#71: To moving intentionally
What am I optimizing for this 2024?
Dear friends,
A personal note from me: Happy new year! This is my first post for 2024. Last year, I didn’t release anything for December, maybe for the first time since I launched this newsletter. I took a much needed break for my personal life— missed you all!
Anyway, for new subscribers, WELCOME! Thank you for signing up to my writing.
Today’s goal is dead simple: I want to list out the things I’m actively thinking about that will matter to me and how I approach work this year. It’s primarily driven by this question:
“What am I optimizing for this 2024?”
Parenting and high-impact work
2023 was a particularly challenging year for me, for a lot of reasons. It was my first year as a working mother. I obviously learned a lot. Admittedly, this is an intersection that occupied a lot of my energy and time. This is one of the reasons why I decided to take a break from writing last December.
Writing on-the-side while parenting full-time and working a full-time job became—I don’t use this word often—nearly impossible to pull off. I had to give myself some time to think things over.
Now that the dusk has settled, I want to make this clear: I love THIS work. This is a long-term endeavor and I am still committed to nonfiction writing for as long as I can. Time out, like the one I just had recently, isn’t a setback. It’s a necessary step in the right direction, despite taking a few steps backwards.
I’m not making any promises I couldn’t keep other than this: no matter the circumstance, my love for learning and knowledge management is strong and innate. I can’t help myself, I want to absorb as much as I can about the things I care about deeply. It is not a money thing (I don’t earn from substack!). It’s just the way I am and where I see my life going and it is not without thinking. Thinking makes me feel alive and fulfilled and completely in flow with my entire being.
For as long as I’m doing some thinking, some learning & some evangelizing, writing will happen. This newsletter will continue and it will be delivered to your inboxes.
Private vs public-facing work
2023 may be over but the market volatility is still here—and likely will be here for a while. It looks like it’s still pretty brutal out there with recurring layoffs, AI fears, RTO mandates, collective post-pandemic burnouts, on top of all the socio-political chaos everywhere. We do live in interesting times.
The crazier the world gets, the more important it is to remain focused on whatever your personal mission is, in-and-outside of work. Otherwise, it’ll be hard to keep your sanity. Part of that focus for me is to continuously shape the work I’m doing, privately and publicly.
I don’t mean this as my day job versus my complimentary & adjacent interests outside of it. This is strictly about the visibility I allow the work that I do to have. My writing work is my most public work & that is intentional. It is also one where I hold the most control over from a creative and ownership standpoint.
Whereas my design work is different. I work for someone else so therefore a lot of it remains under that shadow. That doesn’t, however, diminish the criticality and the vital importance of it in the industries it is a part of. I’m proud of the work we do at my company. I feel lucky to do this for a living, in spite of the state of everything else in corporate America.
There’s fragility in balancing all of this. I am a writer but I’m also a designer in real life. The influence of one to the other is underrated & excelling in both is key to my future, whatever I choose to be next.
To moving internationally
I want everything I do to matter, to be a part of something bigger, to have a reasonable impact relative to the investment I make. It takes a lot of work to do this, it certainly needs both sides to be executed well.
The challenge to that longevity is stamina. How do you keep building it without burning out? How do you stay long enough to really make a difference, like actual difference to your life, somebody’s life and perhaps, a part of society through design? Maybe It’ll never happen, or i’ll fail. It’s always a possibility.
But by simply not trying, I’ve effectively increased that likelihood to about 100%. That’s the thing about self-fulfilling prophecies, if you believe something hard enough—short of defying the laws of physics— it does happen.
Only by moving intentionally can you ever improve the odds of your destiny, no matter how small or big those steps are.
Some tactical ways I incorporate this in my life:
Writing personal projections: from my own finance goals to work/career goals, I tend to write down the things I can reasonably achieve. It’s a good exercise and an excuse to daydream about how I can do my part to improve mine (and my family’s) future.
If it’s important enough, it has a deadline: it’s going to happen, no matter how slow the progress is, it’s going to get shipped, in its imperfect form, come hell or high water.
Prioritize joy and rest and your own mental health: it’s extremely hard to do anything, let alone accomplish goals, if your life is in disarray. This is not up for negotiation or even a debate.
Aim for small pockets of deep work daily: Deep work is not synonymous to great work but great work is not possible without deep work. I’ll write more about this this year as I explore this subject further.
Make space for boredom: being on 24/7, always occupied by one thing over the other leads not just to burnout but also to busywork. Not everything has the same level of importance nor urgency so I stopped treating every single task/distraction as such. This singularly made my life a tiny bit more manageable especially last year.
As designers, we are all familiar with embracing constraints and setting up requirements to the products we help build. Lifestyles, environments, homes, they are no different. We are both the users as well as the makers for the products of our own life.
Personally for me, nothing makes me feel as bad and as inadequate as losing that high agency. Amidst all of the madness out there, I prefer to maximize the modicum of control I have over my life, in all aspects of it.
for as long as I can, with as much as I can give in honor of it.
thank you for reading working title,
Nikki
If you have a spare moment, I’d love to hear your opinion on my newsletter. This will help me understand what to write about and curate better.
Saw this brilliant exhibit in NYC over the holidays. Learned a little bit more about Basquiat and Warhol during our visit. Was an incredible experience overall. (Taken at The Grant Foundation, New York City)
Worth sharing:
My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career by Michelle Hutchinson
8 tips to manage your time better to achieve your goals in 2024 by Peter Yang
A raw, unedited note from my private notes:
An unfinished list From 07/12/13:
‘What have I learned this week?
Documenting your thoughts and your process is essential to clear thinking. In order to arrive at the right solutions, the environment has to be built for it.
You can turn a lot of things around just by asking yourself, ‘What can I learn from this?’
Constraints are essential to creativity.’