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I had aspirations of becoming a manager or a VP or a chief design officer and lead teams. And then this year showed me that what I'm most happy doing is design. I'm the happiest when I'm crafting solutions, when I'm playing around with problems, when I take a problem and run with it and try to solve it. So that's what brings me the most joy. So why would I follow a, let's say, traditional success path?
Like, here's what you should be doing to be a recognized UX designer. Because in the end, we all know by now, it's not about titles. It's not about ladders. It's just about how your everyday looks like. And if you enjoy it.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the next episode of Honest UX Talks. Today will be a very interesting episode. You can maybe already have a spoiler alert from my voice and probably Ioana's voice. It's kind of the end of the year episode, and we're not feeling great, both of us. In fact, it's the third attempt to make a recording of this end of year recap episode. But yes, it was not an easy time. I feel like every end of the year, even though we are celebrating with a lot of Christmas sweaters, which I am in at the moment, it always comes with its challenges.
So yes, I'm a little bit sick. Ioana had a hard time right now. She'll talk about it in a moment. But yes, today we want to just to talk about this past year, think about it, how it went, reflect just a little bit. It's our already third year tradition. It's hard to believe, but this is the third time we're doing it. We started this podcast in the September of 2020, even though we published it first in the January 2021. But no, we're actually doing it already for two years and it's pretty crazy. And I feel like that's a great tradition to keep up.
But yes, we don't have a sponsor today, so we can just talk about how was your last week and then jump right into it. So Ivana, how was your last week? Hi everyone, and yeah, thanks for tuning in. I think that earlier I was thinking that this is going to be the very honest UX talk episode because it's very honest. Yeah, I'm sick as well. Anfisa, she's sick. We're both sick, but I also had a very rough night. My daughter has just turned two recently, some of you might know, and we're both sick.
We're in the terrible two stage where everything is very difficult. Nothing is right. She wants one thing in this second and in the next second, she wants a completely different thing. And so you can never make her happy. And she's sleeping poorly. So last night I was awake for many hours. That's the current situation, the very honest situation I'm currently sharing my insights from. To answer your easier to answer question about the past week, the past year is paralyzing to think about what happened over...
But for the past week, I can definitely answer. As our friends of the show know very well, I'm very passionate about my project at UiPath right now. So I'm putting in a lot of effort and heart and enthusiasm and I'm learning and there's a lot of AI involved. And I was working with GPT before it was cool.
So it's fun to see that now everybody's talking about chat GBD, but I started exploring it and we're understanding how we can unpack it in our product before all the frenzy started when it was still just a playground on OpenAI's website. Yeah, that's what I've been doing. A lot of work. I feel I'm a bit inefficient somehow. I
I always feel like I want to do more and I never get to do all the things I want. I think it's something that we're all experiencing, but it feels more intense towards the end of the year because I think we're also very tired, most of us. And maybe some people are just crawling towards the holiday and getting some time off. I'm one of those people. So that's my week in a nutshell. How about yours? How was it?
Oh, for you. I think my week was a bit better, but still like not less hectic, let me say so at least. I mean, actually, I didn't talk about it for a while, but I don't know why. The big part of my life today is the home reconstruction that we're about to finish, but it's the freaking biggest project of my life ever. I don't even overestimate it. It takes all my energy, all my free time, all my thinking, like in the middle of the night, 3am, I wake up like, I need to do X, Y, Z thing, and then another thing, and then another thing. A little
literally at 3 a.m. in the morning, I go to the bathroom to make a list of the things I have to do tomorrow. And then I wake up and I have another three things I don't have to forget about. So it's pretty, pretty crazy in terms of how intense it is to do the home renovation project together with a full-time job, together with some other personal things in life. It's just very intense, to be honest. I don't know why I didn't speak about it for a while, but long story short, we're actually supposed to finish our home renovation project the
by the end of this week, basically by December 19th, because we are moving out of the apartment we are renting for now. And if we don't finish our home renovation project, we are basically out of roof. And so that's why it's very intense. It's basically a domino effect sort of story when if you don't order something in time, if it's not going to be delivered, especially from abroad, you will not be making something on time. So then you will not be able to make something that comes next after that. For example, if you
Don't paint your walls. You can't put the pockets. If you don't put the pockets, you can't put the kitchen. You can't put X, Y, Z and stuff like that. And we're literally every day experiencing something that could go wrong. And every day it's like a very on-spot critical problem-solving exercise 10 times a day. Every day I have a lot of stakeholders to talk to, manage a lot of parcels, questions. Something goes wrong. Something doesn't work. It's just really crazy. So I have nightmares right now, but we must finish it until the end of this week.
