2024 has been an interesting year for me from speaking at the AWS Summit in Dubai to changing my entire routine, there are some existing things in my life that does need a change
Why the change?
Looking back on myself over the years, there are noticable improvements that I am proud of doing but I realized that most of the things that I have been doing were not for myself but rather for the people around me. I have spread myself thin to a point that I don't have anything for myself to begin with.
By time I am starting to see that the things that I do care about and that brings me direct benefits have been put on hold, just so that I can keep things moving especially when it comes to my career. There are times when you have to do it because you want to see this project succeed and prospore into something big that you take pride in, I don't mind staying late hours working on things that I know that it would help the project and the company that I am working for but when it comes to a point that I am not being appreciated for the work that I have done, that's when I start to question myself.
In other words that I have burned down to a point that I have been delaying the things that I do care about and putting things on hold like hobbies and social events, I did manage to take a break and reflect on things in my life but I have taken a decision that I am not going to stay like this anymore.
It takes a toll on you when you realize that your work is not being appreciated and valued as much as you think, doing everything without any external support than my own financial expenses and time, and been delayed on certain things that I do care about. Imagine just staying in your place without any progress at all hoping that things might change
As I am writing this post, the goal that I aiming to reach towards is shifting things around in the sense that my work would bring benefit to the right people without compromising anything else that I do care about and would take care of my mental health and well-being. I would expect things to change in around a year or two but I am willing to take the risk and see where it goes.
I don't mind taking time doing things and not rush the process, even if it means taking double the time to reach the goal but without compromising other elements in my life that I do care about, whether it is social events, hobbies, or family time.
My expectations were to achieve things, take on higher roles, and get recognized as a leader in my field but life is tough and things don't go as expected
To be changed
Starting of with the podcast, I have delayed on lots of guests that I want to host on the show and up to today I haven't cut any previous episodes into topics that can be refactored into blog posts or short video based content that can be shared on social media. While there are AI tools that can cut episodes into topics and you can always hire someone to do it for you but neither the tool nor that person will choose the points that I care about so I would rather doing it myself and take my time on it than half assing it and just do whatever
As for writing blog posts and newsletter posts, there are loads of people using AI tools to write and recycle posts to farm engagement and I am not willing to do this at all. I am willing to take more time writing articles on the things that I have covered with real life examples than writing articles on how to do X or Y just to show that I am knowledable about it (like for example setting up a database on AWS while there are loads of those types of posts, I would rather write about how to scale an existing database on AWS and the challeneges you might face while doing it on a production environment)
Further more
The conclusion that I have reached towards is not rushing things and take time on it, I would rather do the right thing than doing things to feed an algorithm and get engagement on specific conditions because doing your work only to please an algorithm will only take you to a certain level but you will reach to a point that you will not be able to go further and spent time doing interesting yet tough things that does take time to get good at.
In a world where everything around us demands time and attention along with lots of distraction and stimulation, I am taking a slower approach (slow productivity) and do what I find is right even if things can be done faster but I don't want to degrade the quality of my work just to get things done faster.
I no longer care about having titles and recognition because it doesn't change anything if you always do the right thing every day, those titles are just checkpoints that you are doing a good job but it doesn't mean that you should stop once reaching that checkpoint because there are always more things to learn and improve on.