It’s the end of 2024! :mixed-emotions-emoji:
Things have happened and now, all of a sudden, I find myself at the end of the year. Last year, I wrote a blog post detailing habits that I wanted to maintain, expand, or reign in. I also suggested that I might check my progress, but predictably, I haven’t done that until now.
As we’ve heard many times before, it’s very easy to not make any progress if you never check how things are going every now and then, so I’m going to employ one of the extremely secret tools of my highly big-brain profession: the Retrospective. This ancient implement was invented to help course-correct as we undergo dangerous quests of uncertain destination. With this tool in hand, we’ll see how I can improve my New Years’ “resolutions” to more effectively lead myself down the path toward the future me I want to create.
According to benlinders.com, 4 key questions to ask as part of a retrospective are:
I’m going to answer these questions (in relation to my 7 goals from last year), and in the process, hopefully find some takeaways for how I can improve on them in the coming year, and do better on future goals.
I feel much more satisfied with the amount of time I spent with friends and family this year (2024 Goal 1). With everyone closer at hand, I get to see my loved ones a lot more frequently. Next up is actually taking on my stretch-goal of last year to organize more events myself, rather than just waiting for other people to do all the work of making something happen.
I successfully cut back on YouTube (2024 Goal 2) with the help of a side project I created called TubeBouncer (TODO blog post still pending). It limits me to 1 hour of being on YouTube domains per day. The code is nauseating, but it’s kind of fun to be in complete control of a tool I actually use and rely on almost every day.
I did also keep exercising (2024 Goal 6) for most of the year. I put a lot of effort into trying to run Ultimate Frisbee practices over the Summer and Fall. While I’m not happy about the attendance of those practices, I am proud of how consistent and dedicated I was to running them. I was also able to improve my upwind forehand hucks while practicing alone in a field most weeks of the Summer.
I definitely forgot about most of my goals over the course of the year. I managed to make progress on some, simply because they continued to bother me (like wanting to watch less YouTube), but others that involved a positive change in behavior (i.e. adding something, rather than taking something away) got lost in the shuffle.
To stop myself from doing something I’d rather not (i.e. last year’s Watch less YouTube goal), I generally just need to make it a little bit harder to do, not necessarily impossible. TubeBouncer isn’t currently active in incognito tabs (although it would be trivial to give it access), but I’ve found that that tiny extra hurdle of entering incognito mode is enough to prevent me from wandering onto YouTube because I’m bored. Plus, it’s a convenient escape-hatch on the occasion I need to watch a YouTube video for educational reasons, even if I’ve used up my allotted hour for the day.
That said, it can be easy for me to fall out of the frying pan and into the fire. While I successfully watched less YouTube, my anime viewing time on Crunchyroll shot way up. I feel better about watching anime than random junk on YouTube, but there’s still a lot of other things I want to do outside of content consumption.
Goals involving other people require their buy-in as well (who’d have thought?). I had some mixed results with trying to spend time with my partner more intentionally (2024 Goal 3) since they were not always able to put more energy into being social with me. But we did share our calendars so that we can better find intersecting free time in our schedules for dates.
I tend to be more of a follower when I comes to planning/organizing events (undoubtedly because it is easier). This made it harder for me to progress in goals like seeing family and friends more often, and creating family traditions (2024 Goal 7). I need to repeatedly remind myself to be more proactive to make these things happen, rather than assuming I’ll eventually wake up feeling inspired to organize an event.
I fell off my exercise routine a little in the Fall due to a busy vacation and work schedule. I was intending to only take a break for a short while, but with one family activity bleeding into the next vacation into the next big work deadline, I ended up missing about a month of exercise. I realize I need to keep exercising even while I’m away from home. Difficulty sleeping has also complicated maintaining my exercise schedule, since it’s a lot harder to motivate myself to do anything in the morning if I’m still dead-tired (I typically exercise in the morning).
Merely saying “I’d like to do X more often” in my goals didn’t actually achieve anything, since I failed to look back at the blog post for the entire year. I need to setup some kind of reminder for these things to stick with me. I also didn’t end up “making time” for side projects (2024 Goal 4) very often since other, lower effort, activities (like watching ANOTHER entire anime over the course of 3 days) were often easier to start. I need to find a way to level the field of effort required to start an activity so I don’t end up reaching for the mindless ones so quickly.
I’m still having a hecking hard time sleeping (2024 Goal 5). I briefly looked into getting a sleep study done, but those seem to be unexpectedly expensive and require more specialized care than I had envisioned, so it hasn’t happened yet. This is really getting in the way of my other habits (especially exercise), which throws off my whole day and makes it difficult to get anything done at work too. I am very frustrated with how difficult sleeping and breathing have become. I really don’t want to resort to using drugs, since even just children’s melatonin gummies tend to make me sleep worse, even if they help me get to sleep faster. But I may have to if I can’t find some way of regularly getting more sleep soon.
Retrospectives don’t have much point if you don’t record some actions you want to take as a result of the reflection/introspection. So here’s my short bullet list:
Remember, just because something is difficult is no excuse not to try. See y’all in the new year!