Hey, it rhymes!
It’s fun to reflect by looking forward. I think it’s how I’m able to best express what I wish I had done in previous years and what I have done in previous years but want to change.
My guess is that thought will change on a whim, but it’s the one that’s here this year!
Parenthood!
My most obvious and important focus for 2022 is to be a good father and dad.
Watching A change and develop over his first 4 months has been so cool. I love that this year will bring us months 5 through 16 and I expect I will continue to be in absolute awe of the changes he and we experience.
More contact
I’m pretty sure 2022 will be another year spent mostly hunkered down. There is still a global pandemic, we still have an infant, and the risk of traveling to conferences and sharing air with hundreds of people just doesn’t seem worth it.
But I miss seeing everyone!
I’d like to find a way to have a sort of regular hallway track where I run into an assortment of people through the year except it’s for a 10 or 15 minute coffee break over video during a normal weekday.
Who knows, we’ll see. If you like that idea, let’s have coffee. ☕
Reading
As always, I want to make sure reading stays a priority. I’ve successfully crawled back from reading only a few books every year to almost a book every week in the span of 6 years and it really does feel good. I am always thinking about the books I’m reading and the books I want to read.
I’ve set my Goodreads goal at 52 yet again. I’m less confident I’ll hit it because of baby, but I have found ways to work reading back into daily life again, so we’ll see!
I’d also like to track reads on my site in addition to (or rather than) Goodreads. Storygraph is also hanging on my periphery, but it doesn’t have an API yet and I’m not sure I want to just switch silos without having some way of bringing the data back here.
Listening
I love listening to music and I love discovering new music.
Spotify has become my radio and I pay for unlimited and customizable stations. I’d like to stop treating Spotify as my default place to go when exploring an artist I enjoy.
When I find something I like, I should try to support the artist outside of miniature Spotify royalties.
Some new rules for listening, some of which I’ve already implemented:
- My preferred way to support artists is Bandcamp. It sends them a good chunk of money and is low friction for me.
- If an independent artist is not on Bandcamp, but has a website on which they sell digital audio, that could work, but adds enough friction for it to be less likely.
- If an artist only sells physical media, but is on all the streaming services, I can only shrug and keep listening to them on Spotify.
- If the artist is signed to a major label and is only on streaming services, my level of effort will be a bit less because they’ve either figured out a good enough contract or are screwed no matter what.
Writing
Writing makes me happy, so keep on keeping on! I paused my weekly notes for a couple long stretches in 2021, but I’m now on a 5 week streak and feeling good about the rhythm of the last month.
I mostly need to remember it’s okay to not fill a page. Any time I let something sit as a draft for more than a week, it’s doomed! Just press publish, and feel free to edit later. And I should try to follow my advice!
Music
I mentioned this in a previous weekly note, but I need something tangible to focus on so that I actually play guitar on a regular basis. I’m going to start taking the courses at the Online Academy of Irish Music as a way to dive in and have some structured learning.
One day it will be fun to play with a group of people again. But first, I need to play for myself!
My web
I’ve thought quite a bit about my site (this site, hi) over the last several months and it’s become more clear to me how much I enjoy owning it and the content on it.
Now that I’m comfortable writing weekly and not giving everything a title or tossing random notes up that are also or could be tweets, I can wrap my head around more and more ways to use my site as a commonplace book or digital garden.
I actually started a new site as my digital garden, but every time I put something there I thought: why here and not at my main site?
Parallel to all of those thoughts, I’ve started to like the idea of embracing Micropub as a way for a variety of clients to post to a variety of websites.
So. I want to spend this year creating my own Micropub client and exploring others. By the end of the year, I would like it if almost all of my notes and blog posts on this site were published from outside, but still mangaged in, WordPress. This may solve my “writing in WordPress” troubles.
I also have high hopes (and expectations) for the block editor in WordPress. As long as features become stable in 5.9 and 6.0, I’d like Happy Prime to be working almost primarily with the full site editor by the end of the year.
The Indieweb
I keep dipping my toe into the Indieweb waters, but I haven’t really made the commitment to participate as a regular community member. I’d like to change that this year and spend at least a few minutes every day checking in or making some progress.
My internal mental roadmap for Shortnotes includes a variety of Indieweb items. That should help keep me on task as I have at least a vision of what I want to improve when it comes to sharing my work.
Phew. Okay, that’s that. See you next year!
Previous iterations of this look-forward: 2020, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015 . I also maintain a page listing all my various yearlies. I’m not hard on myself if I miss one, but it’s always nice to find a moment to reflect.
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