Do you remember in the previous post I talked about all the things I hoped to achieve in 2020? Finishing the book, finishing the game, doing a bunch of other things? I think I sort of overloaded myself? To the point where I got into work at around 8:15 on a Thursday and continued working until about 19:00 to get things done. How did I get there you ask? Or maybe you didn’t ask? I’ll tell you nevertheless.

It was a lot of small little things that built up, things I committed to one of which was work. I wasn’t enjoying my job for most of the latter part of last year mainly because I was just fixing old stuff and not building new stuff, so I voiced it out and I was heard. I was given new stuff to work on, lots of new stuff. More than I could handle sort of new stuff but I held my head up and said I’d get it done by the beginning of February which seemed like a reasonable goal.

Software development is a very unpredictable process and it turned out there were more unexpected things that cropped up causing that deadline to be moved, only by a few weeks or so but I still felt bad missing the original deadline. So I stayed late and work overtime to get things completed. This has sort of pushed a lot of other projects back for me, like a few talks I planned to do.

By about the second week of January, I already had about three talks lined up to do for work. One I asked to do last year November-ish, but got pushed back to Jan, and two others scheduled for February were because of two different rotas I’m on. I’d say it takes me about two weeks to plan each talk, excluding weekends. Since completing the main project I’m on takes priority to me over talks, I’m super behind on writing them which makes me put a lot of pressure on myself to get the project work done quickly so I can write the talks.

Something we started at work this year (I bet you’re seeing the pattern) was a team wellness challenge. This involves grouping up in teams of five and completing sporty or mindfulness activities to get points for your team. As the slightly competitive person I am my focus was to be in the top ten, so I planned to aim for about three points a day which I’d achieve by meditating and doing two 20 minute walks. But because of the huge project I talked about at the beginning of this article, there’s no way I could get that done and squeeze in walks every day, so that’s sort of started sliding too. Maybe it’s my fault for caring so much and wanting to be competitive but I put a bit of pressure on myself for that too.

Lastly, the two things I talked about in my previous post, the game and the book. If writing talks have fallen behind because of the project, then my side projects have definitely fallen behind. I know it’s only been one month but that’s one month of free time I’ve given to work and not the things I truly enjoy doing. Things I do to relax and unwind. Furthermore, these things will be a month behind deadline, and as much as I enjoy doing them I’d much rather they be done before 2021 than continue working on them.

Phew, that’s a lot. The good news is, none of that stuff is important. The game, book, wellness challenge, even work. And that’s a fact I need to remind myself when I’m woken up in the middle of the night thinking about how I’m going to fix problems at work or when I spend time with Hannah and I’m worried I should be working on my projects instead. If I don’t do any of those things the world will still exist. It will still keep spinning and people won’t care, much. What is important though is my relationship with Jesus and sharing the gospel with others. It’s easy to make idols out of worldly achievements. They feel nice, you get praised, people cheer for you, but my life on Earth wasn’t given to me to make my name great it was given to make His great. I pray this year that I keep that at the forefront of my mind this year.