Goals

Something to strive for

2024

For the Year

2023

I did not set any goals for 2023, just kinda skipped the year and did things on a whim

2022

2022 list

Review

Firstly, I reached the 50 Platinum trophy mark this year which I’m proud of. Going to slow down now and play games at a slower pace though I’m still going to go for the full completion.

I once again did not create a static site generator, I think at this point I’m just going to carry on improving the site generator that I currently have. I made some changes recently to the routing that mean that make things much easier to read in the code.

Something that I did create this year however was the workshop in the garage. I now have a place to go where I can game and work on projects without cluttering up my bedroom. Having a second room has been amazing for my mental health as well since I’m not stuck in one spot all the time.

For the Year

Weekly

2021

2021 list

Review

This year has been better than the last couple. I took some time to just chill-out, relax and do whatever I wanted. My brain needed a reset after 2020.

I reached 30 Platinum trophies quickly, in March. The game that got me the 30th was Fallout 3: GOTY Edition on PS3. I’d never played through the game fully since I always got bogged down in mods and tweaks on the PC version. The PS3 version may have crashed a lot but it forced me to focus and have good manual save discipline.

Still no static site generator, Retejo is still running on my VPS and serving pages with it’s expressjs back-end. I did start on Alchemist in C but my programming itch has not returned yet so I can’t focus on it. Hopefully next year my mojo will return.

I didn’t manage my blood sugar well this year, I got lazy about it and that may end up hurting me in the long run. I need to be better about my insulin and levels. One thing that helps is the FreeStyle Libre 2 sensor, I paid for them out of pocket from May until September to make sure they were a good fit for me. I was able to get them on the NHS after that and not having to prick my fingers 4+ times a day is amazing. I was getting callouses on my finger tips which made getting the blood for a test harder and harder.

After the second house move I had access to a nature reserve nearby that I could walk our dog, Chloe, on. She loved it and was always excited to go, all I had to do was pick up the lead and she would be at the door waiting. Sadly she passed away in October, she was 11 years and 3 months old exactly.

College has messed me around this year. I started out on a higher level course but apparently nobody realized that I didn’t have the correct qualifications to be on the course so I was moved down a level and now they have no idea what units I need to do. Here’s hoping next year I can get some actual college units completed. At least work is interesting and not too difficult, having done IT support in the past it’s familiar but has more equipment failures than software issues.

For the Year

Monthly

Weekly

2020

2020 list

Review

2020 was a year. I think everyone understands that to the root, global pandemics create a shared moment that people all over the globe can relate to in some way. Especially when they go on for so long. My goals were hampered by several things this year, mainly moving house twice in short succession,being diagnosed with Type-1 Diabetes at 25, having to down size a fair amount and not having my own permanent space for several months.

I didn’t finish ten non-fiction books. I didn’t even complete one hardware project. Alchemist is still an egg in my mind, and until it hatches I don’t want to start making blog posts because that’s just more work to have to port over. I did ride my bike over 10 Km several times but it was no where near weekly. I did not journal any more than 4 times over the year. The motivation for it has evaporated, it will return eventually I’m sure but for now I’m not doing anything worth writing down.

Dealing with a chronic illness is not something I was prepared for, let alone one that requires such a large shift in diet and general upkeep as Diabetes. Having been diagnosed in February, here at the end of the year, I have realized how much I took being a healthy person for granted. I think I was depressed after the diagnosis but with the pandemic lockdown starting the month after I never really noticed since I assumed it was a side effect of spending 6 months indoors.

A few things I did do this year are start an apprenticeship as an aircraft simulation engineer which finally got me out of my old job dealing with angry members of the public every day, play all the way through from the start of Final Fantasy 14 to the middle of it’s first expansion and started trophy hunting on the PlayStation consoles.

2020 List

For the Year

Monthly

Weekly

2019

2019 list

Review

I failed a few of these goals. I’ll get the negatives out of the way first.

The Bad

I haven’t completed a single project this year. Mainly because I had to move house suddenly partway through the year which messed up my rhythm for the rest of it. This is also why I failed to work on a project most weeks for the weekly goal. In retrospect completing eight projects I didn’t have outlines for at the start of the year was untenable. I’ll reduce that for next year and work my way up.

Writing in my journal was a daily thing that started in Sept 2018 and I kept it up for over one hundred days. After that streak I felt burnt out and since then I have written…nine entries. Not even weekly, most of them are months apart and have half remembered information in them. Next year I would like to go back to writing daily or at least weekly.

The Good

I have reduced my meat intake significantly this year, until this year nine out of ten meals I ate contained meat, now it’s more like one in ten. My diet has improved a lot because I’m thinking about what I’m eating now.

I ‘read’ 30 books this year. Most of them were audio books and science fiction which I will mix up with more non-fiction in 2020.

I’ve hit my exercise goal of thirty minutes on average two times a week this year which I’m proud of. Next year I’d like to do more cycling.

2019 List

For the year

Monthly

Weekly