Otherwise, literally, we're out of roof. So that takes like literally 50% of my time. And I'm trying to focus on work, but it's pretty hard, especially if you have like every 10 minutes, somebody's calling you and asking you to resolve another big problem. I think you resonate with that. So building a house, being built in a compound, but we're working with our architect right now. And I think she hates us by this.
point because we're absolutely busy, myself and my husband, and we can't even communicate between ourselves. So we have this WhatsApp group where we need to make. And then he has a perspective. I have a different perspective and we're wasting a lot of time because sometimes he's okay with it. And then I come back later after five, four days. Oh no, I'm not okay with it. Let's do it that way. And so it's just a continuous friction. And maybe you don't have a tough deadline that if you don't decide today, you will not be moving in.
I think definitely we will need more structure. Like I need to apply the UX process to this home renovation. And it's not renovation. It's just a home from scratch. But I have to apply the UX process because things are really getting out of hand. I have this impulse of telling her, no, look, we can have a notion space where we can document everything and you can tag us and give us deadlines.
But then I don't want to overcomplicate her process. Maybe it's simplifying her process. So we'll see. But it's a challenge, definitely. And I thought it's going to be so much fun because in the past, when we moved into the current apartment we live in, we didn't have an interior designer. I thought that all the suffering that came with furniture decisions and everything was because we didn't have this person to help us with, to make things easy for us. But now we have the person and it's still hard.
It's still very exhausting. So I can't even imagine building a house. I mean, we do the full on renovation. We basically didn't keep anything and we destroyed the walls and moved rooms and stuff like that. So it was pretty hard on, but I can't imagine at this point doing the house because I'm living right now in a house and like,
I don't enjoy it so much as much as I suffer from just the flat renovation. Maybe at some point, maybe 10 years from now, I'll be like, yeah, I'm at the stage. I'm ready. But not yet. I'm like, even if, let's say I have two children tomorrow and we don't fit in the flat, I would be like, we can still live. We can figure it out. We can have like this furniture that changes the shape. I would rather not do this again for a while now. It's pretty...
It's a pretty crazy project, but still, it's great to hear that you're at least moving with your house construction project. All right, I guess it's a good venue into our episode. The name of the episode today is Lessons Learned in 2022. It was a very busy, very crazy year in many, many aspects of life. And I think we just have to dive right into it. So I would like to start from a simple question, actually. What has changed in your life? If you can maybe reflect or remember what is different today versus, you know, December 2021.
I'm gonna start by saying how I set out, how I started in 2022 wanting to be different. So I remember clearly that in our last reflection from last Christmas, I was very keen or drawn towards the words clarity and
focus. And I know that I was talking about it a lot. And I felt that that was what was missing in my life, being more decisive, of course, having clarity and focus. That's exactly what was missing. And that's what I aimed to sort of fix or address or play with in 2022, the concept of clarity and structure.
And I feel that for most parts, I succeeded with that goal. So I feel that now I have the clarity. Of course, not completely. There's still a lot of novelty. There are still new things that I don't understand. If I like, I don't like. Do I want to do this? Do I want to do that? Do I want to explore these opportunities? So there's a lot of unknown, of course. Luckily, I don't want to know everything about me yet.
But I feel that I have much better clarity and much more focus. For example, right now, I understand that what's very important in my professional life is that I focus on my full-time job at UiPath because I'm passionate about working in big teams. I'm really passionate about making products for a lot of people and especially working in...
Let's say RPA isn't still an emergent industry, but it's quite new in the landscape of industries you can work in. So I feel like I'm setting standards for some products that are built for the first time, if you think about it. So that's very, very exciting. And I want to focus on that. I want to focus on my craft.
I feel that even in terms of my career ladder, I had aspirations of becoming a manager or a VP or whatever, and just be this chief design officer and lead teams. And then this year showed me that what I'm most happy doing is design.
I'm the happiest when I'm crafting solutions, when I'm playing around with problems, when I take a problem and run with it and try to solve it. So that's what brings me the most joy. So why would I follow a, let's say, traditional success path? Like, here's what you should be doing to be a recognized UX designer, be a leader. And I realized that that's not very important.
to me. What's important is that I find work that I love, I'm passionate about and just do it. And that's my everyday because in the end, we all know by now, it's not about titles. It's not about ladders. It's just about how your everyday looks like and if you enjoy it. So what my enjoyable everyday looks like is being an individual contributor that's doing great work and moving the needle and pushing things and building solutions and just working in big
companies this is what makes me happy right so now I have clarity on that because in the past I had so many options I still have a lot of options but now I know which ones I want but in the past I didn't even know what I want so it was very paralyzing in a way or overwhelming so that changed and it's very important and it's liberating right I feel like a weight has been lifted now I know what I want to do and it feels great but then also this came with some difficult choices that I had to make
And that was the downside of having clarity. When you have clarity or when you know you want something, you also understand what you don't want.
