My 2018 Annual Review

As we step into a new year, it feels appropriate to take some time to look back at the year that has just passed. A yearly interval feels suitable for such reviews as it is long enough to work on something major and short enough to course correct any multi-year projects.

Here’s my 2018 annual review.

Career

2018 marked my third year at Buffer, a social media management software company. As a company, we experienced many challenges such as Facebook and Instagram API changes, which affected many core functions of our products. But overall, we overcame the challenges and had a profitable year. We made $3.3 million in net profit for 2018. This enabled us to share part of the profit among the team and donate to causes we care about.

Personally, it has been a great year of learning again. Earlier in the year, we experimented with a new team structure and I moved from working on content marketing to user acquisition. I had the opportunity to work on many marketing channels that I hadn’t before such as Google Ads, email marketing, product review sites, and SEO landing pages. One of my biggest takeaways was learning to look at the customer journey with our marketing more holistically rather than purely from a content marketing perspective.

Eventually, we decided that the team structure didn’t seem to be working well for us. At about the same time, Our Director of Marketing, Kevan Lee, also laid out his marketing vision and we adjusted our team structure again to align it with the vision. I moved back into a content role as a Growth Editor because we realized that my strength is currently more in content than acquisition and we needed more people to work on awareness than acquisition projects. My main focus now is growing traffic to our editorial content.

During the year, I also experienced a few episodes of burnout. I had a terrible episode in April and took a one-week break to recharge myself. (Thanks for supporting me while I was away, team!) I reflected a lot during the break and had a better understanding of how I work and communicate with others on projects. One thing I wish I had known then was the concept of the two types of time that Patrick McKenzie mentioned in his article.

Personal growth

While I spent most of my days on Buffer projects, I also try to take some time to work on things on the side to help me grow as an individual. I often find myself in a fixed mindset, and I found that learning new things reminds me that I can have a growth mindset. (Carol Dweck has written a great book on this topic, and there’s a short summary of it on Farnam Street’s blog.)

My most notable achievement for my personal growth is becoming more confident and comfortable with coding. I have been trying to learn to code for years but never seem to get a good hang of it. I could build simple websites with HTML and CSS but nothing more. My hunch was that I needed to (re-)learn the basics through a structured course. So I enrolled in Udacity’s Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree. I spent about an hour every weekday and more every weekend watching the lectures and practicing. After four to five months of hard work, I graduated from the course, feeling much more confident of my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills. I have since been working on a simple fitness planning web app with vanilla JavaScript (no frameworks) so that I can build a strong JavaScript foundation.

Another thing I have been working on in 2018 was building a mailing list. By sharing my journey in marketing and curating helpful articles on content marketing, I managed to grow the list to more than 370 subscribers. (Thank you, all!) When I started the Udacity course, I paused my personal newsletter so that I could focus on the course. (The course costs $999, and I didn’t want to waste my investment.) Now that I have completed the course and successfully added an hour of coding into my daily routine, I’m keen to resume my newsletter. If you are interested in following my journey and getting a curated list of interesting articles I come across, subscribe to my newsletter here.

Finally, I also tried to work on my public speaking skill. I gave two talks on content marketing and was on a discussion panel on digital marketing career. In 2019, I hope to speak at more events and share my experiences with more people. If you know of groups who are interested in hearing about digital marketing, remote work, and company culture, let’s connect!

Oh, and I read quite a bit.

Triathlon and health

2018 has been an interesting year for my triathlon hobby. After coming in three minutes away from the age-group third place at Singapore Triathlon 2017, I was motivated to train harder in 2018. But almost immediately, I fell out of my training routine and trained haphazardly for the next few months, sometimes training only an hour a week.

In April, I decided that I’ll give it one more shot. If I come in within the top three for my age group, I’ll see if I can take this hobby to the next level. Otherwise, well, maybe I’ll be a weekend warrior. I bought a 20-week training program from Training Peaks and trained hard for the following few months, up to ten times a week. 

The hard work paid off. I came in third for my age group at Singapore Triathlon 2018 with a time of 2:26:20. It’s a tiny achievement but it felt really great. I have since started working with a coach, Eugene Lee, and joined a triathlon club, Club Breakaway. It has been great so far. I have improved quite a bit, learned a lot more about the sport, and made great friends from the club. (I share my triathlon adventures on my Instagram.)

Besides my love for swimming, running, and cycling, I exercise a lot also because I believe in the importance of staying active and healthy. It’s part of playing the long game. And exercising regularly has a positive cascading effect on my health and wellness. Because I want to recover fast enough for the next training session, I make sure I have around eight hours of sleep every night, I eat well, and I don’t drink much. All these make me feel great and productive on most days, more than I would be without such a lifestyle.

I also tried to meditate regularly, though I have had better successes in previous years. In 2018, I had been reactive — meditating only when I felt overwhelmed. The overwhelming feeling could have been prevented if I had meditated more consistently, I feel.

Network

Because I worked mostly from home and spent most of my free time doing my own things (as above), I have been terrible at meeting new people. While it isn’t always necessary to know more people, I do enjoy meeting interesting people and having deep conversations with them on a wide range of topics, like a conversation I had with Visakan Veerasamy last year.

Online technologies such as social media and Zoom have been helpful in staying in touch with my friends, especially those overseas. I think it’ll be fun to leverage more of such technologies (Twitter, this blog, etc.) to help me connect with more interesting people around the world in 2019 and maybe even meet them in-person.

2019

I have already made my annual plan for 2019, and it’s looking to be an even more exciting year than 2018. Hope your 2018 has been great, and all the best for 2019!

This is my second year of doing annual reviews. Here’s my 2017 Annual Review.