accordingly. There was a lot of informational chaos, unclear messaging (especially around the use of face masks) and erratic decision-making. Polish government, for instance, locked down the parks and forests, but allowed churches to remain open.

Despite all of that, I found 2020 to be overall pretty good for me personally. In this post I would like to explore my perspective on this year.

No one from my immediate circle died or even got sick

The closest people who suffered from covid were a few coworkers, but they seem to have had a relatively mild experience. My grandfather was lucky enough to have his heart attack just a few weeks before covid cases started ramping up and hospital capacity started to be a thing to worry about.

I was already working from home

Covid lockdowns and the shift towards remote work caught a lot of people unguarded. Fortunately, I’m hired in an organization which is (and has always been) fully remote. I didn’t have to put in any extra work to adapt my living space for a new role. I already had a decent office chair, regulated desk and two monitors. We were already coordinating all of our work via online tools. I’m not saying that it’s been a totally smooth ride, my girlfriend had her university moved online as well and at times our scheduled calls were overlapping. We’re both working from the same room and such overlap forces the person with less technological requirements into an exile to the bedroom. But that’s probably nothing compared to what people without a designated working space and routine had to go through.

I started meditating regularly

I’ve been experimenting with meditation for some time now, trying different techniques and apps and seeing some benefits from it, but just this year I managed to make it a permament part of my daily routine. It’s one of the first things I do in the morning and I’m genuinely excited to do it. I’m using Sam Harris’ Waking Up and decided to ask for the free subscription for the year. Weirdly enough, I first got the app in 2019 and even decided to pay for the subscription, but then ended up barely using it.

Currently I’m meditating 10, sometimes 20 minutes a day, almost everyday. I’m thinking about increasing either the quantity or duration of the sessions. After my colleague got back from a Vipassana retreat I’m also considering going on one after the pandemic blows over.

I started using Emacs

One of the most significant changes in how my life looks was the adoption of Emacs as my main tool for many things. Before that I didn’t really have very strong feelings about text editors. I think on some level I knew that plain text is the way to go. I’ve been contemplating writing my MA thesis in LaTeX or at least RMarkdown but since I’ve never actually written it, that contemplation didn’t amount to anything significant. I’ve been taking university and conference notes in Markdown, using Sublime though. I sort of wanted to be a Vim person and learned the basics, but I haven’t really had the opportunity to use it in practice. I wasn’t really working with text that much and I didn’t get around to customizing it.

And then, some time in the early 2020, I stumbled upon this post describing an org-mode workflow and I fell into the rabbit hole full of Zettelkastens, Personal Wikis, Second Brains, Roam cultists, Digital Gardens and the whole shebang. Before that, I never realized that personal knowledge management is a thing, and a thing that I need in my life. But that quickly became obvious to me. I’ve always had a good memory so I tended to rely on that. But that was clearly a mistake - writing stuff down in a systematic, organized way seems to be crucial to staying sane in the world which is constantly increasing in informational volume and complexity.

I started out with Spacemacs after watching some very helpful and informative videos by Jack of Some. After a few months i migrated to Doom (but I still keep my Spacemacs config and can swith between them using chemacs). I won’t go into more detail here, but at some point I will probably publish my dotfiles and a description of my workflow.

Emacs requires a lot of time to invest, and I can’t say I’m anywhere near mastery, but I encourage anyone to give it a try. Truly, a life-changing program.

I started reading more

I used to be an avid reader in my childhood and adolescence, but as time progressed I found myself reading less and less. There were several reasons for that, most important being less free time, greater availability of more stimulating and easier to consume media and damage to my attention span caused by social media. In 2020 I managed to cut out some more time for reading and found that very rewarding. I am not, however, one of those people who challenged themselves to read 52 or 100 books - I’m not convinced that quantity matters that much here.

I read more books overall. I finally started reading fiction again. For the last few years I felt a bit guilty while doing it, because I had a sense that there was so much to learn about the real world, and reading about fictional one was a waste of precious time. Somehow I didn’t extend the same reasoning to other media though.

I also started dedicating some time to reading blogs and making use of an RSS reader. Too bad that soon after I finally got around to reading Slate Star Codex, the author deleted the blog and went on a hiatus. Luckily the archives are back.

I started baking bread

Cliché, I know. But somehow I gave in to the trend, got myself a sourdough starter and started baking. Overall, a very wholesome and positive experience. I don’t have a nice bakery nearby and supermarket bread just doesn’t cut it for me anymore. One thing that’s very rewarding is how much about bread baking boils down to technique - there is no hiding behind expensive, exotic ingredients like in other forms of cooking. The recipe is always very simple - just flour, water and salt. And yet, depending on the proportions, kneading techniques, fermentation and proofing times the results can be very different. Contrast that with brewing specialty filter coffee, where technique might be somewhat important, but the majority of success stems from the quality of coffee beans you buy.

In 2019 I managed to cut down my social media usage significantly, motivated by works like Digital Minimalism, the episode of Making Sense podcast with Renée DiResta, or Zucked. Overall, I more or less agree with the claims of social media critics, who portray their influence on people and society at large as detrimental. They steal our attention, keep us hooked for hours, negatively affect our mood and understanding of the world.

