2019 Year in Review
I’ve been meaning to join in on the Year in Review posts, but missed the deadline last year, here it is now.
First of, since this is the start of a new decade, let me do a quick round up of the last 10 years.
🌟 Decade in review.
- Graduated
- Moved to another country
- Got to build UWP apps for a living.
- Saw Muse perform a whopping 11 times
- Started Crossfit
- Got to see a new Star Wars trilogy
- Visited 10 countries
- Discovered Secret Cinema
- Finally saw my all-time favourite Musical … 8 times
Now, that that’s out of the way, onwards to the main subject.
2019 Year in Review
For a few years I’ve been tweaking how I handle my new year resolutions, and what has worked for me was to split it into different categories, or “areas of focus”, and then assign each of these a few goals that seem manageable. So I don’t typically have 12 or 5 or 10 goals (this past year there were 25 of them 😅, some with multiple sub-goals), and I don’t usually expect to complete everything.
So for this Year in Review post I’m going to try to roughly split things into their respective ‘areas of focus’ and we’ll see how that turns out.
🏋️♂️ Health & Fitness
Since most of my job is spent sitting down (the standing desks we have at work are a bit crap so I tend to not use them… I should probably change that) this is usually a big focus of mine. I’ve been doing crossfit for 4 years now, so a lot my fitness goals align with the sport. I’m not going to bore you with too many details here, but I gave myself a few lifting, gymnastic and skill goals, and hit a good deal of them, and missed a bunch.
I’ve also been doing obstacle races for a few years, and this was the year I finally braved the 22km Spartan Beast (along with the other lengths), and therefore completed the trifecta medal. 🏅
Health-wise, I tried to focus on good sleep and clean eating, and that went fine for a while then a bit downhill for the last stretch of the year, this is something I will focus on more for 2020 as well.
💸 Finance
I managed to hit my savings goals with just about 4 months to spare, which was particularly good consider I booked a (naturally expensive) Disney holiday. So I clearly need to step up my saving game, and that is one of my goals for 2020. I meant to look at securing another income stream, but with work and life and stuff, it just didn’t happen.
💼 Career & Dev stuff
So, here things took a bit of tumble. My role at work changed dramatically, so instead on focusing on what I had planned on, I had to switch to working on AWS. I’m now much more comfortable with it, so I’d still count it as ‘success’, but it pushed a good deal of what I intended to work on to 2020.
🎈 Life
So this is my catch-all category for fun stuff, along with social - friends and family -, travelling, etc. It was a pretty busy year. Let’s start with theatre. The year started off with a bang when I went to the final show of Bat Out of Hell (probably the best show ever). That was soon followed by School of Rock (which was alright), and Rock of Ages (just hilarious). Also saw Vision of You (so fun) and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (so good). Managed to go a couple of times to see Jesus Christ Superstar (I think my favourite musical ever), and then took my Mom to see Book of Mormon and my brother to see the Lion King.
With gigs I may have gone a bit over the top going to 3 (yes, three!) Muse concerts. Same tour. Don’t care. It was amazing. Also got to catch Bill Burr and Tim Minchin when their tour brought them to London.
I didn’t travel too much this year. Some friends were planning a trip together but that ended up being postponed. I did do a family trip this year and spent a lovely time in Krakow, Poland.
Also went to two theme parks for the first time in years. Boy did I miss roller coasters!
I also went out with friends at least once in 50 of the 52 weeks in the year, which for me is quite a big deal, but let’s move on now.
📑 The actual review.
I borrowed some ideas from the Getting Things Done book, namely it’s Horizons of Focus (which is just fancy-speak for the 10.000ft to 50.000ft views of, in this case, one’s life). And in general made progress in everything, except what I planned career-wise
Still, my goal setting could be better, so I spent more time than I’m willing to admit sketching, plotting, planning, trying to get better at it (it was during my christmas holidays, I had loads of free time between stuffing myself with food), and I thing my 2020 plan is looking, at least, better. Might share that in a post if can get around to writing another wall of text like this one.
In the meantime, here’s my “End of Year” instagram post.
