Year 2024 in review

January 10, 2025

The easiest way for scaling is to double down on what's already working. That's exactly what I did in 2024. I extended my weekly work strategy to health and finance.

Work

Building on last year's foundation for my weekly system, I consolidated all my bookmarks from external services like Twitter and Mastodon into Pinboard. Additionally, I set up an RSS reader to manage individual blogs.

Finally, the weekly experiment wrapped up successfully, and my blog is back to featuring a now page.

I read the following books.

  1. Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact by Liz Wiseman - My notes
  2. The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love and Raising Great Kids by Ryan Holiday - Quotes, highlights
  3. The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham - My notes
  4. How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber

This year I donated to the Kaniyam Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Wikipedia, Mozilla, and two YouTube channels.

Health

I see a pattern emerging from my learning hours. I'm more focused in the early morning or late at night when the kids are asleep. Since there is nothing I need to attend to, getting into the flow comes naturally, but ending it after an hour is proving to be a challenge. But this is necessary to ensure I'm following all my curiosity without burning out.

Instead of obsessing over working out every day, I've adopted the weekly approach. I lift weights once a week, and for the rest of the week, I do basics like doing stretches every day, taking afternoon walks post lunch every day, taking stairs whenever I can, and evening cycling with the kids.

Family

To apply the weekly strategy over my finances, I started paying bills at the end of each week instead of waiting until the month end. This led to three interesting outcomes: (1) it tested my emergency fund, as I had to pay bills from it before I received my salary (2) it gave me a clear idea of my current burn rate (3) and how much lifestyle creep have I picked up recently.

A lot happened this year. After 6 years of career break, Lakshmi joined Amazon. Aaradhana started school, and Dhruvan has started getting homeworks as he is moving up grades. He is learning க ங ச ஞ, antonyms-synonyms, singular-plural, articles, addition-subtraction and multiplication tables. Wrapping Dhruvan's notebooks in brown covers reminded me of my school days. Lakshmi is taking care of academics.

Our household loves reading. Both my paternal and maternal grandfathers started their day with a newspaper, and my parents still follow that tradition. The ritual hasn't changed much except adding a English and a financial newspaper to the mix. Dhruvan, seeing this, is already picking up the habit early. He eagerly looks forward to சிறுவர் மலர் every week, enjoying activities like drawing pictures using numbers, coloring, and spotting 7 differences between image sections. One unindented side effect is that now, every wall is turning into a canvas.

modern art Modern art
dhruvan art Dhruvan's art
aaradhana's art Aaradhana
team work Team work

Though I was a huge cricket fan, I had never been to a stadium. Lakshmi changed that. She took me to the CSK vs PBKS IPL match to see the man, the myth, the legend in action.

Last time, we couldn't visit Kanyakumari due to bad weather, but this year we made it! I took Lakshmi, the kids, and Appa-Amma to the same places I visited in 2013. Back then, I was a bachelor on a career break, about to head to Mumbai to join a startup. Now, I'm married man with two kids. It's gratifying to see how far I've come in life. Thank God for these blessings. For this reason, Kanyakumari will always be special to me.

Previously 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014

For my new posts, Subscribe via weekly RSS, common RSS