At the same time, social media provide genuine value. My twitter feed from early 2020 did a much better job of informing me about the risks that covid posed and preventetive measures, than major governmental institutions. It was via reddit, that I was exposed to the whole note-taking ecosystem.

It’s hard to find the right balance between these two conclusions. In 2020 I found myself doomscrolling much more than in the year before, undoing a lot of the progress i made in controlling my social media consumption. For some time I let that affect my mood and sleep quality, but eventually I think I arrived at a reasonable middle ground. My current social media usage is the following:

All social media apps on my phone are blocked in the early morning and late evening on work days. This way I don’t let them flood my mind with too much noise before I start working and don’t go to sleep too late. I use Stay Focused on Android, it allows for a pretty granular control over what’s allowed, for how long, on which days and which hours.
No notifications from any social media apps are allowed, except for messenger
I use Facebook quite rarely (once a week maybe?), mostly to look at memes someone sends me over messenger. My feed is blocked on desktop. I don’t really have the urge to use the app on my phone luckily. The thing with Facebook is that it’s quite hard to regulate the content you’re getting exposed to. You are expected to follow and be friends with people you know in real life, and that is not necessarily a good predictor for the quality of content they bring to your timeline. Unfriending/unfollowing people seems like a rude thing to do.
I use Instagram mostly for stories. I rarely get sucked in for more than a few minutes. I think Instagram has a lot of the same issues Facebook does. Also, it’s probably just a low-quality medium overall, given that it’s highly visual and text is treated like a second class citizen.
On Twitter I got much more liberal with the use of the “unfollow” button. If I see someone that makes my timeline worse, I don’t hesitate and unfollow them. I’m not as trigger happy with blocking or muting, but that’s probably because I’m rarely actively engaging in conversations there. I’m more of a lurker.
Reddit seems to be my biggest time sink and I don’t have a good policy for how to optimize my experience there. I try to actively unsubscribe from low-quality subreddits and I don’t use it on desktop, but that’s about it.

I got reasonably comfortable using git

Thanks to magit for making it so painless. I’ve had some prior experiences with git, but they were few and far between. This year I started managing my dotfiles and writing code more seriously. I familiarized myself with the basic flow of committing, pushing, creating and checking out branches, and opening and merging pull requests. One resource I wish I had found earlier is The Git Parable.

I wrote my first fully functional piece of software

A few years back I got myself familiar with Python but haven’t really had the chance to write any actual software. I did some occasional data analysis with Pandas or wrote some simple scripts, but not anything that was supposed to be used by another human. This year it finally changed - we needed a custom solution for streamlining the recruitment process. We have a lot of strong opinions about how recruitment should look like: we rate each answer from each candidate separately to reduce biases. So far that process involved a lot of manual data manipulation - each set of answers had to be anonymized and put in random order. That was a lot of tedious and error-prone work - an ideal task to be automated by some Python.

So I did just that - created an bunch of functions that read and transform data from spreadsheets, create appropriate files and manage their permissions. The whole thing is configured in yet another spreadsheet which contains all the details about recruiters, candidates, questions and so on. Then it turned out that distributing this software to people who would actually use it was challenging - I couldn’t just expect them to install Python and run the thing from a command line. I ended up building a basic Flask-based app to give users an easy way to run all the different functions.

So far probably far more time was invested into this project than we actually saved by using it, but I hope that can change in the future. Overall that was a very exciting experience and I had a lot of fun.

I learned to take days off

I have somewhat of a hoarder’s mindset when it comes to stuff like vacation days. I treat them like a precious, scarce resource and always try to save them for later. Usually I tell myself that I might need to use them in some kind of emergency, so it’s best if I don’t use them right now. Or that I will go on a longer vacation and will need to “spend” more of them at once. I guess I just hate feeling broke.

While this thinking might work quite well for money, it’s seriously flawed when applied to days off. When you’re tired, you’re tired. You need rest. You can’t offload your rest to your future self. At least not without consequences to your well-being.

This year I gave myself permission to just take one day off when I feel like it. Now, I know I’m writing this from a position of privilege: it’s probably not that common in other workplaces to be able to just take time off without prior notice or some kind of emergency. But for those who are in a similar situation - i highly recommend this approach.

I gained some weight

Turns out all this bread-baking and limited exercise aren’t that great for keeping your body fat under control. To make matters worse I developed some not-so-healthy habits around buying treats to eat with coffee. I don’t know exactly how much fat I managed to accumulate, but I feel noticeably rounder. It’s not that terrible, but I don’t feel comfortable with it and hope to change it in 2021. But that’s not a New Year’s resolution - those don’t tend to work.

I’m fairly introverted, so usually having too many of those leaves me drained. I don’t think I had a weekend that left me more tired because of social obligations this year. I don’t remember Christmas or other family events as stress-free as the ones in 2020. On the other hand, I think my tolerance for social interactions might have lowered significantly as a consequence of this. It might be the case, that I will find rejoining the society after we’ve administered enough vaccines quite aversive.

So, all in all, I think I ended this year in a better place than I started it in. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it wasn’t really bad for me personally.