Reflections on 2016 and a look forward

Reflections on 2016 and a look forward

December 30, 2016personal journal6 min read

Can’t believe it’s been another year. This one was busy and quick. Even though a lot happened somehow I feel like I’ve missed it. This is almost the last day of 2016 and I sit here now, in London and look back to reflect on what happened, what did I achieve and what I can do better in 2017.

Work

I think that my professional work contributed mostly to the feeling that the time was flying too fast this year. I was definitely working too much this year. Even though since couple years I’m already working less - I’ve already decided this that family and personal interests are much more important than something else.

Yet, this year I’ve dedicated more time for work . Especially for my business travels. If I count right, I had about 17 business trips, with primary destinations being Hamburg & Munich. This accounted for about 70 flight segments, simply because there is no direct connection from Kraków to Hamburg. That is a lot! I would never expect this.

Up in the air - Lots of air travel this year
Up in the air - Lots of air travel this year

My feeling about this is, that while it’s nice to travel for work occasionally when you do it too often it’s becoming a burden. You still “loose” time at the airport, taxis, hotels.

What I would like to improve? To use my time better while I’m on business trip. I guess I could spend it better - reading more books or building some apps.

Travel and photography

While this year was busy, I’ve managed to do some shorter and bigger trips. Of course more is better, but anyway, I’m quite happy about what happened.

Nałęczów

First, in January, together with N. we’ve visited Nałęczów. It was short but refreshing visit over the weekend. We’ve enjoyed visiting this part of Poland - it was actually my first travel to the east part of our country.

View of Kazimierz Dolny

Smashing Conf in San Francisco

Then, there is a big one - In April I’ve got the pleasure to fly to San Francisco for the Smashing Conf! This was my first time Bay area, yet alone in States. I didn’t have time for much of sightseeing, but it was a definitely nice experience. The conference was, of course, great and I’ve also enjoyed running there once or twice. We’ve also visited Silicon Valley!

Enjoying bike trip at Google Campus — Mountain View, Califorin
Enjoying bike trip at Google Campus — Mountain View, Califorin

Senj

Last but not least, in July 2016 we’ve traveled for one week to Senj, Croatia. This was so called “workation”, since we’ve officially didn’t take days off from work but rather worked couple hours from AirBnB place we’ve rented. Senj was great location - warm and sunny coastal town allowed us to relax a little, gather sunshine and spend few days off the usual busy life.

Wonderfull sunset in Senj, captured with iPhone SE
Wonderfull sunset in Senj, captured with iPhone SE

I’ve also brought lots of pictures from the trip since we’ve also visited Plitvice Lakes National park. It’s an outstanding area and I recommend it to everyone. I’ve blogged about the trip on my blog, so you can read about the full experience.

I’ve also dedicated some time to curate my Instagram feed. Currently, my profile has +160 followers - It would be awesome if I could double that next year.

Improvements? Of course - Travel more and for sure take at least once, 2-weeks long dedicated, quality vacation time. We already have some plans for 2017, so we’ll see how this would go.

More photos would be nice too. Perhaps I’ll get some bigger zoom lens and try to photograph some local birds around…

Running and training

I am a little sad when I look at the numbers from 2016 and my resolutions from a year ago. On January 1st, I wrote:

A goal for 2016 will be to double the training hours. So let’s aim for 150 hours and more than 1000km. Put one or two races to the bucket and I’ll be very happy in the end.

I didn’t improve on here. On Strava, I’ve logged 78h of training and 617km. This is at least almost exactly the same like I did for 2015. So not “totally” bad but I could feel the downward scope here. Most of the running I did was in first half of the year.

In the first quarter of the year, together with Krzysiek, we did few more nice “runtrips” in the southern Poland: Luboń Wielki, Turbacz, Prehyba, Kamiennik - this are main ones but not all of them. This year will be different, though.

3 months ago I’ve also managed to sprain my left ankle on one of the training runs. It took, surprisingly, a lot of time to recover.

What could be done better? I think in the area of training I’ve got a lot to improve. My primary focus will be to get more consistency in my exercises and running. I’ll let rest follow the flow.

I’ve also gathered one important observation during that year - when I need to concentrate more on work and handling everyday life’s issue, I loose focus on fitness - somehow pushing it too low in my priorities. I’m not happy about that and I know I want to change that.

Blogging, personal development and more

I’ve posted more this year but not as much as I wanted. Just 29 entries, including 11 reading lists. That is a slight improvement but definitely nowhere close to where I want this to be. Still, lots to improve in this area.

Personal development is an area I want to focus most in 2017. I’ve got this feeling that this year was too much on autopilot. Maybe it went okay because of the momentum of the previous one? I’ll focus on some serious improvements and I’ll be blogging more about this topic.

A fresh start in new environment

One last major change for 2017 is that since mid-November I’m living and working in London. This is a big change to my life and preparations and moving had probably significant impact on the workload and stress levels in the last quarter of the year. But it’s done now - we’ve moved without any major issues and I’m ready to roll here. I’m still working at creativestyle and I hope that being here will also create a lot of new opportunities.

Looking back on other topics in 2016 - I guess I’ll agree that it was a crazy year. A lot of important events and changes in politics, economy, tech, and society. I just hope here and also strongly believe that we will do better in 2017!

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