Month-in-Review Highlights: April 2022

Me amid preserved Roman-era ruins in the ghetto neighborhood of Rome, Italy. April 25, 2022.

I postmortem each month shortly after it ends, reflecting on what happened in general and, more specifically, in the context of my goals. Though I don’t share all my insights here, I have made it a practice to share at least one key highlight or insight. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)

When I do my goals review at the top of each month during the first few months of each year, I see things I should do to keep on track that I comfortably put off in the notion that I don’t need to start on this or that quite yet. I have time.

And then we get firmly into the second quarter of the year and, as every year, my goals review reminds me that still haven’t started on certain line items. At which point I realize that continuing to delay at this stage moves me from prioritizing certain goals over others to pure procrastination.

Can’t have that.

Therefore, while I need to keep up my forward momentum in several areas, I need to recenter a bit of my focus onto the more administrative, research-oriented to-dos that I’ve shuffled into the background as “not yet necessary” and “can wait.” I had several professional shifts in the plan for 2022, and though many aspects have moved forward at a good—and exciting!—pace, even these on-track efforts will hit a snag soon if I don’t face down the other half of the workload around them.

However, for the items that I can call “on track,” I can say that I have made solid and exciting and motivating progress, and while every time I set a big goal I get frustrated along the way, on balance I feel fantastic about what I’ve managed to accomplish so far.

In fact, I even had a little motivation to get through a milestone before the end of April: We’d scheduled a trip to Rome for the last week of the month. Initially, we’d planned it to see my mother before she launched a vacation with friends, yet she caught COVID and cancelled after the grace period for getting our trip money returned. So ahead we went. The change of pace and scenery made for a needed break in the routine and a fun reward for the hard work required to make fast project-related progress ahead of the trip.

As I’ve moved forward through 2022, I find it interesting to see what goals I set back in December that now feel less important than they did then. I’ve decided to stay the course with what I’d planned, hoping it will all even out and that my current feeling of misprioritization will prove wrong once other aspects of my plan for the year progress. Perhaps I had something in mind in December that I’ve forgotten about now that we’ve arrived in early May. Maybe it will all make sense soon, what I’d thought and why I’d planned as I’d planned back then.

I know, I know: These month-in-review posts, many of them, feel vaguely put and mysteriously worded. I don’t yet want to provide the full picture of in-development efforts to the world, even if I do acknowledge that few people other than my closest family and friends read these monthly postmortems. These little marking stones serve mainly to remind me, on review as the year progresses and as future years pass, of where I stood in the year according to plan each month. (They help with a little public-seeming accountability, too.)