After another eventful year, I want to look back over the goals I set myself at its outset, as I did in 2022.

Methodology Changes ¶

I described my process, and the book that inspired it, in detail in last year’s review. This year, I made some small changes in how I approach the goal setting.

Foremost amongst these was migrating from FreeMind, which I discovered has been abandoned since 2014, in favour of the fork Freeplane. I only made this shift towards the end of the year, so my 2023 goals mind map still carries the older styling; but my 2024 review should be a visual treat!

I also loosened my self-imposed limitation on cancelling goals, in light of my unpredictable circumstances for most of the year.

How I Did ¶

I did pretty poorly this year, only achieving around 31% of my goals, cancelling 62 and being blocked on 7%.

This didn’t come as much as a surprise, though, as I already knew that spending most of the year on the road had played havoc with my goals.

In the rest of this section, I will go through each area in more detail:

Health, Fitness & Well-being ¶

Similar to last year, I managed a little under a third of my set goals, mostly under ‘Health’ and ‘Well-being’ rather than ‘Fitness’. However, whilst I didn’t make many of my quanitified goals (e.g., hitting a target weight) I did generally make progress in the right direction (e.g., losing weight).

Assets, Finance, Location & Security ¶

I missed all of my account balance targets, but those goals aren’t entirely in my control so I’m not too upset about that. Most asset-related goals, such as repairing my Fairphone 3 and upgrading my desktop PC did get ticked off, through I had to scale back my ambitions of installing Arch GNU/Linux on my laptop (settling, for now, on Kubuntu instead).

Values, Purpose & Identity ¶

Again, I achieved about a third of these goals, the vast majority of which (27/32) were to do with my various Web sites. I made some progress on my cataloguing site, finally scraping as much of my TV viewing data from followmy.tv as I could and deleting my other social cataloguing service accounts.

A few wins on this site included the addition of comments and automated spell-checking, but the vast majority of planned things (like conducting a WCAG audit and getting my CV tool equal to my old one) were pushed off into 2024. I also have some planned improvements for my travel tracker, such as moving to the new Wayward API, but I lost all motiviation to work on them in the absence of an ongoing trip.

I also postponed a planned investigation into self-hosting a Solid pod, and I cancelled indefinitely my plans to do the same with Mastodon and Monica due to lack of interest, reasoning for the former that I have never been interested in non-federated social media, and failing to think of a realistic use case for the latter.

Productivity & Organisation ¶

There were only a handful of goals under this heading, which I suppose shows again the limitations of this exercise: I had no choice but to be highly productive and organised during my travels, but that was not really capturable in the form of achievable goals. That said, I believe I fulfilled my annual theme—‘Year of Fun, Travel & Adventure’—with aplomb.

Fun, Travel & Adventure ¶

Speaking of which, this was an obvious high point of the year: I visited several places I had long wanted to and managed to keep up my writing about them.

Career & Work ¶

Another high point, in part because I didn’t have a lot of work. I applied for roles with the British Antarctic Survey, did contract work for various clients and achieved an awful lot in the final quarter of the year through a part-time role I picked back up once I was back in the UK.

Volunteering, Contribution & Impact ¶

Again, not setting many goals meant I was able to achieve many of them, such as teaching english again and volunteering with the Brigadas Civiles De Observación (BriCOs). Several planned projects were cancelled for reasons beyond my control, particularly relating to the Scouts, although I am a little annoyed that I didn’t manage to tick off my goal of meeting a foreign Scout group: I did see one in a park in Alejuela, but I wasn’t really sure how to approach them without seeming weird.

Knowledge, Training & Education ¶

I achieved a decent amount here, although with the caveat of having cancelled just as many goals. I again took too much of an initial bite in terms of lanugage learning, which I pared down from the original list of Spanish, Arabic, Kurmanji, Turkish, and French (along with Teeline and Morse code) to just Spanish and French, and I was very impressed to have achieved a B1 in the former (from a starting point of nothing) in just ten months.

A lot of my progress here came in that final quarter, as I was lucky enough to get on a string of paid-for courses in everything from sailing and diving to mountaineering and amateur radio.

Arts, Culture & Creativity ¶

2023 was my best-ever year for blogging, with me getting out 15 posts over the course of it. I also smashed my targets for films, TV shows, books and games, and finished most of the things I had specifically named.

Upgrading my desktop GPU from an ancient Nvidia GTX 460 to an AMD Radeon RX 6600 and an Intel i7 920 to an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X meant I could finally take advantage of the Vulkan graphics library, jumping my ability to emulate games written for Windows on Linux by several decades in a single jump. I spent a lot of the final quarter of the year catching up on all the games I’d been unable to play for several years, such as Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey and Metro Exodus (all of which were incredible, and reminded me of why I used to love gaming).

Social Life & Relationships ¶

The nature of the goals under this category rarely changes, being mostly a list of people I haven’t seen for a while and want to meet up with, but I did a solid job bouncing up and down the country over the final quarter seeing friends and family all over the place.