My 2024 Annual Review

A new review to keep myself accountable for 2025

This year, I decided to do something different: I’m going to start doing a yearly review, and I’ll share it online to keep myself accountable!

An annual review will help me learn of what I did well and what I could improve on for the year ahead. I warn you that this might be a bit worrisome for you as a reader, since this is a very personal piece of writing that might not be interesting to everyone.

For this review, I’ll use the set of questions from James Clear’s annual reviews, which are:

1. What went well this year?

2. What didn’t go so well this year?

3. What did I learn?

4. What do I plan to improve on next?

Now let’s get started with the good stuff!

What went well this year?

Productive Procrastination (blog)

This year I finally started my blog. Okay, it was kinda late (~October I believe?) and I haven't been as active as I wished to, but I still consider it a win to have created it, nonetheless!

I only have 2 posts for 2024 (3 if I somehow manage to publish this before December 31), but 'm still happy with it. I don't want to be the best writer around or the most famous one (my online presence is smaller than an ant at this point, and the frequency that I post online is smaller than a microbe, don't think you can get much smaller than that), I just want to write about this productivity hobby that I spent way too much time on and share my knowledge with others, while improving my own writing ability.

Image with the meme of “I’m just a chill guy” to represent that I’m just someone trying to improve my writing.

To help me achieve that goal, I joined Write of Passage - a writing bootcamp with an incredible community on writing in ways that are enjoyable to you and aren't dull for the reader. Unfortunately, their stay was also a passage and the course is gone for good now. I'll do my best to use David Perell's teachings for my personal growth.

I confess that I still haven't done a lot of changes to that Substack's view and “About” section, and I should probably do that soon. That's probably gonna be a priority for 2025.

Regarding this blog's growth so far:

• I got 12 free subs, and my most liked post got 8 likes. It ain't much, but it's honest work.

• 2 Posts this year, one with 67 views, and another with 53 views

University

My university went on strike at the start of the year, to the surprise of 0 students from it. It lasted about a month and a half, so my graduation should be postponed by a semester now. Fortunately, I was able to pass all of my classes with good grades in my last semester (that ended in August), and I hope to do the same this semester (that will end in April, hopefully).

For this semester, I took quite a few hard subjects: one where I have to write the research project for my end-of-graduation thesis, one about basic internet (known as the hardest subject in the course) and one for developing mobile applications. I also have other two classes, but they're more miscellaneous and won't have as much focus as the other three, since they are relatively easy (namely one to create a business idea and another for building something with a physical board).

If I can stay safe on the hard subjects, I should probably have a good time on the less demanding classes too.

Some metrics from my last semester:

• Completed ~90% of my assignments on time

• Got over 80% results in all classes

• Highest grade: 92% on Assistive Technologies

• Lowest grade: 81% on Web Development

• General GPA: 80.12%

These grades are good, but there's still quite a bit of room for improvement. If I was able to finish all of my assignments on time and study a bit more, I'd probably be able to get more than 90% results.

Investment portfolio skyrocketing

This year, I decided to follow the Bogleheads investment method for my investment portfolio. It basically focuses on buying index funds for the long run, instead of analyzing and picking specific stocks to invest. I think I'm riding a high wave right now, as the companies from the index fund are growing in value and USD is getting more valuable (compared to BRL).

The issue is: will I hold on when this wave crashes? I hope that I will.

For some metrics:

• Portfolio overall grew 15% in 12 months

• I was able to invest over 60% of my paychecks each month

I also know that one year is way too little time to get any kind of conclusions, but I want to be grateful for choosing this type of strategy instead of just being careless with my money. I guess I can also use this meme now.

“Stonks” meme, with a graph going up to say that I “understand” investing, when in reality I don’t.

What didn't go so well?

Health not healthing

At the start of the year, I was very inconsistent with my workouts. I was trying to go to a boxing and a weightlifting gym at the same time, and I did both pretty badly. This was sucking onto my confidence in my ability to get things done, and with university wanting every fiber of my already scattered attention, this was being even harder than I expected.

Then, somewhere around April, I dislocated my shoulder in a boxing training session. It didn't hurt a lot (only at the time, a few days later and the pain was eating me alive), but my doctor prohibited me from doing martial arts since it could cause the shoulder to dislocate again - and the more it dislocates, the worse it gets.

And since I lost my main mode of cardio, my relentless eating caught up to me and I gained over 7kgs (15lbs) of weight. I'm trying to come up with my own cardio plan that isn't too impact heavy (so I won't cry like a kid over a hurting shoulder) and that isn't monotonous (so I'll continue doing it regularly and not grow tired of it).

