A less technical post and some light analysis on my 2018 New Year resolutions.
Introduction
I think December of 2017 I came up with a spreadsheet for New Years Resolutions. I’m not going to put all of my resolutions on display because some are decently personal, but I’ve linked the template here. Below, you can see a screenshot of some of my resolutions for 2018.
The template provides some various nice features - like color coding and then automatically generating some basic visualizations.
I’m not really going to talk about that however. This post is going to be (unsurprisingly for me) self centered and talking more about my past year.
Analysis of 2018
This isn’t going to be long. But I thought it was important. I decided I was going to push up a blog post on my year as a way of ensuring accountability - even if it’s just for my own sake, publically listing some of my resolutions and how I did overall will help me internally have a sense of accountability.
I broke my resolutions into a couple of different categories - Physical, Reading, Italian, Extracurricular, Stretch goal, Relationships.
A basic summary of how I did is here.
| Category | Made | In Progress | Missed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physical | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Reading | 3 | 2 | 8 |
| Italian | 8 | 2 | 5 |
| Extracurricular | 55 | 3 | 14 |
| Work | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Stretch goal | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Relationships | 0 | 0 | 2 |
Which really ends up generating the following graph in terms of percentages:
Which to be honest is pretty embarassing. Lot of red there… I need to start reading way more. I think I’ve done a better job towards the end of 2018 but yeah that’s pretty abysmal. Relationships I also tanked. Granted there were only two goals I set in that department and one was kind of a stretch, but pretty disappointed with that. Work I did ok with but it was hard to keep the motivation up. Physical I did well. I was happy with where I ended up. One of them that I missed was run another marathon, but I did a triathlon instead and in my opinion that was a much better decision.
In addition, I didn’t push enough to this blog. I like blogging and I like doing fun coding challenges and projects in my spare time or taking classes. And I really didn’t even give myself enough of a chance to do that. Partially because I was pretty low on time and still trying to adjust.
Take Away
I think that 2018 was a strong year for me. I struggled with adjusting fully to Chicago and the cadence of a working life. However, I do think I started to adapt well - from teaching tennis after work to volunteering the extracurriculars really started to make me feel better about how I was living my life on a day to day basis. Also the time that I spent with my friends in Chicago and exploring the city is time that I wouldn’t give up for anything.
I also have decided that for 2019, I’m going to break my goals up more into quarters and when each quarter of the year ends, I’ll have a day over the weekend where I review the past quarter and can kind of analyze my status. That way I’ll have a better grip over how I’m doing and making sure that I’m still growing and learning at a good pace.
With this post, I’ve pretty much finalized by goals for 2019. I think I’m going to continue the tradition and post a 2019 year in review as well. So count on a similar post next December. Hopefully with a little bit more statistics.