So and then that's the tricky part. When you realize that something's not good for you or something's not exactly what sort of maximizes your joy in your everyday life, then you have to let it go. And it's hard because it could be something that you put a lot of time in, a lot of heart in, a lot of energy. There's this, let's say, loss aversion. There's the sunken cost fallacy. There are all sorts of psychological mechanisms that prevent you from
freely moving from one project or even one relationship if you want to another right so it's the same in your personal life sometimes you realize that a relationship isn't working for you anymore but it's hard to leave it right because you've put so much energy and
I've learned that clarity also brings pain in a way because it sort of sets some boundaries that are very tough to respect then. But you want to respect. I mean, you organically go towards what you want. But that means leaving, shedding some of your layers, right? Leaving some things behind. And choice is suffering is one of my mantras for this year. I realized that making choices means losing something all the time. And that's fine. And I think you should embrace this because you also win something. So always
hopefully you win more than you lose with every choice you make, but you will always be losing something. And I've learned to accept that because I'm a person that has a lot of FOMO. I want everything. I want to be that and that. I want all the scenarios look interesting. Everything is sexy in the world. I want to do everything. I want to try everything. I want to be everywhere. And 2022 showed me that I can't be everywhere. And it's,
It's not efficient to be everywhere. And I don't have to be everywhere. I will be losing some things and that's fine because I will win other things. And that was the main, let's say, dynamic in my life. And I'll wait when we get to the 2023 part to talk about what I currently feel is most important.
I can talk for three hours, four hours, four weeks, I guess, about what happened this year. It was very deep for me. But I'm curious to hear what changed for you or what was most interesting or most important. How was your year? Well, that was very deep. And I really love how you already kind of shed light on some of the learnings you did this year. It's really cool. I didn't even get into that part of reflection and understanding what happened this year to that extent, at least. But I am very happy that you found clarity because I do remember only like
maybe two months ago or so, you mentioned that, oh, I don't feel any clarity. I feel totally lost. And then you started the job that you had a break from. You suddenly have it back. And I'm so happy that it helped. It's really great to hear. And yeah, and I totally also feel you with the choices of suffering because it's the same for me. But I think maybe I had this kind of insight also last year when I was also typically jumping right on everything. Every opportunity was exciting. I was always like super interested in everything.
I don't know how, but like naturally I felt like I don't have energy anymore, I guess, to do everything. So I had to make choices. And it was also in a way painful, not too painful, but it definitely had consequences on how I perceive things. But yeah, high five there. I guess we have some things in common. Anyways, my last year or my current year,
last year, almost 2022, definitely had some changes in life. And I feel like this is probably the most different year I've experienced in the last 10 years. So it's hard to even say where to start from, because I feel like most of the years last 10
years, I was really focused on job, on like developing my career. I was really focused on being a better designer. I was so passionate. I just, that was everything in my mind. I mean, I was a designer literally for the last 10 years. I started in 2012 and literally from that moment on, I just couldn't stop. It was like my biggest passion. Nothing was as important as work. And I was so excited about my work even last year in December. This year, looking back, I don't feel
the same passion, to be very honest. It sounds bittersweet, I guess, because, wow, suddenly, did you just lose the passion? No, but it transformed. And it's much, much deeper right now. I mean, when you're going through the beginning of the career, let's call it that first decade of the career, you have all those ups and downs. It's more emotional. It's a roller coaster when you're
understanding who you are, what you like, and how it's going, and your strengths, your weaknesses. And it's a lot of nerves. You're thinking you're not good enough, but then you're thinking it's great, and you do some first achievements, and you celebrate them. I think it's like with everything in life. When it's fresh, when it's new, you always feel more emotional about things. And now looking back, and I don't feel like I'm old yet, but...
