Annual Review 2023

Preliminary Remarks

I find it valuable to do an annual review. I've been doing it for the past 3-4 years or so. This year I decided to do it publicly.

Before I begin, a few remarks are in order.

The first one goes to my philosophy of thinking about results. I like setting goals and tracking them. However, I treat them as directions for my activity rather than hard-core start and stop containers for results. I also put significantly more emphasis on the process than the outcome, because the process is what makes it sustainable.

A corollary of it is that I don't set New Year's resolutions. I find them too artificial. The fact that you are supposed to forcefully start them just because a calendar turned a page doesn't work for me. I set goal when I feel that an area of my life would benefit from it, and I plan outcomes but accept the reality of most goals taking longer than expected to complete.

Second, my philosophy of goal-setting and goal-achieving is best described as 'slow burn, not heavy lift'. This means that I layer multiple goals on top of each other and I work on multiple projects in parallel.

I mention this because a lot of productivity authors advocate for choosing just one or two projects and pouring all of your energy into them, and I do use this methodology for short-term sprints. For instance, if I am under a lot of pressure working to meet a deadline, I'll opt for having a singular focus. However, this has never worked for me on a long-term basis, and I consider this a recipe for burnout.

Instead, I prefer alternating among multiple projects. This not only allows me to keep deriving pleasure from all of them (one of the reasons I didn't tire working on my PhD) but feeds into my thinking and makes the crossover insights richer compared to those I get when working on just one project.

This doesn't mean spreading myself thin over 20 projects. But I've found that having 4 to 8 projects at the same time is where I feel the most productive and energized and accomplish more.

Finally, I don't have people depending on me. I mostly work for myself. That frees up are a lot of time. If my results for 2023 seem ambitious to you (they don't to me, but just in case), I think it's quite helpful to keep in mind your personal circumstances that required your attention and prevented you from working on the projects that you planned you would.

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Among the most significant things that happened in 2023:

• I finalized the EUI thesis. It has yet to go through the formal process of the defense but there is no more substantive work to be done.
• as part of a 12-member team, I submitted of a book on Private International Law in Russia to the publisher to come out in June 2024.
• learned web design in Figma and Webflow at a level that allowed me to build this website from scratch.
• submitted 10 grant applications and secured 4 postdoc offers.
• resolved my immigration status for the nearest future.
• published 88 posts on LinkedIn on topics that are close to my heart.
• started a new relationship. Feels better than all of the previous ones combined.

I will now write about each area of life where I wanted to make progress in more detail.

1. Academic

I wrote about it before on my LinkedIn, so I won't dwell on it too much here. But essentially, 3 very important developments happened over 2023.

- the EUI thesis

I finalized my thesis. By the end of the 3rd year (2022), I had an almost full draft but I rewrote most of it during the 4th year. I had more or less full draft in May 2023 and submitted it in August. In fall 2023, I kept introducing changes and worked with a native English speaker to correct it. I had the final draft ready for submission by the 4th week of December.

- the Private International Law book

I submitted the text of book titled Private International Law in Russia to Hart Publishing on 31 October 2023, written by a team of 12 collaborators.

This is a project that started in 2019, with a different publisher and different people. At the time, I worked on it in the capacity of a contributor. That iteration of the project, however, didn't work out for a number of reasons.

Still, a lot of work had already been done. So I wrote a new book proposal and new sample chapters (with the help of one of the co-authors), assembled a new team, and negotiated with the new publisher. We signed a new contract mid-July 2022.

We delivered the manuscript (12 chapters written and edited by 12 people) on 31 October 2023 and recently agreed on a cover. It's hard to believe it but 4 years later, the project is finally taking a tangible shape! The book is expected to come out in June 2024.

- postdocs

Throughout the year, I continued applying for postdocs (I started in 2022) and managed to secure my nearest future. Got a little bit of the breathing space, which feels really nice.

2. Writing on LinkedIn

This is a passion project of mine, sharing the expertise I've accumulated over the years of applying for scholarships, graduate and postgraduate programs, etc.

