2024 has been a great learning experience. On both personal and professional fronts.

Here is my goal list I made for 2024:

Financial goals went for a toss in 2024

First half of 2024 was good for the finance bucket. But once the Forbes Marketplace bomb dropped, I lost most of my regular income. Combine that with slow marketing since Sept 2023 as I was busy building 24hoursareenough website, and it was a disaster waiting to happen. And it happened.

I had always wanted to build 24HAE and was loving working on it, but six months into it and feels like God said, “hey, how are you taking thing easy peasy, let me make your life difficult.” And so the Forbes Marketplace decision to completely shut down its SMB team. So many people suffered for it, but that’s how capitalism works I guess, and one can’t really complain.

Thankfully, not all was lost.

I am grateful that I started implementing fiscal discipline in my business at the beginning of 2023. And that has helped me remain afloat. (Almost) maintaining the lifestyle my family and I are used to. Primarily because I had 7-8 months of expenses saved.

If you work for yourself, that is absolutely the first thing you must do – have minimum 6-9 months of expenses saved. Heck, in these uncertain times, even if you are a salaried employee, you should have that saved up.

Professionally I learnt a ton

But the financial dip has also given me an opportunity to think deeply about how I was building my business.

I now realise that I cannot be dependent on 1-2 long-term clients only. I need to have a healthy mix of short term clients too. For both financial health and personal flexibility.

So I am now doing what I should have been doing all along – building lead pipelines and being more aggressive than passive about marketing myself. All the while doing client work and satisfying the customers and wowing them with high quality of work. Some say that’s the best kind of brand building 😉.

It has been challenging and scary, but I am starting to get the hang of it. Because I know how the follow ups will snowball after 2-3 months of regular pitching!!

Effective marketing has always been a sore point for me because I tend to go for low-key marketing on LinkedIn. I try to post every day, but then life happens and the regularity goes for a toss. This is what I have done on LinkedIn in 2024, according to Cleve.ai, and I need to pull my socks up for 2025:

My non-digital venture Chaupaal Foods, in partnership with my husband, is expanding and that has been another rollercoaster ride. Because when you take that huge a leap of faith, there is humongous amount of learning on the go. It can get overwhelming at times but we have managed to remain afloat till now. And we hope/plan to be start 2025 with a bang.

Personally it has been a fulfilling year

On the personal front it has been a rollercoaster ride but as they say, all is well that ends well. My daughter has cleared her CLAT exam and in the next month or two, we will know which college she will be going to. The next five years are set, and by that time she will be her own person (and we will be relegated to cheerleader role 😉). Matured and equipped enough to take decisions that steer the next phase of her life. Till now my husband & I have been very hands-on, without actually being helicopter parents, so that would be quite some relief.

Without coming across as smug, I want to say this to all parents of school going kids: as parents our job is to guide them, ask the right questions, excite their minds and provide a positive environment to grow. The rest happens organically. There is lot to say here, especially since I stay in a place that would rank number 1 if we had a list of places having maximum helicopter parents. But that’s a post for another day!

Health is wealth. Is it now?

This winter is treating me better than the previous 5-6 winters, a season when I typically cut back drastically on client work. Not because I could afford to do that but because my health was unpredictable and I didn’t want to commit to deadlines I might not be able to meet.

This September I finally consulted an orthopedic I had been meaning to for the past year. The medicines have provided immense relief and I sleep much better now even without medication. The medicines were on the expensive side, but since I have started prioritising my health above all else, I didn’t think twice about ordering them.

I am sharing this because women all over the world, especially working moms, tend to de-prioritise their health. They don’t have time. They don’t have the budget. Who will take them to the doctor? Because they are humans too and want to be cared for and pampered!

To these working moms, and women in general, here is what I say: nothing else is important at the end of the day if you don’t take care of yourself and don’t value your health. Love yourself first and only then expect others to follow suit.

Learning can happen in multiple ways

For the sake of completion, here is a sample list:

  • Intro to Psychology, Yale University
  • DevOps on AWS
  • ChatGPT 101
  • Storytelling for kids
  • 100DaysofAI – challenge (completed about 55 days)
  • Slow productivity by Cal Newport
  • Day Trading Attention by Gary Vee
  • Hidden Potential by Adam Grant
  • Rethinking – Adam Grant (podcast)
  • Online Marketing – Amy Porterfield (podcast)
  • High-income Business Writing – Ed Gandia (podcast)

I read many more books (and PDFs) than mentioned here and a few more challenges I don’t remember exactly now.

Reframing the past

Besides shilalekh I have two more websites – 24hoursareenough.com and itechcreations.in. itechcreations is my business website and 24hoursareenough is home for all my writings related to positive productivity and self-care for working moms.

When the time came for this year’s roundup I did not know where to post and so I came back to the original – shilalekh.com, where I post about everything that life teaches me.

Shilalekh is where I started my online writing journey in 2012. I might have veered on to other sites – itechcreations, 24hae, LinkedIn, Medium and more, but Shilalekh is now becoming my identity, who I really am inside. Come 2025 and you will read more posts from me here. But more on that in my next post.

How was your 2024?