I don’t generally agree with the way some services do their year-end reviews, like Spotify who does theirs at the beginning of December. The year’s not over yet – there’s still a whole month left to go! Typically I’d wait until January to really start thinking about the last year, but since it’s 2020 and I’ve been on vacation for a few weeks I’ve had some extra time to stew.

This year I went through several periods of idleness, though not inactivity, punctuated by a few bursts of productivity. I didn’t write nearly as much as a normal year, but I did take back up photography. I programmed some, but not as much as I’d have liked. And I watched a ton of movies.

Writing

Tracking my Progress

I keep a spreadsheet where each tab represents a year in writing. Over the years I’ve added or removed columns but it’s remained fairly consistent in its use. Although Scrivener does keep track of your progress over time, this is just on a per-project basis, and I like to have a broader view of things.

I’ve started and restarted projects to turn this into a little app, similar to the NaNoWriMo tracker: goal tracking, project management, progress reports. Sometimes it has some social features, sometimes it’s desktop app, sometimes it’s just a command line interface. I’ve done this so often now that it’s basically become how I evaluate new programming languages or frameworks.

But no matter how I dress it up, or how refined I build my user interface, I still just come back to the spreadsheet. Apps introduce complexity. A spreadsheet is as simple and dumb as you can get. Very little is as useful as a plain spreadsheet.

This Year’s Word Count

I think it’s obvious what happened here, at least in that first long horizontal line. But I’ll explain a little.

In the beginning of the year we moved to the city. Late last year I started a job that was 100% remote, and living in the suburbs was not cutting it for me. A little too much ennui, there. The hope was that living smack dab in the middle of the city would alleviate some of the problems working from home introduces.

And for the first month things were great! City life was awesome! Then the lockdowns came. That was okay, because at least outside my window wasn’t a lawn and another lawn and another lawn and endless quiet. Even under the lockdowns, there was still life outside my window.

But, it became difficult to keep up with things like writing or programming in my free time or doing very much at all, really. Being productive during a pandemic just wasn’t a priority. I had to reassess what it meant to me to be productive, or if I needed to be productive at all in order to feel satisfied with how I spent my time. The short answer was, I didn’t need to be productive; I just needed to be.

I’ve always written for myself more than anything else. I rarely share what I write, although I do sometimes talk about it. While I do think it would be nice to someday be published traditionally, that’s not the only goal and it’s not why I write. The problem here is that I didn’t really think much about the exact reasons why I write. It’s a compulsion, more than anything. Stories or premises appear in my head and I have to write them down.

Because of all this I think it was inevitable that I grew unhappy with my writing in general. The lockdowns and the stresses of the pandemic, of the protests that marched by my apartment, of everything else that happened, these all were handy excuses for taking a long break and really evaluating my reasons for doing what I do. The joy in writing had been evaporating, and it took all this for me to think about it deeply.

So these long horizontal lines are my time doing a little soul-searching, doing workshop exercises, trying to re-find and refine my reasons for writing as well as my craft.

Once I started back up, I think I made good pace! Even an emergency appendectomy didn’t stop my progress once I started. Minus the two days in the hospital.

Programming

All in all, I wrote nearly as many lines of code as I did words this year. Generally LOC are not a good metric for progress, but I thought this was an interesting metric, anyway. Maybe this is another reason I felt a little burnt out sometimes: 40,000 words written, and over 30,000 lines of code in a year! I guess I have been busy.

Photography

Earlier this year I bought a used Nikon D3 and have tried to revive and maintain my interest in photography.

I’ve learned, and re-learned, a few important things with this camera:

One, photography as a skill is not like riding a bike, and you really need to keep up at it to keep your eye. Otherwise you end up starting over, redeveloping skills you used to have and rebuilding muscle memory. This is frustrating and discouraging and the worst part of picking up any hobby after a long absence.

Two, post-processing continues to be the maker and breaker of photos. Few photos are perfect straight out of the camera. With a little extra care, many photos that at first seem unspectacular can really grow into something special.

Three, it’s just as important to look at photos as it is to take photos. This helps you figure out the things you like and gives you goals for styles to develop on your own.

Four, don’t pay attention to Instagram. It’s a toxic black hole of chasing likes, thumbs-up emojis, and pointless trends. Social media continues to be cancer to creative endeavors. I spent about a month maintaining an active photography account before I got tired of that rat race and moved on.

Movies

I watched over 150 movies this year! It doesn’t take much active engagement to just watch movies, though. I did semi-participate in Hooptober, where I watched a horror movie every day through October. This gave me the opportunity to fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of the horror canon. I love horror movies, but it’s taken me until now, my 29th year of life, to finally watch the Night of the Living Dead, which may have been made in the 1960s but feels as modern as anything released in the past year.

In Review

It’s easy to review the past year in terms of numbers when you’re a little metrics-obsessed. I track everything from the words I write to the music I listen to to the movies I watch.

Even so, there were long stretches of the year where I “did” nothing at all: nothing got tracked. This kind of unplugging, for me, really helped me keep my head on straight as it felt like things were getting more and more out of hand in the world around me. As spooky news became a pandemic, and protests turned to riots and businesses shuttered and never took down the plywood over their windows, as the election ramped up and petered out, as long as focused on my own little corner of the world and doing what good I could with what I had, I managed to stay okay.