2020 Year-In Review

Let's face it, 2020 has been a pretty eventful year and its no short of roller-coaster ride for most of us. As it's the end of the year, it's time to reflect on what has happened and plan for the year ahead. Here, I'm listing three highs and three lows of the year (and deriving my personal three point todo list for 2021!).

The highs :-)

• Lot of travel and new beginnings

  Lot of travel might sound odd considering most of us spent majority of our time locked up at home but I got to travel extensively in the early part of the year and got to meet so many amazing people and explored a lot of new places! I also started my new role in my day job, got to lead a team in my project, started writing tech blogs with a group of engineers, took steps towards digital minimalism, got into a daily exercise routine and even setup this personal blog and website.

• Ton of learning

  2020 made us learn new ways of spending time at home. I went from learning technical aspects of photography to clearing multiple cloud certifications. I also started gardening at home, started learning Español again, learnt and worked on multiple new tech stacks and even learnt to cook a few dishes.

• Family time

  Since the whole country was locked down for many months, I got to spend a lot of time with my family after a very long time and loved most of it. Though at times it can become too much of family time to bear, somehow I found a way to wade through it. The shift from always being on the run to spending all my time at home made me realize lot of things that I was missing out and now I balance my work and personal time a lot better!

The lows :-(

• Lots of troubles

  The pandemic exposed some of the worst problems around us. Lot of my favorite businesses closed down, many people I know lost their jobs, many people were financially affected and most of our personal routines got radically changed. It made me realise that I had to plan a lot better for uncertainties in life.

• Failed plans and shattered dreams

  It's difficult to create an exhaustive list of all the plans and dreams that got shattered! From the trip to Azerbaijan to see the F1 races to reservations for many in-person trainings and conferences, anything that involved even a little bit of travel got cancelled. Even small activities like going for a nice dinner became impossible!

• Wellbeing

  The pandemic directly and indirectly affected health and wellbeing of millions of people. I personally suffered severe health issues due to lack of physical activities for almost 9 months and one of my very close family member got infected with COVID-19. Mental health suffered as well due to lack of any social gatherings/meetings and being confined to the same atmosphere all the time.

To conclude, like any other year, 2020 had lots of highs and lows and I personally feel that a lot of issues around us which were neglected got focus and made us reset our priorities and also made us realise that life is unpredictable though you plan out everything to the last bit!

Hoping for lot more positivity and happiness around us in 2021!