How Do You Reflect On This Year

How do you reflect on this year? Are you setting out to do things next year and be a different person? Are you creating your goals and plans to achieve it? Or just want to wing it and hope for the best?

On the other hand, have you considered what you did this year? Have you tried thinking back and analyze what worked that you can do again? Or are you just focusing on your mistakes that you think, and hope, you’ll stop doing the following year?

This 2024, I planned out to do three things to achieve my goals. Or more precisely, I have three concepts that I kept in mind to keep me going. Namely, these are, making things easy so it becomes a routine, being disciplined, and keeping in mind that life will get and hinder us from doing what we need to do. Keeping these in mind, there were things that I was able to do and some not.

And this is the time of the year that I blog what worked for me, what didn’t and some that I did not expect. I wanted to do this before the start of the new year so I could start planning my upcoming year and continue achieving what I am supposed to do.

I encourage you to do this too.

What worked

We all look at what went wrong to know the reasons why we were not able to accomplish things. While this makes sense, I think we should also look into what we did that helped us achieve our goals.

For example, this year, I set up a daily reminder list of what I need to do on a daily basis like reading the bible, journalling, and writing my blog. I have the badge count on my reminder app on the number of tasks I need to do. I don’t like seeing those badge notifications. So it made me look every time I open my phone. It made me do those three things daily – reading the bible, journaling and writing my blog. It made me consistent on a daily basis. I think it worked for me because it puts structure in my daily life. Waking up, coffee, smoking, and then doing my tasks made my day relatively smooth.

So this is one thing that worked for me and I will continue to do. By having these constant reminders, I am able to do the things I want to.

It is the same for work but with a little difference. I have a daily task list that I need to accomplish everyday and project lists that I wanted to make progress on. I go through that list and structured my work day around it. The difference with this is that I limit my work tasks to three per day. Three project tasks per day only. This is outside my daily reports. The reason I did this is because I don’t want to burn my brain cells. I just want to get enough things done.

Lastly, keeping in mind that life will always get us, I structured my workout routine by anticipating that. I used to workout alternately hitting different muscle groups per day but when life gets us, when something urgent or important happens, my workout session gets interrupted. So, I focus on hitting all muscles daily. The idea is just to use it, be stronger, and move on a daily basis. Well, except this holiday season, this worked pretty much me.

What didn’t work

Strictly adhering to schedule. Yeah. This didn’t work for me. Not all of them. At the start, I created a schedule for tasks I want to do at specific time of the day. Each task is about an hour. My workout. Writing blog. Reading. Playing piano. Work schedule. But, this did not work.

Most of the scheduled task I have happens when my kids are around or in case of work, people chatting with me. This distracted me from doing what I scheduled. Also, there was a feeling inside me that it wasn’t right at that time. So, time boxing is something I am dropping.

Another is working on multiple projects with small progress daily. This kind of drains my brain cells. And eventually, the next few days were mere scrappy output or procrastination. So, this I am also dropping. One major task per day works.

Eating schedule. Yeah. Didn’t work too. As long as there is food, I tend to binge. So, instead of trying to be disciplined by sheer will, I’m just removing all extra food so I don’t eat too much.

Way forward

Hindsight is only smart, reasonable and logical after everything has happened. We do not usually know the consequences of our actions at the time we take it until we get experience the effects of it. However, we can learn from our past and move forward. If we do not know what could happen, we can look at what others have done, anticipate what happened and start from there.

This 2025, in a nutshell, instead of forcing myself in doing things, I am aligning the things I choose to do and achieve according to what my present me can do and slowly progress. I always believe that if something is achieved in a short span of time, it can also be gone just the same amount of time. Averaging of distribution.