I keep coming back to what it means to recharge. The metaphor that has been working most for me lately is the idea of a battery. In the green, I have plenty of charge. Everything is possible. In the orange is the ideal place for “active rest”. But if that’s not an option, I can […]
New Year’s resolutions are terrible because we are not a different person on January 1 (or 2) than we are in the last days of December, or November or June. They are also terrible because we over-estimate what we can do in a day, and under-estimate what we can do in a year. Today is […]
2021 was not the easiest year for the world, but personally it was a good one in many ways. Career I hit the one year mark at DuckDuckGo (more on that in: 1 Year @ DuckDuckGo), and got promoted for the second time ever in my career (my last job didn’t have promotions). A lot […]
Since 2017, I’ve been posting a photo every day to Instagram and photo.cate.blog. I kept that up last year, posting 361 photos in total. In 2021, the aesthetic monotony of pandemic life really started to get to me and this was probably the hardest this project has ever felt. I think part of the appeal […]
In 2021, I committed to publishing each Monday. Aside from a couple of narrow misses in October, I kept at it, making 52 posts over the year, up from 20 in 2020 (I wrote more about what this looked like in my retrospective: The Year of Habits). I had 4 articles on LeadDev. I sent […]
This time a year ago, I felt like my creativity had died of COVID. Died of boredom. Died of exhaustion. Suffocated under the weight of… everything. In the struggle of this, I felt caught between the should of, I should be able to do this, and the recognition that the world was on fire. I […]
All year I’ve been doing the Positive Intelligence app program. Every day there’s a focus (not always different, they rotate) with multiple prompts spaced through the day to meditate on. Some days it’s the exact thing I need, and others it’s not, but the one that always, always, lands is the one about “choose the […]
I feel like I’ve spent much of this pandemic digging out of a case of burnout, watching people burn out around me, trying to get ahead of things, trying to inch up from zero but never really feeling like I make it that far. I think it’s understandable that people are burning out, left, right […]
I think about habits a lot. That my word for 2021 is habit is a product of this, and a useful lens to cycle back on it. I think about habits, how to intentionally build and maintain them, and then I remind myself that I set it as a priority for the year for a […]
At the start of the year I wrote that my word for 2021 was habit. In January, I challenged myself to do something creative every day, a habit that I’ve continued (although not quite as diligently). In February, I challenged myself to do two things every day: read a book and exercise. I continued challenging myself to exercise in March, but […]