Reachable dreams. Step-by-step

What was your plan for 2020? Become richer, healthier, smarter, or maybe find love?

Let’s dive into my experiment of 2020,

where it’s brought me and how it can help you reach your dreams in the upcoming 2021

NB! Each of us in a different situation and has different abilities/opportunities, it is just my experiment of 2020 and I hope that you can find it useful✌

Today’s story is structured in the following way:

• The trigger that pushed me to pursue a dream (not a fantasy)

• What’s the difference between a dream and a fantasy

• How I broke down dreams into a subset of goals

• Example of my typical day

• Results

🔫1. Trigger

There is always a trigger before each big change.

In my case, it was about my successful friends and my curiosity:
‘How you …? What are you doing to be…?’

and

Health problem:

• Neck pain after intense swimming training

• Stomach problem after eating a junky meal

• Skin problem

• Frequent flu/cold during 2019

✨2. Fantasy vs Dream?

What is the difference between a Fantasy and a Dream?

A dream can be broken down into goals and exact things to do daily, a fantasy — can not.

🪓3. Dream into a subset of goals

At the start of 2020 I broke down my big dream of being successful and happy into a subset of goals, and put them in the following groups:

Health, Family & Friends, Career & Finance, Personal development.

💊3.1. Health goals

• Be healthy overall

• Be more energetic

• Look fit

• Half-marathon

👬3.2. Family & Friends

• Find a girlfriend

• Find new friends

• Keep in touch with my family and friends

💰3.3. Career & Finance

• Have income from my company (investment, consultancy, company profit)

• Become a better CTO (understand more about tech/people)

• Understand technology such as Kubernetes, CI/CD, Machine Learning, and Security

🥇3.4. Personal development

• Build a personal brand: -website , -podcast, -blog, -style

• Read 12–15 books: 20% novels, 40% -IT books, 40% — business literature

• Increase my professional network

• Improve my Swedish

🔍4. Break down Goals into Daily routines

Here I have to recommend two books that can really help you:

— 📗The Slight edge:
This book explains how to break down big things into small daily tasks

— 📕The Power of Habit:
This book helps understand how to build habits for daily tasks

Let me give an example:

You want to be a better in businessman/businesswoman-> Try read 12 business books next year -> 1 book per month -> each book is ~ 300 pages -> ~10 pages per day.

The example shows that your real goal is just to build a habit to read 10 pages per day in case you want to be a better businessman/businesswoman

🤏5. Daily routine example

NB! Times can vary depending on many factors (summer/winter time, illness, night party and so on), but that was my daily schedule during 2020 that I tried to stick to it as much as possible.

Wake up.

• I know my agenda for the day (that has been planned one day before), it helps to not snooze too much (Especially with remote work during Corona times)

• Google assistant (smart speaker) plays music right after alarm ringing

Morning routine.

• 20 minutes Duolingo to learn Swedish (🥇Personal development)

• 10 minutes of yoga (📺Sun Salutation), and 10–20 push-ups (💊Health)

• 30 minutes for shower and light breakfast, a mix of fast and slow carbs (something sweet and porridge) (💊Health)

Day planning.

• Checking the agenda, add new tasks from emails and Trello sprint backlog(💰Career & Finance /🥇Personal development)

• Prioritizing tasks that will affect the annual goal in general (💰Career & Finance /🥇Personal development)

Working time

• Commute to the office (pre-corona time) by bike or bus with audiobook or youtube(💊Health/🥇Personal development)

• Coding or doing other related tasks with a lunch break(💰Career & Finance/ 👬Friends /🥇Personal Development)

• Each hour I have a watch beep signal that reminds me to do stretching for a couple of minutes and keep the right posture(💊Health)

• 1–2 times a week I am running during this time (choosing the day with better weather) (💊Health). I also use Garmin Watch with an in-build 📺running program

Lunchtime.

• Trying to cook or order something that follows the Harvard Plate suggestion(💊Health)

Harvard Plate

• Eat vitamins : D, B, Omega 3, and Multivitamins. Especially D in the Scandinavian region (💊Health)

• Serve or order a small portion (💊Health)

Chill and personal time.

• Watching youtube, or doing any other non-goal related things 🤘
  This is a crucial thing to not become a 🤖robot.

• If have a special dinner or a party, sometimes I chose an alcohol-free beer instead of regular ( 💊Health). A friend showed me this trick an interesting way to hack your old habits

• Prepare for bedtime ( 💊Health)

• No TV-series after 11 PM

Bedtime(📘Why we sleep. An advice from that book below) ( 💊Health)

• Be in bed before 11 PM

• Keep room cold and fresh

• Keep the room dark and silent during the night

• Sleep at least 8 hours

• Do not eat 2 hours before sleep

• Do not drink alcohol before going to bed

• Do not drink coffee after 3 p.m

• Sleep on a comfortable mattress and pillow

• Remove blue light from your screen 2 hours before bed (📖 Bedtime mode on Android)

• Go to bed and wake up at the same time (23:00–7:00), even on the weekend

🧾5. Results

• Read 25 books

• Biked(503KM)/Run(301KM) and did a half-marathon in 🐌2:25h

• Duolingo (Finished the whole course)

• Built a website: https://skobeltcyn.com/ (don’t forget to click on a 🔴 button)

• Did 7 podcast episodes (it didn’t take off, but it was a good experience) + one episode with me:

• Wrote 3 articles on dev.to (include this one) ~ 4700 views

Stats from dev.to

• Workwise, we rolled out the: https://sensivo.eu/ product, have several paying customers and are closing the pre-seed round🎉🍾🥂

• I guess vitamins helped me to avoid the flu, and now I am recovering after COVID-19

• I found new friends and acquaintances via volleyball meetups and participation in an open-source project. And I have been in touch with old friends and family via Zoom

• I got rid of stomach pain by increasing physical activities. Still have skin problem but found a good treatment after proper check-ups

• And I found a girlfriend (How — it is a different big story)🎈

That was just an experiment of 2020, hope it was a fun read.

UPDATE from 2021!
Recently, I build an app Yourhabit.me that helps me to track my progress during my 2021 experiment!

I appreciate your claps and please leave your comments below.

If you have a friend who is chasing a dream but without obvious progress please consider to share this post with him/her 👌

Stay safe and happy new year!
Best, Alex
Co-founder of sensivo.eu