This year, I spent 233 hrs writing for LinkedIn and related activities, publishing in total 88 posts. I wish I could spend more time doing it, as this means a lot to me, but I had to prioritize academic projects.

I also published a 70-page guide on funding a master's degree and a selection of my application letters, something I've wanted to do for a while.

I also started working on a guide to writing legal essays for a master of laws (LLM), see Part 1 here.

The vision I have is a library of digital self-paced materials guiding applicants for master of laws and PhD in law programs which I will be realizing in 2024.

3. Web design

I started my first blog 2 years ago, right before Christmas of 2021. At the time, I used a platform called Ghost, based on the recommendation of a YouTuber I followed. That was not a good choice: I quickly maxed out the platform's capacities and wasted a lot of time looking for alternatives.

After my annual subscription expired, I decided to move to Wordpress and use a website template. However, after watching hours and hours of tutorials and tinkering with the platform to make it suit my needs, I realized that using a template was not going to work.

The problem with templates is that the minute you try to adjust it and make it personal, it all goes wrong. You either have to use the template exactly as is, simply replacing titles, text and images, or build the website from scratch.

So I decided to learn web design. I don't have the illusion that a pretty website is a deal-breaker but it was a strong need of mine to have something beautiful and tailor-made, and I decided that I was ok spending the time learning that skill.

I learned traditional web design (ie, html, css, javascript) before by taking courses such as Harvard's CS50, and Colt Steele's and Angela Yu's bootcamps on Udemy. I liked the courses but I didn't like web design. It felt too technical, I got bored quickly, and it didn't address the actual design part of it, ie the elements hierarchy, the choice of fonts and colors, etc, as opposed to the code running it - all the fun.

I decided to use no-code tools instead. I took several courses on Skillshare, including a 20-hour course by Vako Shvili (which turned out to be more like a 100-hour course, given all the exercises), a lot of YouTube videos (eg, Mizko's), and a specialized course on design by Nate Kadlac.

I designed my website from scratch in Figma and then built it in Webflow. I hired a freelancer to do make it responsive for mobile and tablet (very happy to have supported a female web designer from Taiwan who did an absolutely terrific job).

It took me a lot of time to finish the website - I started in May 2023 and was done in September - but I'm really happy with what I have at the moment. Doing this side-by-side my academic projects actually helped me not to burn out, because they were so different. Whenever I was tired of doing web design, I could always switch to academic writing, and vice versa.

As a bonus, this project helped me combine two of my fascinations: love for beauty and functionality.

4. Immigration

I felt unsure about writing this part because I feel like I'll inconvenience a lot of people. I feel like this is a sort of invisible subject, something unspoken of, which is strange given just how ubiquitous it is. Because it's invisible, there is an illusion of it being easy (I remember a colleague at the EUI, at my mention of it, philosophically noted: 'Well, we all are immigrants here'. It was striking to see that she, a holder of a German passport, actually believed her experience was comparable to mine).

Anyway, immigration is the reality of my life, so I'll mention it here.

This year, I moved a lot and changed a lot of documents. Surprisingly for myself, in spite of all the institutional support I had, psychologically these relocations were the toughest so far. I was just so tired of proving for the umpteenth time that I'm human enough to be on this territory that I was ready to give up.

I can't imagine having done it without the support of my favorite people, and I am so grateful for having them in my life.

I feel like if I could have the energy and effort I spent on it back, I could have written a book or created something beautiful. Well, maybe next year;)

5. Relationships

This year marked a new romantic relationship for me. Funny how that works:
my last relationship ended in November 2022. It started 7 years prior, in Berlin (or, to be precise, on a plane Moscow - Berlin), when I was going for a research stay at the Humboldt University.

The new one also started in Berlin, only this time at a bus station (albeit, a very special and unusual bus station).

I seem to show special affection for Berlin and public transport. 😉

This year I've also been appreciating the wonderful females I have in my life and the relationships I've built with them.