I just feel not as excited. I feel I have a perspective and that was a team last year, I believe. But this year I just realized it's so much stronger. I know who I am. I know what I do well. I know what I can do. I know what I don't want to do. And I can always argument things. And I can always, even in hard moments, which I did experience this year, I could formulate and not just feel some way and not being able to express it, but I can formulate it much better and better.
be more rational. And so because I've added this rationalism aspect into how I perceive my work and my life, it became not as emotional, naturally. Anyways, that was a little bit of the sentimental intro. But practically, this year started very different because for the first time, I didn't have a job. In the end of 2021, I was laid off, which
which was another big theme of this year, I guess. I was laid off from my previous job at Citrix because, yeah, they also had some issues. It was financial planning. They have been very much on the wave in the beginning of COVID. And then by the end of the COVID, there were some problems and promises were not fulfilled. And so basically they just had issues, crisis. And they had to get re-evoked
couple of offices and my office was one of them in Prague. And so I started this year without having any job, which was very different. I was almost one month looking for a job already by that point. And I think around end of the December, I accepted the job offer. The beginning of the year, I was already at calm. I knew which job I'm going to start. I had two months to be sort of on a sabbatical. I was enjoying it. I was traveling a lot. I was more
impulsive like hey let's go into that trip tomorrow okay let's do it I was suddenly again like a student who can just jump into things immediately without double thinking it without planning without stressing and stuff like that so that was really nice but at the same time I just did not even beginning of the year the theme I just mentioned was like not feeling as excited I immediately realized that I'm not missing my job like I don't miss designing right now which was very different I guess I
I didn't feel like I need to jump and do something and improve myself. I did a few videos, but it was not, again, like as ignited. Because like a few years ago, I could wake up in the morning and like, oh, I want to shoot the video. Oh, I want to make a post. Oh, I want to make a design. It was not the same. I was like, I have to do a video. So that was a big change in the beginning of this year. And I just felt like I'm missing some sort of a passion or a purpose. I wanted to do things that I kind of promised in the end of the year.
Last year that I'm going to do the new course or a new book, promised you things and I knew I want to do them. Not as passionate, I guess, anymore. And I was not driven by it.
Somehow I ended up not even doing it this year. So in the beginning of this year, I thought like, okay, let's do sabbatical. Let's take time off. Let me make myself missing this work, missing content creation, missing, you know, designing. And I gave myself that free time for two months. I just did little thing here and there. I did my portfolio. I did a few videos, but it wasn't super focused on like many things at the same time. And while I was still like trying to understand what's happening with my career, war has started in Ukraine. Yeah.
Some of you know I'm Ukrainian, so that changed completely everything. It's hard to reflect right now. I'm still processing it. It's still happening every day. It's very, very hard to make lessons out of it. But I think, long story short, if I try to explain it, it was very...
as stressful as it gets. I think in the first two, three weeks, I lost like five kilograms. It was really crazy. You don't sleep, you don't eat, you don't understand what's happening. Your family is in Ukraine, your sister is stuck at the border for like 44 or five hours. It's winter, it's February, she's with cats, with only a few luggages, in the crowd, nothing to eat, long time being stuck literally outside. And it's just like a lot of stressful moments. You don't understand what's going to happen.
Actually, at the beginning of March, where the war just started, I was supposed to start the new job. So it was a very, very, very hectic period. And I ended up not starting the job on the 1st of March. I ended up moving it for one week just to kind of get myself through the census. And then it was also a very interesting rollercoaster starting the new job together with the war being still a very, very early stage on.
I remember watching videos, onboarding videos about hospitality industry and thinking, what am I doing here? Literally people dropping all their lives and questioning their jobs right now and thinking, you know, let's say if you're a singer, singing doesn't make sense anymore in this world. Why should a singer should go and like protect the country and stuff like that? And you're sitting here watching those hospitality videos. What am I doing here?
So that felt very weird, very weird. But I think maybe one month in, I started giving myself more and more open mind opportunities and I started focusing on job and sort of slowly, slowly, slowly in one month, I got into it and I got more
more interested in things. But not gonna lie, it still impacted me and still impacted my work and still impacted how I work. It changed, the roots really changed all my values and priorities in life. And I realized how my job is not as important as so many other things in life. I ignored it for a while, for like 10 years.
I didn't know history as well. I didn't pay attention to important signals in life. I didn't pay attention to maybe social life even in the needed amount. And so, yeah, this year changed, the world changed completely my perspective, which I'm going to talk about in the next question. And then, yeah, towards the end of the year, I started feeling like I do need to have some change in life. I don't feel as excited about my next career move. I'm
good and happy at my job at the moment, even though we have some turbulence I mentioned. But I do need some change and I'm not going to tell everything just yet, but this parallel world, something will change next year. Okay, let's stop here and let's maybe talk about our actual lessons, the key question of this day episode. So Ioana, what do you think will be your key lessons from this year? Paralyzing question. Yes. Okay. Let's start slow.
