December 12, 2023

2023

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Before even talking about myself, I must honor the memory of all the good people who died this year—families vanished, children orphaned, and entire cities destroyed.

I will remember this year by how much I wept and cried, despite being a grown, oversized, bearded man. Being indifferent to the tragedies live-streamed on the internet is really hard when you are a father of two young kids.

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Life is a mixture of sad and happy, and this year was no different. If it were not for the catastrophes of the year, I would remember it by how much my life bettered within, in many* aspects:

I rented an office space: SafaHQ

Leaving the house in the morning and working until evening, in isolation and in an environment specifically designed to enable good habits to thrive was the best thing that happened to me this year.

I've been dreaming of having an office space for myself for years. This wasn't feasible earlier, as our sons required a lot of attention during the day, making it difficult for my wife to manage alone. Also, I didn't make that much money to justify the luxury of almost doubling my monthly fixed expenditure by renting a complete space just to work in front of a computer during the day, on weekdays.

After the kids grew up a little bit more and after Selenay had a few more friends with kids to make the day a bit more bearable for her, she gifted me the luxury of spending my entire day in my man cave.

If you have kids and have been working from home for a long time, you would understand how big of a thing this is. I praise Allah for this blessing and thank my wife for being always an understanding and helping spouse.

Bonus video: Saying goodbye to my home office

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I am so back in the reading business!

I have always looked up to people who read a lot, have a good library of books, and can refer to books and authors when discussing a subject.

From a very young age, I've seen reading as virtuous, exciting, and of high culture. However, I've been also really distant from reading after graduating from university and starting to work full-time. I wanted to change that. I want to be back in reading especially reading non-fiction best sellers—and more importantly I wanted to remember what I read.

After buying two dozen non-fiction books and publicly setting a goal to read them this year, I realized I had forgotten how to read!

It took me months to get back to speed but now I have a good pace, a reading system, and a reading setup.

The books I have read this year:

  1. The Psychology of Money
  2. Thinking, Fast and Slow
  3. "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
  4. The Hard Thing About Hard Things
  5. Rework
  6. Hooked
  7. Deep Work
  8. Outliers
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I started setting rules to live by.

This is one of the biggest things of the year. I started setting carefully worded rules as a self-discipline method. I applied all the lessons I took from my previous goal-setting experiments and the books I've read on habits and switched to a different approach in creating persistent behaviors.

I've set four rules this year and have been successfully following them:

  1. Workdays start with reading
  2. I lift weights
  3. No food after 9pm
  4. No social media before noon

You can read the hows and whys of this system here.

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I started taking weightlifting seriously.

After realizing there's no way out I made weightlifting a part of my identity this year by setting a specific rule for it.

I think it's safe to say it became a habit for me, considering I've been lifting weights three times a week for the past 8 months with few exceptions.

I started with a self-made split for the first 6 months, then tried a personal trainer and failed hard, and then moved to following StrongLifts 5x5 and currently enjoying it.

I invested more in my home gym and bought more pieces of equipment, started eating whey almost regularly, and lifting heavy weights.

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I still struggle with my weight.

Although I regularly lift weights, do cardio from time to time, and get in strict dieting for certain periods within the year, I failed hard in losing weight this year.

At the beginning of the year, my weight dropped to 109.6 kgs, but by mid-year, it surged back up to 121.4 kgs. I ended the year around 116 kgs with a net yearly increase of 6 kgs.

For future reference: This year I tried hard to lose weight, perhaps as much as I did when I dropped from 125 kgs to 105 kgs back in 2019.

However, this year I really felt that the scale doesn't move backward as easily as it was doing before.

I have two explanations: either I'm getting old or building muscle and losing weight at the same time is really hard.

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I distanced myself from modern distractions.

At the beginning of the year, I was so hooked on social media that I was wasting long hours watching random YouTube shorts or refreshing my Twitter feed repeatedly. I did a so-called "dopamine detox" in January and refrained from the internet at all for one week. I couldn't believe how it felt to be away from it.

