Yearly reviews are important for a variety of reasons. Identifying our strengths and areas for improvement can help us develop a plan for moving forward, personally or professionally. A yearly review can also allow us to reflect on our values, priorities, and goals and adjust our actions accordingly.

Reflecting on the past year helps graduate students better understand how much work has been accomplished. In addition, it may help us to plan our research and personal life for the upcoming year. 

Here is the yearly review of my personal and professional life in 2022 as a graduate student.

Highlights of the year

• I have made tight connections with my inner circle.
• I shifted to intermittent fasting, eating only one meal each day, which revolutionized my life.
• I have read 30 books, learned touch typing (from 17 to 104 words per minute), learned French using the Duolingo app with a 340-day streak rate, and watched and reviewed 225 films, documentaries, TV shows, and other videos. Watching guilty pleasure movies, however, was a mistake!
• I have increased the amount of time I spend reading and writing each day from 30 minutes to one hour.
• I have been able to reduce my social media usage from 1 hour per day to 20 minutes.
• I transferred my master’s degree to a PhD. In preparation for my first journal article, I have completed the third semester of my PhD program.
• I have written a total of 30 blog posts. I earned a certain amount from my blog in December, which was equal to what I earned over the previous two years combined.
• I became a level two seller on Fiverr by helping people set up Notion workspaces.

Reflecting on 2022 goals

Personal and professional relationships

A year is shaped by the people we spend time with and the relationships we form. I have managed to make tight connections with my inner circle, the people who, on a daily basis, provide me with energy and inspiration.

You are only an average of the five people with whom you interact most frequently on a daily basis. Based on this analogy, I always search for the right people to interact with.

This process has the benefit of assisting you in realizing the areas of your life that need improvement in order to become the person you really want to be.

Among the best books, I read this year was “12 rules for life” by Jordan Peterson. One of the rules out of all 12 which caught my attention was the third one, “Surround yourself with people who want the best for you“.

In the words of Peterson, “Men and women create their worlds by using the tools they possess at hand. Faulty tools lead to faulty results. Repeated use of the same tools leads to the same faulty results.” That is why learning from others, especially those who wish us well, is so important.

Health

This year has been a year of ups and downs for my health.

For me, waking up at 5 AM ish is a big deal, especially since it influences many things during the course of the day. There were certain reasons why I wanted to get up that early. It has not been going according to plan, at least not consistently.

Throughout my life, I have been a night owl. Shifting from that to an early bird was not a wise move. In particular, it disrupted my regular sleeping schedule, which I messed up badly this year. Despite all the information I could gather (especially from the book, “Why we sleep“), I realized that at the end of the day, it all boils down to one question, “Is this working for you?”.

Irrespective of whether something works for others, if it does not work for you and if you are more productive being a late worker, you should do so. As a result, I adopted the schedule that worked best for me all this time, six hours of sleep from 12 PM to 6 AM. I was astonished at how helpful the Netflix series by Headspace was in helping me to sleep.

My sleep schedule directly affects my eating schedule too. It has been three years since I became a fan of intermittent fasting. Having watched Dr Jason Fung’s brilliant presentation, I became intrigued by intermittent fasting.

In the beginning, I followed intermittent day fasting, which entails fasting for 24 to 36 hours at a time. After three months, I lost six kilograms. However, it soon became apparent that with the nature of my work (I was working as a research engineer at the time), I would not be able to continue to do so. Consequently, I changed my diet to a more flexible one.

I ate two meals a day without weighing or subjectively choosing what to eat, following a more popular schedule, 16:8. In this schedule, you eat within 8 hours and fast for 16 hours.

But this year, I thought, what if I ate less? By eating less, my body has to work less to digest food. Would I be able to save more energy as a result? So, I did just that; I ate only one meal a day. (This is not medical advice!) Everything changed after that. There was a greater sense of relaxation and focus than ever before. However, these are highly subjective matters that vary from person to person.

For example, some people are healthier when they eat only beef. Since this was a hot topic, I attempted one month of a full carnivore diet (only meat). For me, it did not work. My sleeping pattern was disturbed, and I experienced mental and physical fatigue.

Overall, there should not be any rigid guidelines concerning diets since it is entirely dependent on each individual. It is a process of trial and error. Also, I am pleased to have achieved a healthy diet balance this year.

Learning

This year, I have set a goal of reading 30 books, following my previous goal of 24 books (one book every two weeks). Clearly, that was a mistake. I read 51 books in 2020 (the goal was 50 books). In hindsight, that was one of my most regrettable decisions that I’ve made that year. Despite reading only 24 books in 2021, I gained more knowledge than any other year.

