Looking Forward to 2021

Welcome

I didn’t want to start the year with a ‘look back at 2020’ post, so instead, here’s my look forward to 2021. As this is my first ever blog post, I should probably introduce myself. I’m Alex, I’m a product manager at a Coworking software startup. I’m interested in UX design, consumer psychology, and technology & business for good, especially concerning the environment. I enjoy strength training and cycling, and have recently got into bouldering and basketball. I play a lot of video games, spend way too much money on Lego and love vegan cooking. I’m currently living in Munich, Germany.

So what’s this blog all about?

Like many others, I decided that the 1st of January would be a good time to start a blog. For a while I’ve wanted to try to establish some sort of personal brand, and I feel like personal blogging is a good vehicle for that; I can write about whatever I want, in whatever tone I want. But aside from that I want this blog to provide a creative outlet beyond what I do at work. I wanted somewhere else to express and exercise my creativity. I aim to write monthly life updates in the hope that this will keep me accountable and encourage a healthy habit to form. I also hope that it improves my comprehension skills and helps me practice my German writing skills (yes, I plan to write each blog in English and German 😬). Working with a remote team, it’s crucial to be clear and concise with all communication. And I never get the chance to write in German, so hopefully this blog gives me chance to work on both of those skills.

Looking forward to 2021

I’ve already got a few big plans for this year, and a few goals in my personal and work life that I’m looking forward to working on

Personal life

My main focus for this year is to get more organised. I’m terrible at making lists, setting reminders, making organised notes and instead opt for keeping everything in my head, convincing myself that I’m able to remember and manage everything I need to do from there. I think my biggest aim with getting organised is that it’ll help my mental well-being. By setting reminders and doing things on time, I’ll hopefully get less stressed about not meeting deadlines. By making lists, I’ll hopefully be able to tackle big tasks in small pieces, making them more achievable and less daunting. And by making notes I’ll hopefully avoid the paralysis of not knowing what thought to focus on first and the following hyper-active jumping from task to task as my brain reprioritises every few minutes. I also want to work on my personal brand. I’m not going to be taking it too seriously, I just want it to be an ongoing project, that spans lots of disciplines, that gives me opportunities to learn and develop skills, but most importantly, keeps me excited! This blog and website is the start of this project, and I’m excited to explore other avenues and types of content creation going forward

Work life

I really want to step up my design skills this year. I made a lot of progress last year, so I want to continue on that trajectory. I want to get more comfortable and competent using Figma and I want to better organise our design resources for my own benefit and for the benefit of our development team. But on a more fundamental level, I want to learn more about colour theory, accessibility and the general principles of UX design. I accidentally fell into this role; I’ve never studied design so I’ve very much been figuring it out as I go along. This year I think I’d like to approach it more formally, with a bit more structure. I also want to work on how we support our remote team. We’ve always worked remotely, but as our team grew last year and with the uncertainty of when we might be able to finally meet up again, I want to make sure that everyone is happy, healthy and motivated. I’ll be thinking more about how we work, how we communicate and also what sorts of social activities we can put on to keep everyone connected

So that’s what I’m looking forward to this year. What about you? I’d love to hear it - tweet me or send me a DM at @marsh931 . I’ll be back again at the end of the month with a January update, hope to see you then! Alex