I finished up a book that week, a bunch of new project ideas came to my mind, and I even drew a comic in my spare time.

After that week, I returned to social media but somehow I was not getting the same pleasure as before.

I realized how hostile and offending Twitter is, and how mind-numbing YouTube shorts are.

Step by step, I moved into a life where distractions have no place:

After all these efforts to cripple my smartphone for good, I also set a rule that disallows social media before noon.

Considering I rarely open my laptop in the evenings, my social media time is effectively limited to a few hours each day.

If you ask me, on a regular workday, I spend less than 30 mins on Twitter.

This is an achievement for someone like me who lives on Twitter.

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I became more productive at work.

After ditching distractions, I happened to read the book Deep Work by Cal Newport and I fell in love with it immediately.

Using the inspiration and productivity techniques from the book, I started planning my day and managing work more carefully.

Moving to an office, using little-to-none social media, and better management of the day combined, my productivity boosted tremendously.

Although I don't have concrete measurements, I feel that my productivity has increased three to fourfold compared to last year.

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I traveled a lot and had fun.

I made a business trip to Houston and stayed there for 3 weeks. It was a lovely experience for me and my family that we decided to spend 3-4 weeks in a foreign city every year.

This being the biggest travel event of the year, all of the cities I visited this year are the following:

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My interest in stationary grew a lot.

After I started using my first-ever index cards which I got from Houston, I immediately fell in love with them and sought local alternatives.

I use index cards almost every day and for various purposes: as a backlog, as a task queue, as a timetable, as a to-do list, as a whiteboard, as a guest book...

My interest in paper-made items, permanent markers, and stationery in general grew significantly after binge-watching Van Neistat and discovering Tom Sachs.

Filling my office with office stationary, I feel like a student again and I'm loving it.

Also, I bought a printer and a scanner to ease my bookkeeping. A very happy side effect is that I can print on the index cards. Be it a template or a mobile app UI screen.

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I have a more defined style in outfits.

This year, after buying some Adidas and Under Armour from the outlets in the US, they became my love brands and I ditched Nike completely. I found the most comfortable pair of underwear and the most comfortable pair of pants ever. Bought many of them and threw away almost everything else.

I combine the pants with a t-shirt in summer whereas I wear them with a sweatshirt or a hoodie in the winter.

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I bought my first-ever iPad.

I don't use it as frequently as I imagined but I do like my iPad. It helped me create the logo I use in the favicon, I edited some thumbnails with it, took a few pages of notes but gave up, and used it when teaching my 3-year-old some Lego robotics.

It could be a motivation for me to learn some iOS development too in the future.

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I continued creating content, but not as much.

I started this blog and published a few posts.

I live-streamed a couple of times but after moving to SafaHQ, I had to stop.

I published 20 videos: 10 in Turkish and 10 in English. These numbers are really low compared to the last year.

I tried outsourcing one video but didn't like the result much.

I intend to continue producing video content, but I have doubts if I should push to produce in English or fall back to my comfort zone and produce in Turkish. We'll see.

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I decided I should start coding for myself.

It's been a while felt like I lost my passion for developing apps. It changed when I read about how Feynman lost his passion to do physics and questioned why that was.

Feynman figured in the early times, he was doing physics out of curiosity, how he liked it when he wanted it. He realized when he had concerns about what needed to be done, it killed his passion. To bring it back he tried to work on a matter just for fun, not for publishing purposes nor because their bosses wanted to. This led him to get the Nobel prize at the end.

This resonated with me and I accepted the fact that not all pieces of software I develop have to be either monetized or contribute to my career in any way.

Developing software is fun, it was more fun when I was developing apps just for experimentation or just for me to use them.

After accepting this fact, I built this blog (Paper) and an automation assistant (Watson).

I have written on index cards a bunch of new ideas too that I would be excited to build.

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Some random facts about the year

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* This post was not meant to be this big. A heartfelt thank you and an equally sincere apology to you if you've read through all of it.