Welcome to my blog: a place where I put my coherent thoughts and hold myself accountable by publishing quarterly updates on my projects. It has been 7 months since my last entry!
The latter half of this year chewed me up and spit me out. It marked the passing of my father, followed by a series of illnesses and injuries that affected both me personally and the immediate members of my family. I am currently recovering from a 3-week upper respiratory infection, just after healing from an injury in my left foot that took 3 months to figure out — have mercy on my spelling mistakes.
As you can imagine, these events were not great for making progress in the non-critical parts of my life, but they weren't the sole cause of stagnation. As I noted in my last blog, I've made some bad hypotheses about how I should be tracking my day-to-day progress, and have spent months finding something that worked for me (a simple note and task-tracking system in Obsidian). I wouldn't even say that I'm done tinkering, as much of the recent progress I've made hasn't been tested against my usual 9-to-5 routine.
I'll get to more on that near the end, but first, I'd like to recap the year.
Out and About
I got a decent amount of travel in 2024, starting with a Hocking Hills cabin retreat with some friends, a trip to see my brother in St. Louis, and two separate excursions to Chicago and New York with Danielle. This year was also the 20th anniversary of the Expert Engineer program at JPMorgan Chase, a group I'm honored to be a part of and a series of global events that I enjoyed helping put together. When I had to miss my own event in Columbus, the east coast group welcomed me with open arms — they even let me steal some of their swag!
I'll be traveling about as much next year, with an early trip to Sandusky, OH for CodeMash and multiple trips for work. I'd like to get to Europe at some point if Danielle and I can swing it, but it'll depend a lot on work schedules and vacation time.
The Content Diet
I read a bit this year, but nowhere near as much as I have previously. From my fantasy pile I finished Defiant, The Sunlit Man, and Witch King — all of which I recommend. The rest of my reading was in the business and technology spaces, including Meditations, Engineering Management for the Rest of Us, Accelerate, Ultralearning, Switch, and most of The DevOps Handbook. Like most "self help" books, I have a mixed relationship with each. I think they're worth your time, as long as you take the advice with a grain of salt and keep in mind the publication dates.
As I thought back in May, Cyberpunk 2077 remained my game of the year, and was the game I played the most. I did two runs of the game (Street Kid and Corpo background), and earned 100% of the achievements. For single player experiences I would also recommend God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn, and Lethal Company for game nights with friends.
I did 100% complete a game called Littlewood, but I'm not sure I enjoyed it — primarily because you get nothing for all your effort at the end. Maybe I've just been spoiled by games like Stardew Valley.
The Rest of My Goals
I didn't finish any other games, nor did I work on my own. I didn't craft anything for the tabletop games I play in, but we did find time to get together and play. I didn't complete any additional training courses. My AWS Solutions Architect certification will lapse at the end of this month. I didn't do very much writing, neither professionally nor for fun.
Because of some surprise medical bills most of our house projects were scrapped. I think our biggest achievement this year was getting the garden beds in, which I celebrated back in May. Gardening was my primary source of exercise this year, especially after I injured my left foot and was forced to spend a lot of time in Q3-Q4 sitting.
If it isn't clear already, I left the Almighty List hanging this year — I would consider 14 of the 18 projects failures. In other words, I did about 22% of the things I set out to do in 2024.
But that doesn't really bother me?
I've never had a parent die before, and although we weren't close at the time of his passing, I needed time to sort out how I felt about it. Then I got injured, people around me got sick, and I got sick. Oh, and I still had to go to work — we have a major deliverable in Q1 2025 that I've been chasing all year.
Don't get me wrong, I spent more than a few weeks moping about my lack of progress. But as time went on, I started to wonder if the time in my life where I get 15+ projects done in a year has passed. I think it has. Then I let that thought marinate through the rest of November and December, and landed at the system I have now.
The Almighty List (Is Dead)
I will not be checking off the Almighty List this year, because the Almighty List is officially dead. I thank it for its many years of service, and may it rest in peace. Instead, I have four broad focus areas for 2025:
- My Routine: I've noticed a lot of problems I've had lately have to do with the fact that my old routine doesn't match up with my new responsibilities and lifestyle. I'm going to be switching exercise to the morning, forcing myself to take an hour lunch break on work days, and blocking my time more concretely.
- Daily Note: Using Obsidian, I've started aggregating information about my day into Zettelkasten-like notes and supporting files. I find I'm more organized when I do this every day, which I'm going to try in 2025.
- Housework: I need to focus on house projects this year, and the day-to-day minutia of house maintenance. Blocking time for these activities and completing tasks will be a priority for me.
- Reading: The amount I read seems to be declining year-over-year, and I don't like that! I'm going to focus on reading as much as possible in 2025, especially from the massive backlog of books I have at home.
Anything else I get done in my personal life in 2025, I'll consider a "nice to have". Those four objectives are the only thing I'll be tracking daily, and my execution is fairly brain-dead: a checkbox in my daily note, and an aggregator showing my progress on a dashboard.
Anything else at this stage is theater, and any other projects now have a clear priority: below these four. Like I said at the beginning of the article, this hypothesis hasn't been tested against my 9-to-5 routine, but it can't hurt to start simple. I can always do more if I feel like it.
Wrapping Up
That's all I got — a level-headed entry into the year, with a few small goals. I do have some more updates coming to the site, but it's mostly CSS changes and cleaning up old articles. If you're involved in any of my tabletop roleplaying groups, the secret back half of this website is about to get a flood of articles converted from my old D&D notes. If you have no idea what I'm talking about:
I hope all is well with you and yours, and I'll see you in the next one. :)