In the words of Naval Ravikanth, “The smarter you become, the slower you read“. Although I made a poor decision to read more books than last year, there are a few positive outcomes. I have read several good books this year, and even better, I have enjoyed most of the books I have read. In addition, I am pleased to have found a balance, which is one book per two weeks. I have listed all my readings in my GoodReads accounts, arranged by genre.

Since I moved to Canada to pursue my PhD last year, I have been interested in learning French. There was no immediate need for that. So, I took a fun approach to learn the language using the app, Duolingo. The lessons were easy to follow and almost like a game. For me, this method worked best because I did not want to lose the streak when it had built up to some extent. This attitude motivated me to return to the app daily, every day, for 340 consecutive days.

Watching movies and documentaries has been a habit for a long time, both for fun and also as learning experience. The experience was wonderful until it wasn’t!

In the past, I used to search for good movies and documentaries with high ratings, buy them and watch them, and go to the theater if they were new releases. However, I have subscribed to Netflix this year. Although most of these films are mediocre at best, I have also watched some of the same movies multiple times simply because they were available to me. Thus, instead of seeking out good movies, I simply watched whatever was available.

Using the Notion app, I have begun creating a database of all the movies I have watched since 2019. Currently, this database contains nearly 450 entries. Additionally, I have begun writing movie reviews and adding them to the database, as one of my goals this year was to write more.

Overall, I watched and reviewed 225 fictional and non-fictional art (movies, documentaries, tv-series and other videos), although watching guilty pleasure movies was a mistake!

After the end of last year (2021), I became familiar with touch typing because I was surrounded by several people who could touch type. At that time, wanting to touch type was more of a sudden interest than a serious consideration.

But, later, I realized there is a direct relationship between typing speed and productivity; if you can type twice as fast as you can now, you will be twice as productive. I began to learn touch typing from 17 words per minute, which is less than the normal handwriting speed (40 wpm). In the beginning, I made a mistake of not being concerned about the accuracy, but, after learning all the positions of the keys, I shifted my priority from raw speed to 100 percent accuracy, hence the sudden change in the red graph (typing accuracy) and the green graph (typing speed).

My goal of reaching 100 words per minute took 90 hours of practice. Compared to the norm, this is quite a significant amount. Even so, I am glad I learned touch typing, since it is a lifelong investment.

Productivity

I have set a goal for this year to read and write more. I have dedicated time to reading and writing each day. Before starting my PhD work at 9 AM every morning, I spend one hour reading and writing. The writing was not exclusively based on research. Some of my writings have included drafts of blog posts, evergreen notes of my thought process, and even movie reviews. This non-linear note-taking improved my writing quite a lot. Consistency suffered quite a bit, so I plan to improve it in 2023.

It was difficult to come up with a clear answer to the question, “Do I have a toxic relationship with social media?” However, at the beginning of this year, I spent more time on Facebook and Instagram. Even if I would not be able to share my blog posts on both platforms, I temporarily deactivated my accounts. It was a wise decision. For several reasons, I continued to be active on Twitter.

Social media with less rich media content (images and videos) is more appealing to me. In contrast to Facebook and Instagram, Twitter is primarily text-based, which allows you to think before responding. This is one of the reasons why I started this blog. Because if someone reads my blog, they are not just seeing it in their feed. They are happy to be here and taking the time to read my content. And that’s a more trustworthy and a decent interaction in the long run.

Additionally, I needed a platform to publish my blog posts. So, I decided to stick with LinkedIn and Twitter. Because of my own social media restrictions, I have reduced my average social media usage time from 60 minutes to 20 minutes per day.

The concept of PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) has come up recently in discussions among people seeking to create a digital second brain, but I have had some frustrations with it. Because of my shiny object syndrome, I checked out almost every new app that was released in an effort to improve my productivity (So far, I have tried Evernote, One Note, notion, roam research, Logseq, and Obsidian).

I have come to realize that PKM is yet another sophisticated method of procrastinating. There is no such thing as a perfect PKM system. All that is required of you is hard work. After realizing this, I chose not to switch to another app this year.

In spite of this, I always wondered, “Would I be able to accomplish more with the correct PKM system?” or “Is it really wasting my time and energy doing all this work without the right system?” Worst of all, “how can I be sure that things will work out without the right PKM system?”