Based on what you said already. So clearly one of the lessons I've learned is that choice comes with suffering and I accept that. And I have a lot more courage in making choices and going on a path that might mean that it closes some doors and maybe it's not the best path.
to go on, but it's my best bet at that moment in time. And I trust myself and I'm going to do it. This is one thing. So just trusting yourself more. And I feel that as we grow older, this becomes stronger. So I feel that I'm not there yet. Right. The proverbial there. I'm still learning to trust my intuition, my decision system. And yeah. And myself. Yeah. That's the key lesson.
trusting yourself. It sounds very broad and abstract, but it's very, very tangible, actually. Then another thing that I've learned is that you can't be everywhere at the same time and be effective. So I've learned that, like, I sort of had an intuition about in last year's conversation, focus and clarity are key to being successful in one aspect or another. So I
I've sort of given up on the fantasy that I'm going to be able to do everything, explore the world, be in this and that and everywhere and work in agencies and startups and big companies. And at the same time, and just have my own company, be an entrepreneur, have a school, have a course, have a...
the social media presence on 10 different channels and everything. And so at some point this year, I felt like, oh my God, I'm not growing on TikTok. I need TikTok. Brands are all about TikTok now. And so I felt this like nagging voice in my mind telling me you need to focus on TikTok. And now I really don't care about TikTok.
I don't care about TikTok. I don't care about Twitter. These are platforms that don't resonate with me and that's fine. And I really don't need to be everywhere. I need to be in myself and that's the only place that matters. And so I've also kind of tuned out a little from the social media kind of stress and pressure and everything. And now it's a lot more fun. So now I do as much as I
can, when I'm in the mood for it. I have some brilliant collaborations that I'm very happy of, and it's just great to work with Hot Jar. They're amazing as people above anything else. And I'm also, I think they have a great product, so it feels very authentic and it's really bringing me joy. So even the social media thing, which can be for some people, or I guess for most people that spend a lot of time on social media, there are those
let's say dark effect or downsides or right mental health issues that might emerge i don't have the reach as good as i used to have it i'm not being as successful as i want to be not getting enough likes or whatever people don't like my content i suck
but I don't feel that anymore. I'm just, I accept that some things I can control like the Instagram's algorithm and that's fine, whatever. And then I realized that at the end of the day, everything I'm doing, I'm doing because I believe in it. I mean, I think it's an interesting piece of content. I think I had an interesting thought and I want to share it with the world. I think I love this collaboration, this product, and I want to bring it forward to my audience. And so if you base everything in authenticity, then you're,
all the noise becomes less powerful around you. So I think it comes back to trusting yourself. And to trust yourself, you need to listen to yourself. So another thing that I'm practicing a lot now is listening to what's going on in my head. Although sometimes the thoughts I have are not my thoughts. So they're the thoughts of society, my mom, my dad, I don't know.
who LinkedIn gurus, right? So sometimes they're not my thoughts, but I've learned to even recognize this is my thought. It feels authentic. And this thought, I don't know. I think I kind of got it from somewhere like the pressure to become a millionaire and be super successful and make all the money in the world, make as much money as possible. So sometimes I felt this pressure as well. I need to make money.
And now I realize that as long as I can afford a good life for my daughter and my family, that's it. I don't need to have 10 millions. I don't need that. I mean, of course, why not? But it's not going to be my life purpose. I'm not going to obsess over that. I'm not going to give up on things to do that. So again, this is just an example of a voice that wasn't my own. And I managed to like get rid of it.
So right now it feels like I'm navigating this interior place of authenticity where I'm starting to understand. I feel like I'm just scratching the surface of being authentic. So I'm starting to understand what makes me personally happy with maybe it's not this traditional recipe for success. And I do realize that it's a bit weird to say that because I have a lot of followers. I'm in a startup. I'm also in a big company. I've also had my school. I've had courses. I've had things. So
So yeah, it feels like what do you mean not the traditional recipe of success, then what is it? But it feels like I've been experimenting a lot. But just some of the things that I've been playing around with bring me joy. And I'm learning to recognize those things, right? So I think that's it. The last lesson would be listening to yourself experimenting, because I think the purpose of life and maybe this is a good thing to end my monologue on the purpose of life is self discovery. So it's just
getting to know yourself. That's all there is out there. Just building the best relationship you can with yourself because the outside world you can't control. You can do your best, but you can't control. So what matters is how you feel on the inside. So that's what I've been doing for the past year and for the past 10 years, I think, but in the past year with more clarity. And yeah, what were your lessons? Wow, this is really cool. I mean, I don't even have those lessons to be very honest.
