How I Achieved More in 2024 (and It’s Not by Working Harder)

Hi friends,

Happy New Year! 🥳 Hope you had a great holiday period, and you could rest.

A year ago, I decided to rethink how I approach work, life, and growth.

The results surprised me—perhaps they’ll surprise you too.

I wrote this in Goals in Focus, Paths Amiss: The Year of Choices in the 2023 Abyss:

If I had to summarize the lessons of 2023 in just one word, that would be growth…

This newsletter breaks down every quarter of 2023. Why I failed from quarter to quarter, and what I learned from it.

Read: I made dumb mistakes and learned from them. As you can tell, I was pretty open about it. You can read the whole article here.

So, after 2023 ended, I set some guidelines for 2024:

• Don’t shop when you’re hungry

• Focus on helping, opportunities, and rewards may come as a side effect

• Travel

• Keep it simple

Here’s how I performed at each of these:

Don’t shop when you’re hungry

Making decisions out of desperation rarely leads to the right ones. This lesson hit home when I suddenly had an extra 5 hours per day only to create content.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, the less time I have to accomplish things, the better I prioritize.

This experience reminded me of Parkinson’s law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. I saw this play out firsthand.

However, I didn’t know what to work on, and I had so much time on my hands that everything seemed doable. As a result, I started many things and finished only a few.

Figuring out what to work on doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

You can have 5 hours daily or 2. If you don’t do rapid experiments, you may still be working on the wrong thing.

I needed less time.

What a stupid thing to say, but yes. In early 2024, I started looking for a full-time job, and we were expecting our first baby in April.

Both are amazing at eating up all your time.

Compare the two years with my new experiments.

+---------------+----------+-------------------------+
|               |   2023   |          2024           |
+---------------+----------+-------------------------+
| Time/day      | 5h       | 2h                      |
+---------------+----------+-------------------------+
| Newsletters   | 28       | 51                      |
+---------------+----------+-------------------------+
| Blog Posts    | 34       | 16                      |
+---------------+----------+-------------------------+
| Books         | 0        | 3 (about 30,000 words)  | new experiment
+---------------+----------+-------------------------+
| Video Courses | 0        | 1                       | new experiment
+---------------+----------+-------------------------+

The shift to focused experiments, such as books and courses, allowed me to channel my limited time into projects with lasting impact, proving that constraints can be a powerful driver of creativity and efficiency.

Help

Bitsy, my newsletter, grew significantly when I focused on writing about topics engineers find helpful. It wasn’t about chasing numbers but about creating genuine value.

If you help others succeed, growth and opportunities naturally follow.

I’ll continue this trend. As promised in the previous article, I’ll expand the articles in Bitsy with paid articles that contain my validated learning and help you get more done in less time.

Travel

This year, we’ve accomplished some non-trivial feats regarding traveling with a newborn. We haven’t taken any flights yet, but we drove to Croatia for the summer, had a couple of smaller family retreats, and had off-road adventures with our new daily driver.

Traveling with a newborn is all about simplicity. I learned that all I need for 14 days can fit into a backpack. 😄

Keep it simple

No complaints here.

If I consider the amount of helpful content I created throughout the year, this was by far my most productive year.

Two things helped me achieve this:

• my wife, who constantly looks after the newborn and helps me dedicate the extra time needed to finish newsletters and books

• saying no to many things

The cornerstone of 2025 will continue to be simplicity. I’ll continue experimenting, doing more of the things that worked and brought results, and spending the rest of my time with my family.

After all, isn’t that what we’re all striving for?

To create something meaningful, grow along the way, and share life’s best moments with those who matter most.

As you set your own goals for 2025, consider this:

What could you achieve by simplifying, focusing, and saying no to distractions?

📰 Weekly shoutout

1. From Code to Words: How to Write Well for Software Engineers by

   Fran Soto

2. How HTTP 2 Improves Upon HTTP 1 by

   Saurabh Dashora

3. How did I improve my focus & productivity with a simple Second Brain in Notion? by

   Petar Ivanov

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