Struggling to set 2021 intentions

and what I'm carrying into 2021 instead (at least for now)

The last few weeks, I’ve had the intention to sit down and spend some time reflecting on 2020 and looking forward to 2021. I even sat down to journal, but only got a few sentences in. Despite taking a few extra days off, in addition to Range’s 7-business-day shutdown, I found myself feeling disappointed that I didn’t get to do as much as I’d hoped. But by the final weekend, I had found some peace in trying to let go of my aggressive relaxation and intention-setting attempts, and just recognize that 2020 was quite a year, and it’s totally ok if 2 weeks of not working but still taking care of kids and everything else is insufficient to recover, reflect, rejuvenate, and prepare to hit the ground running in January.

In 2020:

• I finished mediation and finalized my divorce

• My kids stayed home for distance-learning

• We joined a pod with another kid and his divorced parents

• My partner moved in for shelter-in-place, and then moved in for good

• My kids attended their first protest

• We navigated pod dynamics (two sets of divorced parents and their current partners sounds a lot like a sitcom that will be super funny years from now), including COVID risk protocols and deciding to homeschool the two older kids

• I started a new job as VP of Engineering at Range

• We survived the day of darkness and a horrific fire season

• We made it through (pretty much, right?) the 2020 election season

• and much more…

Perhaps the desire and motivation to do more thorough reflection and looking forward will emerge in the days to come. For now, though, I’d like to kick off this newsletter/substack/thing with some things I’d like to carry into the next year.

Reduce unknowns

When I feel anxious and overwhelmed, a lot of it comes from uncertainty around what all something entails. When I assumed that my roof needed urgent replacing and would probably start to leak the next time it rained, I spent a rainy season extremely anxious. Getting a roofer to take a look and tell me it’s “not so bad — probably needs replacing in the next year or so” helped me reduce the unknown element of my roof situation.

Similarly, at work, where I onboarded in 2020 mid-pandemic as the VP of Engineering at Range, at first I was able to stay on top of things, taking a small number of things quickly from unknowns to knowns to completion. But when the unknowns starting piling up, and I didn’t know how I would simultaneously juggle a bunch of projects of unknown scope, I started to feel overwhelmed. My manager Dan reminded me that the first step in reducing unknown might be super basic and only take 10 minutes.

Though an initial investigation may only take a few minutes, sometimes I avoid the unknowns because they’re the source of anxiety. But when I create some clarity and a basic plan forward, that anxiety quickly fades. I’ll try to remember this going into 2021.

Let go of arbitrary expectations

My default innate behavior is to anxiously plan but not really make the plan explicit. Like having a plan for how a weekend will unfold - we’ll go for a hike in the morning and pick up food at the place I found at Yelp, and then have a few hours to relax at home, and then play board games and talk, and then go to sleep.

After 3+ decades of living, I’ve found this method to often make me miserable, especially if other people are involved. They may not want to follow the plan I made but didn’t tell them about.

For example, when thinking about having spacious time over the break, I had a thought that my partner and I would go on a beautiful hike, and when looking over an expansive panoramic view, we would both set intentions for 2021. I didn’t share that this was something I wanted, this didn’t happen, and I felt disappointed that it didn’t happen. SO SILLY.

My brain is like a cat that presents me with random gifts like dead mice, hoping to please me with its achievements. But sometimes it just stitches together random expectations of how a day or week or month or year will unfold, and I think my satisfaction will correlate with how closely reality matches the plan.

In 2021, I’m going to try to set higher-level intentions and be more clear and explicit about any specific expectations that are actually important to me at work and in general.

Write

I was reading Fair Play over the break, and the author talks about making Unicorn Space, the space in which you do what makes you interesting, what makes you feel alive and uniquely you. For me, that’s writing. And in reading that, I realized I’ve been neglecting that part of me.

I’ve experimented with different types of writing in 2020, with a super-limited tinyletter shared with close friends, sales emails to sell our online course after we couldn’t run in-person events, blog posts aligned with work themes at Range. But a lot of times, I want to write, but don’t know where it should go. It’s often personal writing that encapsulated all the parts of me. The engineering leader, the partner, the mom, the co-parent - thoughts on what’s top of mind for me, what lessons life is dealing me these days.

So for now, this will be that place. There may be engineering leadership blog posts, there may be parent hacks, there may be philosophical musings.

What about you? What do you want to bring into 2021?

Thanks for reading!