A good place to start is by asking yourself a few very simple questions, such as:

Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote five novels and became one of the most influential philosophers of all time. Did he have Obsidian? In prison, Nelson Mandela wrote his books and became one of the most influential figures in South African history. Pretty sure he did not have access to roam research in prison!

That’s enough evidence to prove the point! We already have what it takes to be successful. These new fancy systems may be able to assist us. However, it is important to recognize that the amount of assistance we receive from these apps is significantly less than the amount of effort we must put into the work ourselves. And I learned that optimizing your PKM system is not actual work. That’s just another fancy way to procrastinate.

Professional work

I transferred my master’s degree to a PhD this year, which was one of the most difficult decisions I had to make. Since I have always wanted to pursue a PhD, it was the easiest decision for me to make. But deciding whether to pursue a PhD at the same university or at another university was always a contentious issue for me.

While wandering around, having difficulty deciding, an idea occurred to me from a book I read earlier this year; Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks. He discussed an interesting method for making difficult decisions. It is by asking yourself the same question if you were 100 years old. To put it another way, what would 100-year-old “you” advise the current “you” to do? I found that to be intellectually and spiritually sound. By doing this, you can remove most of the barriers that prevent you from making the right decision. So, I went ahead and did that. I decided to do my PhD in the same university.

I will begin my second year as a PhD student at the beginning of the next academic year (2023). Being straight out of an undergraduate degree, I found it difficult to adapt to the pace of a PhD. And now, I have found the pace more enjoyable than anticipated. It is important to note that these things also depend on your supervisor.

While I can’t share my research yet (it hasn’t been published yet), here’s a sneak peek into what comes next year!

Since becoming a freelancer, I have become a level two seller on Fiverr, which has been on my bucket list for more than a year. After 53 customers, these are the lessons I have learned.

1. If you undervalue your product, you undervalue your customer.
2. Providing a high level of customer satisfaction is as important as having a high rating. Although sellers can get ratings, only a few customers will likely write positive reviews.
3. It would be best to avoid working with people who are interested in getting the job done for the least amount of money. To put it another way, selling your products only to those who understand their value is crucial to long-term success. In addition, it has high commercial viability. Eighty percent of your customers will reject your offer, but you can make all that money if you sell to the remaining 20 percent.

Above all else, working with different companies, small businesses, and individuals helped me to gain a thorough understanding of “commercial communication.”

The blog has had a successful year. Since the beginning of the year, the total views have increased almost tenfold, which has given me comfort and encouragement to keep writing.

I set a goal for myself at the beginning of 2022 to earn a certain amount from my blog. By the end of the year, I had earned more than five times that amount. Furthermore, I earned a certain amount in December, which was higher than what I had earned for the last two years combined.

What did I do differently? NOTHING! The only thing I did was being consistent and having some faith in my business model. I also wanted to sell a digital product in my blog, which failed miserably. But I learned some invaluable lessons from the process.

The top lessons I learned from writing the blog are:

1. It appears that students are having difficulty obtaining information about the graduate application process. In the coming weeks, I will focus more on this topic.
2. Although the goal of a blog should be to help one another, which is ideal, it is also healthy to have a business mindset. Because when you have a commercial focus to some extent, you are forced to find what people really need, which ends up being your top priority after all.
3. Putting effort into spreading the word is just as critical as publishing.

Finances

In 2021, I moved to Canada to pursue a PhD. It turns out that money works very differently depending on where you live. It has both pros and cons, of course.

It has never been a habit of mine to track my cash flow, at least not consistently. I have found, however, that keeping track of your money in this part of the world is much easier due to the fact that almost all transactions are done electronically.

When I was in Sri Lanka two years ago, I used Notion to track my money, and that was not an easy task. But if I wanted to do something like that, regardless of your method, tracking money would need to be done manually. This is because most transactions are not electronic. In most cases, cash was involved.

As I converted all of my transactions to digital, I could track my progress using a third-party application, such as Mint.

One of the biggest lessons I learned about living a worry-free life is not to spend money you have not earned. An effective yet simple solution to most of life’s problems!

2023 Outlook

1. To make more time to spend with loved ones.
2. To find more people who have the same career goal interests as me.
3. To make time to meditate and exercise
4. To learn more about data science + physical chemistry
5. To increase the daily writing time from 1 hour to 1.5 hours and write reviews for all the books I’m planning to read this year.
6. To learn more about technology-based startups
7. To publish my first journal article as a PhD student
8. To write 50 blog posts and create an “Obsidian for academics” course

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Images courtesy: Image by Freepik, memecreator