Auld Lang Syne | Looking back on 2024

A number of people have had terrible years. There’s a lot of bad to point to. Personally I had a good year. I graduated with a Masters of Sciences. I took a great trip to Korea and Taiwan. I have spent the last year in a solid relationship. I took full advantage of the time to improve myself.

I have been defining personal OKRs and have accomplished many more things. I spent this year focused on three themes: Create, Connect, and Digital Zen.

I’ve written short sci-fi stories throughout the year, culminating in a published anthology. I wrote a number of blog posts as part of my Digital Zen goal, developing simple tools which are meant to remove digital bureaucracy and make my life easier.

With more free time, I could spend it learning new things like the programming language Rust. I read 156 books.

I explored the world, connecting with people and places. I’ve used Google Maps to keep track of the places I’ve gone and the food I’ve eaten. In Maps, I’ve earned 50,000 points from my contributions of reviews and photos from the places I’ve gone.

I’ve really gotten back into Pokemon cards. Pulling them out of my parents’ house and re-organizing them, I’ve managed to complete the original Base set twenty-five years later. I’ve also tried to catch up with newer sets and have built a good collection. I’ve made a number of friends from other collectors in the city and from local fairs.

I have been using Obsidian more over time in order to keep track of everything. I’ve moved my OKR tracking from a spreadsheet into Obsidian to take advantage of its offline mobile support.

I’ve built other tools including Obsidian plugins but also new apps using new technologies. Beantown is a social media for rating coffees you’ve drunk and it connects with ActivityPub. I’ve figured out how to use AI to measure nutrition from a photo of food. I’ve also used LLMs for projects like summarizing PDFs to in-game chatbots.

And I achieved many other things as well across each of these three goals.

It’s nice to go back into the OKRs at the end of the year and really look at the scores. Of course I could just come up with a few numbers and give myself a thumbs up. Nobody needs to validate the scores. But it does serve to myself as a representation of my goals and what I’ve done to achieve them. You can easily get obsessive about it, but it can also be a way to hold yourself accountable to your goals.

With that, here are the scores from each category for each quarter.

Create: 0.72/0.73/0.64/0.69

Connect: 0.71/0.73/0.80/0.72

Digital Zen: 0.70/0.78/0.54/0.74

These are good scores. Getting to 0.7 is expected, as you always want a bit of leeway and to set an overly ambitious goal. And you can average each of these together in order to determine the overall score for the year:

Overall: 0.71/0.75/0.66/0.72

So overall, I did a great job of meeting the goals I set out for myself in January. I really did capture the spirit of Creating, Connecting, and reaching Digital Zen.

And now that the year is at its end, I have thought through the goals for next year.

First, is to Wrap Up the third decade of my life. I have spent a lot of time putting things off for future me, and my to-read list sits at 81 books at the moment. It’s time to really wrap up and pare down my to-read list and my to-watch list. It’s time to catch up and finish up the things I’ve put off for a while.

Second is to Grow Relationships both online and offline. This is an extension of Connecting but to focus not just on breadth but depth, deepening my friendships and connecting with people in more ways. One thing I’ve seen over time is how the boundaries between online and off are thinning. It’s important to do both, but you can’t necessarily ignore one of them. So learning how to navigate this hybrid world will be a useful skill.

At the start of each year we see a number of new works enter the public domain and I do want to take advantage of that. With Popeye’s first being introduced this year, I want to publish a full Popeye adventure as well. I’ll get to work on that soon.

My third goal is to create Useful AI. I already had some work last year with my nutrition experiment and others. But a lot of AI that we use today is just LLMs and chatbots which are neat but not improving my productivity or making my life measurably better. Some of this will be to get my app published and used by others. I have more ideas on how to go beyond Digital Zen and use AI to improve my life without making my life harder. I hope to write more about that throughout the year.

A year can never be all good or bad. You get a mix of both and hope they average out positively by the end. Sometimes bad things happen that are out of your control, and you need to figure out how to improve what you can.

So as we go into the new year, I’m going to focus on the things I can control. I’m going to focus on improving my relationships. I’m going to focus on improving AI tools so that I can finally catch up on my reading.

I’m looking forward to it.