Looking Behind and Looking Ahead: 2021 and 2022

Here it is: the annual retrospection for 2021.

I started writing this on January 6, 2022. And this was sitting in my drafts for almost 2 months. Don’t ask why.

Looking behind at 2021

2021 was Year 2 into the pandemic and Year 0.5 to 1.5 of my Ph.D. Here are some highlights:

Looking at the numbers

Looking ahead at 2022

There are some exciting things happening in 2022 for me:

Going forward, I intend to do more of less. In the past, I’ve generally been very distracted in terms of what I want to do. I had hoped that by doing more things, I would be able to figure out what I liked. Turns out I find a lot of things interesting and it is hard for me to say “No” when a new opportunity pops up. I end up having a lot of things on my plate and become stretched too thin.

To that end, I am going to impose a limit on how much I will do and stop testing the limits of how much I can do. The upper bound on the number of things I will be involved in at any point in time is 5. This 5 will be distributed between research projects, classes, teaching, and other obligations. Currently (March 2022) it is at 5. I anticipate it will stay at 5 until the end of this academic year. Ideally I would like to bring it down to 4.

Some other fun things I want to do this year: