2023 - Year of Structure Review

If you want to find out what I wanted to accomplish, feel free to go out and read the original post. Hopefully that will give you some insight into what I was thinking so we can cover how it actually went. It was filled with optimism, hope, a sense of change. It ended with only some of these things.

So how did it really go?

Some things this year were quite simply out of my control. The company went through a second round of layoffs. While my direct team was not impacted, there were others within our org that were. New positions were created as we restructured and many of my professional growth ambitions quite simply got put on the back burner. While I’m thankful to have a job, there are still some things that need to improve in 2024 in order for me to stay satisfied here. The structures that I worked to put in place have been helpful and hopefully career advancing. I was one of the few teams at the company that was hiring after the layoffs. There is still more to do and more projects to take on that keep me interested and at the company.

However, the work that I had in 2023 had its toll on me. My health was not great at the beginning of the year and I still suffer from many of the same issues. Weight is still up, sleep is still down, and the next year looks to be jam packed with even more projects at work to add to the stress.

But we’ve been making some progress though small at times.

I’ve signed up for Noom and that has helped out some. Small steps in the right direction at least.

We have a gym membership that we got so my oldest could get more confident in the pool for his scout ranks. He’s decided to not continue in scouts which is a tough pill to swallow for this Eagle Scout, but its his decision and I can respect his reasons. But we still have many months left on the membership and I have yet to go to the gym. Its getting cold so hoping I can make this a regular habit here in the new year.

I was able to keep a fairly regular PTO schedule this year or at least, try and hit my cadence of 1 wk/quarter off. It worked out that I actually took an extra week in there and I don’t regret it at all.

There wasn’t as much shop time and not enough time away with the family. We had some health challenges in the family with my mom breaking her hip which was a 6 month ordeal to get her back into health. Again, some things you just can’t control.

Do you consider it a success?

The great thing about a theme is it is not a pass / fail sort of thing. Did you live up to the spirit of the theme? For the first part of the year, probably not. But I put some things in place in the second part of the year both professionally and personally that I’m pretty proud of even though I can’t fully disclose them on here. 2023 may just be another one of those years where I survived vs thrived. There have been a lot of those lately which is concerning.

I’m still excited about the future and the theme for next year. We’re moving in a few weeks that adds a lot of stress to the first part of the year, but also a lot of possibilities of things to come.

Here’s to us all having a Happy New Year!