6. What didn't work

Among the things that didn't work out this year:

- didn't get the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation postdoc

This is the postdoc I most wanted and the one I worked the most for, spending about 100hrs on the application.

I firmly believe it was the best application I have ever submitted anywhere. For  the first time in my life, though, I feel strong and competent enough to say that I don't think the issue was the quality of my profile or the application. Rather, the foundation had a clear agenda and I didn't fit in. But I guess that's how it works anyway, and the best thing I can do is move on.

- health goals

Initially, I had an outcome goal to get to 52kg and fit into one of my older dresses (I am currently at 56). I know it may seem like a ridiculous to have but the conditioning of the patriarchal society about what women should look like is hard to overcome, and I am not exempt from it.

Anyway, I don't think it was a good goal to begin with. Not just because it didn't come from what I truly wanted for myself but from the goal-setting standpoint itself. It's too superficial and doesn't correlate to the underlying desire to be healthy and feel good in my own body.

For the next year, I decided to reframe my health goals as a set of guiding habits instead of outcomes, among them:

• weekly meal-planning (I already do it, and it gives me a lot of pleasure, but I do it inconsistently)
• weekly preparation of home-made chocolate desserts (I make home-made snickers from time to time but very irregularly, and when I don't, I default to cheap store-bought chocolate)
• daily movement practice (a combination of yoga, afrodance, cardio and weight workouts; I already do all of them but quite inconsistently)
• not watching Netflix while eating (I have this really bad habit, and I'd really like to break it)
• daily meditation habit (I've been doing it for a while in 2021-22 but then stopped and didn't resume in 2023; I'd like to do it more regularly)

- monthly challenges

In the beginning of 2023, I had an idea of making my year more interesting by completing 12 monthly challenges, each aiming at spending 5-15 min on a skill of choice daily. The idea was to have fun and learn something in the process.

I did a month of afrodance and a month of makeup but then stopped. I think I set goals that were too ambitious and put too much emphasis on learning and not enough on having fun. I'll think how to redo it next year.

- a book that I'm writing

I am writing a non-academic book in the style of creative non-fiction. I thought I'd be done with it by this year as I'd already had 40,000 words of a rough draft in 2022. However, I've had so many things to do this year that I decided to postpone it, even more so given that it requires going into trauma and I've dealt with it so much these past years that I wanted to give myself a breathing space. I hope to come back to it later during 2024.

- building a system for implementing new habits

I am really into building new habits and changing my results through them rather than through forced, heavy-lift projects. I've read a ton of literature on the topic and have a note where I keep all the ideas about changing my habits.

What I wanted to do this year was to develop a system for implementing new habits and breaking the old ones that would work for my psychology and my lifestyle regardless of the exact habit I'm working with. But alas, it didn't happen. I didn't have enough resources to direct my attention to it.

- didn't manage to reduce the time i spend on my laptop

I don't have a dependence of my iPhone (I know it sounds unusual but I really don't: my neck gets tired from staring at the small screen very quickly, and I only use the phone for reading on public transport) but I do depend on my laptop. I tried to set limits, eg, finish at a certain time in the evening, but I just couldn't hold myself from doing stuff on it again. Something to work on in 2024.

What Energized Me

This year, things that energized me and brought me joy were:

• conversations with my favorite people
• dance, especially afrodance and contact improvisation
• writing, both academic and personal
• reading
• creating materials for master's and PhD applications
• working with people's background for the admissions essays

What Drained Me

• admin stuff, especially dealing with rejections in issuing papers and getting access to services based on my nationality and long waiting periods
• insecurity concerning access to resources for living
• technical work, like doing the bibliography and footnotes (after doing the 1,500 footnotes for my thesis I felt more exhausted than after 3,5 years of writing the text itself)

Takeaways:

• in some areas of life, the best goal is the habit - like with health.
• it's ok to say 'no' to a project.
• if you have to accomplish something, then by all means do it. but if you can, it's ok to postpone.
• i found that solely focusing on the goals can be limiting to what can actually happen.
• do small things; 10min of yoga is just as valuable; give myself permission to quit anytime.