On 1 January 2024, I set myself 4 goals for the year ahead.
I wanted to:
- Read more
- Share more
- Save some money
- Close my activity rings
Well, it’s New Year’s Eve and this year I’ve exceeded two of the goals I set myself, mostly completed a third, and had a fair crack at the fourth.
1. Read more
I wanted to read a book a month this year and, I didn’t! But I have read 4 interesting books and I’m part way through the 2 more.
I am nowhere near having achieved the goal, but for someone who doesn’t really do reading for pleasure this is a pretty big achievement for me!
2. Share more
I wanted to own my own content this year and do more blogging directly on my own website. I set myself a goal to share something on my website, on average, at least once a week.
I built new post formats directly into the website – notes, lists, music, games, replies, reposts, weeknotes, and ‘now’ posts – all in service of sharing more here, and not elsewhere, and wilding my online garden. Whether anyone was reading them or not was irrelevant. What I wanted was a greater repository of my basket-case of a brain on the web. I wanted to become the Chief Librarian of Me.
I achieved my goal, and then some. Including this post, I’ve posted 64 pieces of content this year that might loosely be defined as ‘blog posts’.
I like this new approach to me being on the web; and now it’s more of a habit, I suspect I’ll keep it up!
3. Save some money.
This is a long running, repeated goal. This year I aimed to save five-grand, and I exceeded that target.
I have, however, realised I’m doing it wrong. I should be pumping money into my mortgage, not putting money into savings accounts. The interest payments on my mortgage dwarfs anything I can get in savings accounts, and I am kicking myself for not realising that two years ago. In my defence, I’ve been putting aside money for so long whilst renting that I never even thought about the mortgage itself being a savings account.
Next year, I will reorient the goal!
4. Close my activity rings
My final goal is the same as it was last year; to complete the activity rings on my Apple Watch each day, as a crude measure of remaining active. That means I had to:
- Move to burn for 500 ‘active’ calories each day
- Exercise for 30 minutes each day
- Stand for 1 minute every hour for 12 hours each day
I am promising I have not made this up, buy I have completed 666 activity rings this year – or 75% of the target. Which, is close enough to the 80% threshold for calling it the goal “complete” that I’m not salty about it.
I call that success!
I set myself 4 goals, and – following my own arbitrary rules for how I calculate success – I have achieved 77% of what I set out to achieve. That sounds like a pretty good 2024 to me. Onwards to 2025!
You can see my progress with this year’s goals by visiting my goals dashboard.