2021 Goals

Michael Sholty

An overview of my 2020

As we enter this new year, I want to take some time to reflect on the last year of my personal and professional growth.

Things that went well

Professional achievements

  • Rebuilt from the ground up most core Zapier interior pages like My Apps, My Zaps, Settings and Task History
  • Wrote some brand new zapier.com experiences such as Zap Details and Task Usage
  • Spearheaded a huge technical shift at Zapier in migrating our codebase to TypeScript, and creating buyin at the company so future work is written in TypeScript.
  • Untangled our giant ball of yarn of monorepo frontend code to begin splitting our code out into a new focused repo that my team owns entirely.
  • Kept a very healthy work/life balance despite huge team goals, allowing myself to work at a pace that is healthy and sustainable. I've created a lot of healthy work-related habits that I want to sustain into this new year.

Personal achievements

  • I stayed safe by not contracting COVID19 🦠
  • I bought a house! 🏡
  • I started to climb out of the "burnout hole" I dug myself into 😓
  • I started going to physical therapy to treat a chronic back injury that I sustained in 2016, decimating a lot of athletic progress I made from 2011-2015 🏋🏻‍♀️

Things that I want to improve on

  • Write more ✍🏻
  • Improve my health through focusing on my diet. I want to go back to the methods I used in 2015 to lose a lot of weight, which in turn made me feel better physically than I've ever felt. 🥙
  • Time management. I want to schedule more blocks of time in my schedule to timebox my work, so that I don't try to work ad libitum on things that don't align with my present goals.
  • Spend more time outdoors. I am very certain I will achieve this now that I have a new house with a yard, and tons of yard projects to undertake. I'm very excited to transform my "blank slate" backyard into a beautiful place for my family to relax and spend time together in.
  • Be a better husband. Through the last year, I've done a lot to find myself again. It takes a long time to rediscover yourself after a bout with burnout, and that can lead to selfish behavior. I want to take steps to being a better partner to my beautiful wife, so that our marriage can grow to new heights in 2021 ❤️

Parting thoughts

Want to know something awesome about this specific blog post? I sat down with nothing but a domain at 8:55am on a Sunday morning, and churned out this entire website plus this blog post before 10:00am. Want proof? Check out this Twitter thread where I chronicled my hour-long journey. It's very satisfying to accomplish my main goal of "write more" in an hour of work, and have new fertile grounds to do more of it!