Opening thoughts:
It’s been a surprisingly motivated week. I felt pretty refreshed after Christmas and wanted to do All The Things! By today I’m pretty tired, but I don’t know if the enthusiasm is actually gone or if I’m just wiped out by the killer headache I had last night. I’ll refrain from adding anything new for a while, ahaha.
Completed goals:
- /2023reading - This was my “easy” reading goal, aiming to read the number of books I managed to read the year before, 300. I made it well in time, so this only ended now because it reached the end date. I overachieved!
- /2023reading_ex - This was finished well before the end date, and chronicled me reading 365+ books last year! Some of them were short, and I counted stuff like manga, comics and textbooks, but that was all in the plan (I always have counted that kind of thing).
- /2023reading_sav - And this one aimed for 400 books. I reached it at the last minute, on December 31st.
- 2023pages - This goal was aiming at reading 70,000 pages in total in 2023, and I exceeded it by quite a ways. I’m very happy with my progress here!
- /2023_readingsprint - This was the goal I created in December (I think?) to count down the last books I needed to finish for my “savage” reading goal. This goal style was actually sparked by someone in the support inbox suggesting that they’d generally find whittle-down-style goals more motivating. I can’t say I found it more motivating, but it was a nice addition to my stable of goals. Also nice to have a manual goal to enter data into: I find the deliberateness of going to add data quite useful.
New goals:
- /2024reading - This is my “easiest” reading goal for the year, aiming to read 300 books in total. This should be doable if circumstances remain the way they are right now, but I’m not ruling out having to reduce the goal – there have definitely been years where I struggled to read this much. It’s tracked via StoryGraph, using the slightly-hidden books metric that only the support team can switch on for StoryGraph goals (same goes for the other two).
- /2024reading_ex - This is my moderate reading goal, aiming to read 365 books in total. A book a day, a lovely-sounding number.
- /2024reading_sav - This is the hardest level of reading goal for the year, aiming to read 400 books in total. It’s also the first to get archived if it starts feeling too much like work to keep up. I made it to 400 books last year, so it is totally feasible… but it wasn’t easy.
- /2024reading_sprint - I discovered toward the end of last year that I really liked counting down the number of books I had left to read for my reading goal, so I’m starting this goal at the start of the year this time. This one is set with the intent of reaching my “savage” goal, which… I’m not sure how I’ll handle it if I give up on that. We’ll see!
- /2024pages - Linked with StoryGraph, this is a goal set up to get me to 84,000 total pages read in 2024. I set this goal by deciding that I’d like to read slightly longer books than I was averaging last year, say 230 pages or so on average, and multiplying that by my most difficult reading goal… and then rounding up a bit, 'cause I like round numbers.
- /newmonthresolution - This is my meta goal for the New Month’s Resolutions challenge I’m running. More about this on the blog, or in the appropriate thread. I created it via the graph editor so it doesn’t slope but instead steps up on the precise date I want it to. Technically I wrote about this in the last update of 2023, but it seemed apropos to carry it over and mention it here too.
- /plank - My first New Month’s Resolution! Simply put, I want to do a plank every day and hold it for as long as I can, working up the difficulty scale as appropriate. So far, I’ve ascertained I can hold a plank on forearms and knees for over a minute, so I’m now working on doing them on my forearms and toes.
- /yoghurts - Also technically not a new goal, but it’s my choice for the New Year’s Resolutions: Ride or Die 2024 challenge, so worth mentioning here! It’s set up so I average eating 6 biolive yoghurts per week in 2024, for a bunch of health reasons.
Changes to existing goals:
- /readreadread - This graph is barely in use anymore, but I’m loath to delete it because I like looking at it. So instead of archiving it, I edited it a bit via the graph editor so the bright red line is a bit closer to the data.
- /weighingin - I’ve added a break for while I’ll be staying at my parents’ house (due to a family emergency taking my wife – and thus my ride to any part of civilisation from where we live – out of the country). I’m pretty sure they have a scale I could use, but I remember it being a bit inaccurate, and I’d rather stick to my own.
Derailments:
- N/a! I’m sure they’re coming…
Closing thoughts:
- Next week I’ll be heading to my parents’ house for a week, as mentioned above. I imagine that’s going to make life a bit weird for some of my goals, but I hope to stay on track with everything.