Goals for 2018 - summary
The year is over and it's perfect time to reflect on goals and set the new ones. At the beginning of 2018, I set a few goals for the year and did a little summarizing at half of the year in this post. Let's do a final review.
😎 General
First of all this year was awesome! I completely changed my life, my work approach, the way how I see a lot of things, got married and went to the biggest travel adventure of my life.
This goal setup helped me so much. The whole year I had a mindset where am I going and why I'm doing each small thing. I have a Trello board with four columns: "Backlog", "To do (within this particular month)", "In progress" and "Done" and a repeatable card with everyday stuff (about 4-5 things). Everything there are small things that need to be done. All stuff I've created this year were directed to achieve global goals. So I'll definitely set up goals for 2019 as well.
Let's look at the details.
💰 Get a Stable Income From a Freelance — Done.
This one I'm satisfied completely with. I have a few clients which I work for my whole time and I don't have to spend time on searching new contracts like a lot of freelancers do. Basically, I have a part-time job and make as much money as I want depending on how many hours I spend on it. My working hours are flexible and I like what I do.
At this point, I only can become a better specialist and get a higher hourly rate. In other ways everything is perfect. So 100% of success on this goal.
🧳 Go On A Long Journey Around The World — Done.
We went on this journey at 3rd of September and still on it. I'm writing this post from Bali and it's so awesome! I realized the traveling is my passion a few years ago and from that point, I went to this goal (to travel full time) and finally made it.
Right now we travel with my wife around East Southern Asia, we visited 17 cities and 10 countries for less than half a year and became even more hungry for travel than we were. We have so many ideas and plans for 2019 destinations. Also, we have a huge plan for the 2020 year, and it's so exciting for me, but it's only in development so we'll get back to that at the end of 2019 :)
We also wanted to have some kind of travel journal and we experimented with a lot of platforms and ended up with two:
- Our Youtube channel - we upload twice per week (Monday and Friday), so if you interested how our travel journey goes, subscribe! This is also lead me to learn new things like editing, filming and YouTube-ing in general which is great because I love to learn new things, especially outside of IT area.
- Our Instagram - where we post a lot of photos from our journey and sometimes stories. Instagram is an amazing platform where you can express yourself. It's already gone beyond food and girlish photos. You basically can create an account for any kind of creativity you do and share with the world.
- In addition, we have a plan to start out website/blog very soon.
100% to this goal as well!
🍅 Don’t Eat A Meat/Fish In This Year — Success Level 70%.
This goal is very important to me and for the way what kind of person I see I wanna be in the future and what global goals I wanna reach. Recently I realize that sustainability, environment, nature, and the world itself are not an empty sound for me and I want to do as much as possible to help become world the better place. Or at least not spoil it for next generations.
Do not eat meat was my first goal, but while we travel around Thailand I got that I need to find a compromise or I'll starve to death :D. So I decided when I can't find vegetarian food I'll be eating fish or seafood. I've not a big fan of seafood so usually, I just eat something like fish and chips or fish nugget.
So goal not completely succeeds, but I'm still on my way and when I'm in places where I can find decent vegetarian food I'll only eat that.
If summarise I didn't eat meat/fish till September (so 9 months) and then sometimes I ate fish and it's not hurt me at all. I get enough vitamins and minerals, so why do we eat animals at all? This question I can't answer.
🏴 Improve My English To Upper-Intermediate Level — Done.
It's hard to measure your level of language if be honest. A lot of different sources could give you different answers. I measured it by my satisfaction.
I'm really happy with my level of English right now. I have a lot of conversations with people in English and it's never a problem to understand or express my thoughts. Moreover, our YouTube channel in English which helps a lot.
I can write in English, although I do a lot of mistakes probably and still use only a few tenses, it's only a matter of experience. I read books, watch movies and TV shows, play games in English. So now I'll move my learning path to practice path. I use English every day for basically everything so it'll become better and better. 100% success here.
👨💻 Finish #100DaysOfCode And Coding Courses — Done.
That goal I've already reached in my half-year review so nothing to add here.
I want to change approach here similar to English. I want more make stuff and less learn (in the usual way like courses) because from some level I think it's much more effective.
🏃 Continue Running And Start Working Out In A Gym — Success 50%
Yeah, here we are :) Health goals are not so successful this year. Running and working out are hard things to do while you travel. Or it's just an excuse for laziness :)
I'm trying to add physical activity as much as possible. Sometimes we rent accommodation with a gym or at least with a treadmill which helps a lot. Here in Bali, I surf as much as possible. Our next place will do Yoga lessons so I'll try that as well.
So basically I have physical activity, but it's maybe not so consistent as I want. So I give this goal 50%.
By the way I completely in love with surfing. Its so much fun to slide the wave especially when you can stand up on board :D I feel I'm becoming much better in it, I manage to turn and conquer real waves and not only a foam. But there is still so much practice I need.
🧘♂️ Continue Meditating On A Daily Basis — Success 36%
It funny, but when I review this goal in my half-year review I counted my meditation days and it was 36% of the whole days. Today I did the same thing and it's exactly 100 meditate session within 365 days which is 36.5% of the year. So I'm pretty consistent here :D.
Of course, it's a pretty bad result for me because I'm really enjoying meditation and it helps me to be calmer during the day and focus better on stuff. But constancy is my problem. This goal I move to the 2019 year and I hope will be more successful there.
🧘♂️ Start to write more on the blog — Failed.
When I write my explorations of goals at the half of the year I completely forgot this goal. This is the only one I marked as a failure because I haven't posted anything on a blog at all.
This year I started with moving my two blogs (Russian and this one) to GatsbyJS site generator based on ReactJS. I also used Contentful as content storage and Netlify for deploying. I turned off my server where I hold Ghost blog engine and very happy about it. Generated static content so much faster and React gives me all stuff to customize my blog. And also it's free because I host everything on Github.
In addition, we're planning to start travel blog so I hope this year will be the more blogging year for me than 2018.
📚 The Additional Challenge Which I Participate In Every Year Is Goodreads Reading Challenge — Done.
As in previous years, I achieved my goal here. That's my list of books I've read in this year: https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/10599444. 25 of 20 which is even more than I planned. A few of them were comic books so we're square here :)
I love to read very much, but next year I have an additional challenge here cause I want to read only in English. I've already started my first book and this is "Game of Thrones". I think I'm the last one who hasn't read that Martin's series on the planet.
So that's it for my summary. I totally enjoyed this year and I'm very satisfied with my results.
Really appreciate that you’ve read this.