like it is this podcast about all. But it resonated a lot with your point on authenticity. I really felt the same way, I guess. And I think it also reflected in the activities I was picking up and priorities I was setting for myself this year. I still started this year planning to do content and...
do as much as I can with. I think in the end of the last year, I said like, I finally figured out not to say algorithm, but the planning and the structuring and being at peace of mind that yes, I have content planned for the next month and it's kind of running and I kind of figured out the balance there. But I started again this year, not having a passion around that. And I had the content already for like three months in March. And then, you know, because of the war that started, I just like
This content suddenly doesn't make any more sense. Just don't need it anymore. It just feels weird. We ended up postponing it one month in. So I started posting again only like in April or something. And it felt weird. I just, I posted it and I didn't care, which was very, very weird.
And I still post it. I still try to push it because it was like the legacy of me. This is what I'm doing. This is a part of my personality. This is what I'm known for, right? I think in spring, to just distract myself, I still was pretty active at posting. I still did videos on YouTube. I still did email list, which was actually a must.
exciting part of things because I had a lot of new things to figure out. And then in the Instagram, it was more like I have to. And I posted things there for maybe like five months this year. And then in July, I suddenly feel like it just doesn't work. I don't need it.
It feels weird for me to post something I don't feel excited, not interested in. For a while, right? Because I was doing this Instagram thing from 2016, which is now what? It's like, it sounds forever already. It's like six years or so. Yeah, like...
I thought, okay, I have to keep doing this, but then I don't have passion. And I always felt like a battle within myself that I can't stop it. You know, people know me for it. It's part of my identity. It's kind of dropping my identity. I just can't. And then in July, I'm like, let's stop it. I don't need it. Even if the world goes down and my identity is broken, I don't care anymore. And I stopped and literally nothing has changed. I was still happy as much as I could. I mean, this
here and I didn't feel any consequences. I felt pretty fulfilled, I guess, because other things became more important in life. And so, like you said, like authenticity, it's like recognizing what's important for you right now. What is a part of your identity? Is it still you or you're kind of pushing, dragging yourself?
trying to fit this persona you have created around yourself or you're not and it was a little bit of a battle because for example at my work people still knew me for that and like the new director is joining and like getting to know me and learning that my direct manager right now at work is learning for example that oh you do this content great you'll be great fit for like gross and like ux culture promoter you'll maybe do some activities around that and i feel like
oh shit, again, like this is me trying to fit in this persona, which I'm not feeling like anymore. I'm like this slave of my persona sort of. And I had to first figure it out for myself and only then being able to articulate this. And that's the thing I mentioned already in the beginning that I had to articulate how I differ today and be authentic and be able to explain this to people. First of all, who's who at work and then suddenly to the audience that might still expect something from me.
you. But long story short, like you said, Iona, I feel like it's very important to recognize who are you? How do you feel? Like what's important for you? And drop things that do not matter. Like, and so I ended up dropping a lot of things this year, especially around the content creation. I didn't end up dropping the podcast.
recording because honestly it still gives me joy and I feel like every time we talk we unpack interesting things and I feel recharged after it which I don't feel after many other things but yeah this podcast actually is a great place to reflect and that's something that I feel like is a very important puzzle in everybody's life
But yeah, content creation just somehow dropped. And even though maybe middle of the year, I still plan to do a new course. I was like, yeah, I'm going to do this research. It's called Into UX Jobs. I'm going to do content creation around that. I will focus on the course. Honestly, in the beginning, it was my justification for dropping the Instagram course.
And I actually did the research and actually have a lot of cool content already out there, but I'm still not passionate to wrap it and focus on it and do it as my big crazy project. Like I did it three years ago was the first course into UX design. And back then I was so passionate. I couldn't sleep. It was all I was thinking about. It's like, literally I was waking up with that. Now I don't. And I didn't,
Limbo and trying to understand if courses is something I still want to pursue next year. I'll still try to reflect and maybe figure out that it's not for me right now. Maybe I need to focus on other things. So I'm sorry, guys, if somebody was expecting this course already, but I don't know if it will be published anytime soon. If I will find energy and interest in this, I'll probably do this around
spring, if not, then probably next year. We will see how far it goes. Or maybe it will not be any relevant anymore. We will see. Maybe it just was all in vain. Who knows? But the authenticity, I agree with you, Ioana. It was very important. And it's recognizing what you like. And if you don't like what you do, you don't end up doing a great job. So I think it's also an important factor to keep in mind.
