MS

Hello, I’m Michael Sliwinski, founder of Nozbe - to-do app for business owners and their teams. I write essays, books, work on projects and I podcast for you using #iPadOnly in #NoOffice as I believe that work is not a place you go to, it’s a thing you do. More…

What I’ve learned from my IG #2018bestnine photos

😎Life

Today is the first day of 2019 and I’d like to kick it off with my best 9 Instagram photos of 2018 and what I’ve learned from them:

What I’ve learned from my IG #2018bestnine photos

Selfies still work sometimes… especially with someone :-)

Out of 9 photos, 5 are selfies. Three of them are with someone else - two with my wife and one with a friend who drew an outline of my Infoshare presentation.

The 15th anniversary photo with my wife (top left corner) got more than 100 likes - people wish us well, which is nice :-)

Two other selfies were also important - I completed my 10th olympic-distance triathlon and my home country of Poland celebrated 100th anniversary of independence.

Turns out selfies are popular when they represent something meaningful. A milestone. An important celebration… a deep feeling. Not when you just want to show off how cool you are.

The best nine photos also highlighted the significant themes of my last year, like speaking, sports and travel…

This year I had three significant speaking engagements and the most prominent one was indeed Infoshare (second was mobiconf) and I love the photo at the bottom right corner - looking at this amazing audience which fills out the whole auditorium is always a treat for a speaker.

As for sports, I’m really proud of this shot in the center - of my two biking buddies Nick and Dan climbing our favorite climb to the “red house”, which is an abandoned building in the mountains. The former of them last year completed a climb like this every week. I want to be like him when I grow up :-)

Travel was a vital part of 2018 for me. The shot of my youngest girl in Apple store in England is really cool… and the shot of the 420 park avenue building in the clouds in New York City reminds me of my sabbatical.

It’s really amazing how a few photos can really highlight the theme of last year for you. That’s what they did to me.

68 photos in 2018 vs 97 in 2017

This past year I tried to limit my usage (aka addiction) to Instagram and it worked. I posted 30% fewer photos and I’m hoping to continue down this path by posting maximum 1 photo per week this year, or around 50 photos per year.

I have mixed feelings about Instagram. On one hand it gives me lots of joy and value browsing through the photos… but on the other hand it’s increasingly littered with ads and the parent company of Facebook is an anti-example of a socially responsible company…

So I’m setting some limits for Instagram this year. One photo per week and opening instagram app max one time per day.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed my photos and if you did, make sure to follow me there and let me know how your best nine photos reflect on your last year.

What have you learned? How was the year and do these photos really represent it as much as they did for me?

Tuesday, January 1, 2019 /2018bestnine/