I also went to a nutritionist in November, and my exam results were bad to say the least. I'll need to get a lot of supplements to unfuck myself. I'll take a total of 3 supplements, alongside my normal creatine and whey protein. Rip my wallet.

What is tracking?

Since this is my first proper annual review, I didn't set out proper tracking for most of the items that I think would be nice to track.

• How many workouts did I do each month? I Have no idea.

• How much water do I drink every day? Maybe enough to not die?

• How many tasks do I complete each day? Enough to make progress

• Yearly Goals? None were set

• How much time did I spend studying for university? Probably the bare minimum

It's honestly kinda embarrassing to share a review with so little tracking prep made. I'll try to up my tracking game for next year, since I believe these insights will be valuable for making proper improvements and getting a slap on the face for them - or a straight up drop kick if the results are bad enough.

Ignoring my own plans

Yes, I make plans for what I'll do on a day/week/month and I still won't follow them through. I've constantly gone against my own plans for God-knows-why way more times than I could count. Kind of ironic to hear this coming from someone who wants to maintain a blog about productivity.

Even while writing this review, I got distracted and burned so many plans for finishing it that I've already lost count - I took almost 1 week just choosing which kind of template to use for it.

I guess I'll need a bit more discipline and burn some willpower to follow plans from now on.

Inconsistency at the gym

Even though I now only go to the gym, I'm still very inconsistent with it. I don't have enough data (again) to know how many times, but I can say that there were a lot of times that I only went to the gym once a week.

Sometimes I'd blame having too much homework to work out, and other times I'd blame a lack of energy. There was just no way for me to succeed with this kind of plan.

I started a plan to counter the effects of the lack of consistent workouts: I'll do full body workouts. This way, I can at least maintain my progress for the week and still grow when I want to frequent the gym more often. I applied this strategy around September 2023, and I managed to double the amount that I lift on each exercise since then.

My best lifts for this year were:

• Leg Press - 80kg (176lbs) for 10 reps

• Dumbbell bench press - 11kgs (24lbs) each for 10 reps

• Standing calf raises - 50kg (110lbs) for 10 reps

I could probably up these numbers by 20% if I was focused on beating PRs, but I want to workout for health, so as long as the weight naturally goes up and I'm feeling stronger, having small numbers in my record is good enough for me.

Not following routines

This is a chronic problem of mine. I can't follow a routine even if you tell me to watch Dragon Ball Evolution two times in a row. This ties with the "not following plans" issue, and gets even worse when I have to take medicine in a regular interval (and not a set time). I have a lot of little habits that fall flat from me if I don't consciously remember them, even if I've been doing them for years.

I still need a digital reminder to myself to brush my teeth...

This is something that I want to slowly change in 2025, but this issue might be harder to tackle than all of the others combined - and might be what makes or breaks them as well.

What did I learn?

Some of the best things that I've learned this year were:

The problem really is that damn phone

My parents have been saying this since I was 15, and I just realized now that there's a lot of damage done. My concentration skills have been free falling like skydivers after driving 5 Red Bulls, 4 Monsters and 12 Espresso shots - at a steady pace, but crazy enough to have a diarrhea mid dive.

I'm now keeping my phone in another room when I'm trying to be productive, and I can say that it's helping me a lot. I still keep it near enough to hear it ring in emergencies, but I'm also being a bit more considerate to my own productivity.

For the record: this year, it was very frequent to have 6-10 hours of screen time. I'm slowly lowering this number, so I should see some real results around mid 2025 if I maintain my stance on phone usage.

Repeat past learnings

One quote that I came across this year from Naomi, on one of the Todoist's email newsletters was:

“The best lessons are often those we have to relearn.”

And I've been getting the same lessons over and over and over again. Some I refused to believe in like a kid throwing a fit for not wanting to eat their veggies, while others I gave voice to and applied them in my life - and whenever I start being inconsistent with them, I get a reminder of those learnings and remember why they're important.

Writing is social

After getting into the Write of Passage course, I learned a valuable lesson about writing: writing is social. It doesn't matter if I write 1000 articles if I don't have anyone to read and give me feedback on what I write, and the quality of my writing will be much higher after sharing it with someone else.

What are the things that I plan to improve next year?

A shortlist of what I plan to improve for 2025 is:

• Get more tracking methods for easily knowing if I did something

• Work out at least 2x per week (excluding exceptional circumstances)

• Lower my phone usage to less than 6 hours daily

• Consistently focus for 2 hours each day

• Write a blog post once a month

Thanks for reading my work. Happy New Years!

I’ll smell ya later!