And other things which I do mentioned already was the war starting in Ukraine. It's the priorities and how important life it is also in the life of a designer that pushing pixels and I don't know, preaching workshop. It's not the only thing in life. For me this year, I started being much more interested in really like the ecosystem, like the life, the systems, the world, people thinking. In the past, if somebody tells me something stupid, I didn't care much. I was like, oh, that's their education. They don't care. Okay.
This year, I was so much more sensitive towards things in social media and how people express their opinions. I started reading more. I started diving deeper. I started reading much more books actually this year. And suddenly, world became a different place to me. I like this theme. I want to
keep doing it. I want to focus on other aspects of life and more psychology and more sociology and more politics. And I'm not saying that I'm interested in politics. I think it's crucial for us because every single thing that happens today, right now in life, will affect your tomorrow, will affect your family, will affect your mental well-being and literally even your work and economic and everything.
so important to be proactive in life and not just focus on your little bubble and keep what you're doing great. It's important to keep what you're doing great, but that's not the only thing in the world. And I just got to realize that he's here, unfortunately. And I feel like it's a miss on my side. It's a miss on many people's side. We Ukrainians, I'm Ukrainian. I didn't pay attention to a lot of important signals. And unfortunately, that's the report you saw, I guess. So in a way, it's something that we missed. And we didn't protect our boundaries strong enough in the
past to foresee things that are happening today. I had to drop speaking Russian language. It was first language of mine for like, I don't know, 10, 15 years because I'm bilingual. For me, Ukrainian was a very strong language. When I was still living in Ukraine, then I started living abroad and Russian was more international. So I started speaking Russian. This year I had to drop it
completely and language is a strong part of your identity. It changes a lot how you think. And right now, I think for the last maybe five, six months, actually, even from March, I started speaking Ukrainian, but only like full on. I started speaking like from summer. It's definitely also work that you had to do. And again, priorities is the key, understanding your values, understanding what is authentic to you, what's important to you and seeing the world beyond your bubble. It's probably the key lesson I've learned this year.
And I'm sorry if it's not super design related, if that's what you came here for. It's not that we learned some new, I don't know, design systems, new design things, new tricks, new lessons. No, unfortunately not. It was a very different year from others. But it doesn't mean that it affects us in a negative way in terms of being designers. I feel like if you're a great human, if you're thinking about bigger picture, you're also becoming a much better designer. And I do hope it will be reflected in our podcast content as well. Yeah.
All right, that would be it. And maybe to wrap this podcast or this particular episode, let's maybe mention a few of the achievements of this year. So we leave it on a positive note. Yeah, let's do that quickly. I was also thinking that this has nothing to do with design, but at the same time, it has everything to do with design because design
before being designers were people, were human. I think you can't be a good designer if you don't have a good relationship with yourself, if you don't know yourself, if you don't listen to yourself, if you're not practicing introspection. So I feel that they seem unrelated, but they're very, very tied.
And my achievements? Well, I launched the Domestika course, which I'm very, very happy for. I didn't think I could pull it through with a small baby and preparing it, going to Madrid to record it for one week. It was quite a push, but that was great. And I've learned a lot. And that's what I'm very happy for. I also launched a startup that I worked on in the legal tech space. And I've helped them build a design foundation and the product and everything and make them successful.
like guided their design decisions and just be a facilitator for good thinking while also doing the mock-ups and everything. So that was very exciting as well. And yeah, I'm just very happy to get back to my work. And I feel that I'm currently working on a product that can really have a huge impact and I want to make that impact happen. And that's my biggest joy now. And
And I don't know what else. I've had a lot of collaborations that I'm very proud of. I've had a lot of conversations that I'm very grateful for. And overall, it's been like the past years, ever since I'm in UX design, they've been great overall because they brought me so much joy. I mean, even the suffering that comes with choice or introspection or like deciding, will I be a UX designer or do I want to be a UX researcher or whatever? These are nice choices to have.
Right. This is a nice pain to go through. So I'm very grateful for that. And just a quick note on 2023, my focus will be balance. So I just want to put that word out there. And then next year, when we have this conversation, see how that worked out for me.
