2023 Year in Review

It’s the last non-Rule 5 blog post of the year for me. I guess it’s about time to raise a glass, toast the old year (or at least hope that the old year is toast) and take stock of how my plans from the beginning of the year shook out. I didn’t do a blog post laying out my goals this year, but I did at least do a 2022 Year in Review, so that’s as good a place as any to start.

I wrote five goals in my Bullet Journal at the beginning of the year. I tried to make them S.M.A.R.T. goals. When I changed out books in July, I wrote some check-ins on how I was doing at the midpoint. How did things shake out overall?

1. Break a 4:15:00 marathon time. I didn’t quite get this one. I knew it was going to be a bit of a stretch, but worth chasing. In my last race of the year, the Mighty Mo Run in Sioux City, I ran a 4:21:32, which shaved fifteen minutes off my 2022 best time. I’m happy with that. I think if I’d followed my race plan better, I could have cracked 4:15:00, but I’ve got a great baseline for where I want my performance to go in 2024.
2. Pay down $15,000 of debt. We completely blew that one. Or rather, the Biden economy blew that one up, and I went along for the ride. Losing two jobs in a single year hurt a lot, and my side hustles are nowhere close to being able to pick up the slack. Again, to look at the positive side, we’re heading into 2024 in good shape to really make a dent on this stuff.
3. Get back to making content. I wasn’t perfect here, but I’ve gotten a lot better. The two blogs, one video a week schedule seems to be mostly working, as does the 1-3 Twitch streams. Obviously I missed a fair number of blog posting days though. Lots of room for improvement next year.
4. Read fourteen books (because I only read thirteen in 2022). At the beginning of July I was at nine read. My pace slowed down a lot in the last few months, due to a combination of factors, but I hit that target with fourteen, though just barely. A couple of the “books” are barely more than novellas (one is barely a short story). Still, I’ll take the win, and try to build momentum for 2024.
5. Complete six video games. Same idea as the books thing, I just want to finish some things and get them off my ever-growing backlog. In July I was at five. At this point, counting a couple of DLCs, I’m at eight. So mission accomplished, I guess. I don’t know. Technically this is a win, but started taking on game review assignments for Marooners’ Rock again, so I spent a lot of hours playing things for review where I don’t necessarily feel that I finished them to a standard of completion. Again, there’s more work to do in 2024.

Bottom line, I think I did okay. Some things went very wrong this year (mostly employment related) that hopefully I won’t see a repeat of in 2024 (please, God!) There’s a lot of room for improvement, but at the same time, I’m happy with the way a lot of things, especially the running, turned out. There’s a good baseline for next year, which I’ll look at next week!