A year has always felt impossibly long. Something that happens in January and something that happens in December have always felt like they were on opposite ends of an infinite divide. This was even more true when I was a child and the endless expanse of a summer vacation felt like an epoch. But even as an adult I’ve never really felt like all 12 months of a year hang together in a cohesive way.
That is, until this year. For some reason my year felt like a cohesive unit. It certainly had distinct phases, which I’ll get into below, but I’m struck by how it felt like an extremely contained, and brief, moment of time. Perhaps I’m just getting old and experiencing the realities of math and physics (each year representing a smaller percentage of my overall consciousness as I age). I think it might also have something to do with the fact that I’ve now officially gone an entire year using my Week/Month/Trimester Review and Planning rhythm. This is also my second full year of highly detailed Weekly personal metrics saved in a spreadsheet every Sunday afternoon. The end result is a portfolio of artifacts that can be consumed over a cup of coffee that clearly and discretely contain the entirety of my yearly experience.
Like usual, I’m going to resist my nerd urges to just dump a bunch of data from my various personal quantification efforts for the past year (if you care about that, you can see that here). Instead, here’s my best take at a relatively brief narrative review of my 2021 and what I’m looking forward to in 2022.
Click here to keep reading my recap of 2021 and what I’m hoping to do in 2022.
A Recap of My Creative Output
If you’ll excuse me the indulgence, I’m going to round-up all my public output for the year. If you like what I do and you’re worried you missed something, this should have you covered.
SamSpurlin.com Articles
The Ready Articles
Fields of Work
The Deliberate
Social Media
Other Yearly Recaps Worth Your While
2021 Year in Review by Tim Casasola
My Pandemic Project Failed, But I Learned a Ton About Myself in the Process by Robby Macdonell
2021 Year in Review by Fernando Gros
Thanks for hanging out with me this year. Let’s do it again in 2022, eh?
Your friend,
Sam