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2017 by the numbers

·741 words·4 mins
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Daniel Andrlik
Author
Daniel Andrlik lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia. By day he manages product teams. The rest of the time he is a podcast host and producer, writer of speculative fiction, a rabid reader, and a programmer.

Yay, the obligatory retrospective post!

Let’s face it, in many ways, 2017 was a dumpster fire of a year. The political and social climate has been toxic and frankly it’s hard to be effective in this kind of environment. That’s why it’s more important than ever to recognize milestones and acknowledge your successes.

Travel>

Travel #

I travel a lot for work, but I as I transitioned away from BizDev to Product, it’s become way more reasonable. My amount of time on the road dropped significantly compared to 2016, which counts as a lifestyle upgrade in my book.

  • 111 days on the road
  • 14 round trips by plane
  • 12 were business trips
  • 6 of those were international to…
  • 4 different countries (not including layovers)

Speaking of work related things… #

I mentioned the role transition above, which actually began in 2016, but it wasn’t until the last year that I began to have deliverables to show for it. The change has been hugely rewarding on an intellectual level and I’m consistently challenged in a way that inspires me to do more.

  • 4 releases for existing Ecolane products (2 major, 2 minor, not inclusive of patch releases)
  • 1 new Ecolane product released
  • Oodles of other exciting stuff that I can’t talk about yet.
  • Not even going to ponder amount of emails sent and received or I’ll go insane.
Personal stuff>

Personal stuff #

This was a big year on the personal front. The focus this year was achieving a better mental and emotional health practice, as well as leveling up our living situation.

The biggest milestone in all of this was watching my five year old daughter begin to read on her own. I won’t take credit for that, as it is her achievement, but it takes my breath away to see it.

  • 1 House Purchase!! 🏡
  • 2 home maintenance projects completed.
  • 59 books read (my goal was 52)
  • 25 blog posts
  • 7 movies seen in theatres
  • 202 non work-related git commits in personal and public repositories
  • 4 pull requests filed for open source projects (2 accepted, 2 pending)
  • 373 Mastodon posts (I joined in December and have almost completely pulled back from other social media sites)
  • 646 photos taken
  • 365 journal entries
  • 232 meditation sessions for a total of around 52 hours of meditation.
Writing stuff>

Writing stuff #

One of the biggest changes this year for me was elevating my fiction writing practice. It was clear by late summer that if I was ever going to finish my novel I needed to stop treating writing as a secret hobby that I worked hard at when time permitted and start taking it seriously as a parallel career.

I began focusing on building habits for consistent output, even if those incremental amounts were small. I took an honest look at my work, family, and social commitments and realized that even if I didn’t have the time to churn out thousands of words every day, that wasn’t an excuse not to get out the few hundred that I did have time to do. I ended up cutting 20k words of idle garbage from from my novel and then put my nose to the grindstone from there.

Along the way, I’ve found encouragement and inspiration from friends, some kind members of the GeeklyInc community, and most recently the wonderful writers, fellow nerds, and other lovely folks at the Wandering Shop.

  • 52K words written
  • 3 new pieces of short fiction
  • Novel work resumed in force
  • 13 submissions to short fiction markets
    • 11 Rejections
      • 1 shortlisted
      • 1 personal rejection
    • 0 acceptances (yet!)
Looking ahead at 2018>

Looking ahead at 2018 #

2018 is going to be another big year I think. I’ve got a number of plans for Ecolane that I look forward to sharing when they are released. I also plan to keep writing as a high focus, wrap up my novel, and start the next one. I’d also like to get some more short fiction pieces done from my long list of story ideas. I also plan to resume work on a collaborative fiction project I’ve been hatching with my friend Quentin.

On the home front, we have a number of projects around the house we’d like to take on, and I want to keep my healthy habits from this last year going. Maybe I’ll even try exercising again? Anything’s possible.

What are you hoping to achieve in 2018?

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