So I'm curious to hear about your achievements this year, what made you happy and yeah, maybe one word for 2023. Oh no, I came unprepared. I don't have a word. Let me see. Let me see. Maybe I will come up with it. There are only a few achievements. Definitely not as celebrational as your list. I feel like your list was really great this year and no idea how you did it with the baby. Really, I still feel very much amazed every time you mention all those new things in your life. But in my case, it was basically starting a new job and...
going through it successfully with all the things that are happening in life. And yeah, just being like rational around things, not being affected mentally and being able to be productive at things. I think that's honestly an achievement because I think many people have been suffering a lot with that. And even actually recognizing that it's a great job and because this year it was not an easy one. I mean, I'm joining Skylab that...
twice this year. We started a year, my company was like 300 people, now it's 660 people. It's doubled. And with every growth comes a lot of risks, a lot of new people, processes, values, companies literally changing every day. And I have been able to witness it. I have been able to go through all the risks and impacts of it. That was turbulent this summer. I even thought of dropping out of my job. I thought maybe it's not the right place for me. I went through a turbulence. And by the end of the year, I'm happy.
recognizing that I'm happy at the moment and I'm okay with my job and I'm feeling engaged with it. I like the product. I like the direction we're taking. I feel like it's changing to the positive side eventually, even though it had a lot of red flags for me and it ended up being okay. And I'm very, very looking forward to the next year for things we are planning to do. So I'm happy at my job and that's an achievement.
And I'm feeling engaged with it, not just like that I have to do work because X, Y, Z priority is waiting. The second achievement is home renovation, which is something I think I was talking here about from the beginning of this podcast for two years. We bought an apartment in the beginning of COVID, so 2020. For two years, we were planning, we were thinking about it, we were negotiating, we were fighting, obviously, and kind of trying to make our mind around how to do this. And we actually planned to do the home renovation project
project last winter and ended up pushing it to the March and March again changed everything. So we only got to start doing our home renovation project in the end of the summer. So the whole autumn plus December, like I already mentioned, was super stressful. It was literally another my full-time job that I had to handle. Don't recommend it to anyone, but I hopefully will be enjoying it in one week.
And yeah, that was definitely an achievement because I didn't expect how stressful it is. Even though we had all the stakeholders, we had the construction project manager, we had help with interior, we had all the planning done, we had ordering done before, it was still a lot of problem solving in a project. And I think it made me a better designer. Yeah.
The last achievement this year, again, it's not something crazy or insane. I mean, I did some nice collaborations. I already forgot about this. I had like a collaboration with Spigma this year, which was really cool. I didn't expect it. And that kind of checked my box in terms of collaboration this year. I was super happy and fulfilled after that. Didn't want to jump into any other collaboration. And I even ended up not even posting anything after that. But what I started was the new email list and a few workshops, you
Again, something I was promising even at this podcast for a while. And it was very exciting to figure out the email list and how it works and talk to people through the longer content, trying to really go in deep on certain topic, writing articles.
And I feel like maybe I did like 10, 15 posts. I can't even remember, but that was really great. And I'm happy that I finally got to do it because I promised it to myself for a while. Plus I conducted two workshops, which were better, but again, finally I did it. I planned it from the last year and next year I'm actually planning to do much more workshops and much more emails. And that's going to be my key focus, of course, after the podcast. So that is it in terms of achievements.
Okay, so I don't know if I have the words for the next year, but I'm going to just say that it will come with a lot of change, I think. We'll see how it goes. I'm planning something pretty radical for my life, so I'll call it a change, but I'm not going to mention many details just yet. And we'll see how it goes. Okay?
Okay. Okay. So on this note, I just want to thank everybody for listening to this conversation that maybe you came here for design, but you got just general life lessons. But I think they're in a way the same. And yeah, I hope we have all of us a
much better year than 2022. It sucked for many people. It was a really bad year, still a tough time. So hopefully 2023, even if it doesn't seem to start very well, hopefully it's going to get better as soon as possible. And we can all forget about pandemics and war and then layoffs and just a horrible crisis. Yeah. So hopefully...
by the end of 2023 we're gonna have conversations about how the world around me is going so great but i don't know what there's something wrong and i feel like you're appreciating things much better after the you know downsides so maybe next year we're talking and we're like whoa this year so much better we're so happy let's acknowledge it and stuff yeah well i'm
On this note, thank you everyone for tuning in. Make sure to send us a message with interesting questions or any kind of questions about UX design or not in particular that we can tackle in our conversations. And very important, we're taking a break because we're talking about balance and recharging and authenticity and finding ourselves. We need to have, I personally need, but I think I speak for Anfisa as well when I say it, I need some time with myself just doing nothing design-related
at least one week per the holidays and then some previous week just to prepare doing nothing and then the week after preparing mentally for having to do something so i'm going to take a short break we're taking a break with the podcast so what we will hear each other in january so until then send us your questions follow on sdx talks on instagram we will be preparing the plan so definitely send it
Yes, yes, yes. And also feel free to give us a review. It makes us happy. And I think that's it. Thank you very much and see you in the next year already. Bye-bye. Bye, everyone.