Wrapping up 2023, plans for 2024

I haven’t given myself a chance to celebrate this yet, but I managed to do something in 2023 that I’ve been failing at for over a decade. I managed to write monthly wrap-ups all year long. And that enabled me to perform my first ever year wrap-up.

How to summarize a year’s worth of summaries?

After brief consideration, I ended up creating four categories and making lists under each.

Here’s my categories (and how many items went under each):

The division between the project categories is pretty arbitrary. For example, I put NaNoWriMo (a month’s worth of writing) under "major" and Inktober (a month’s worth of drawing) under "minor" based on my personal level of difficulty meeting each.

The "Non-project" category is kinda weird. Some of it is little accomplishments. Some of it is failed (but notable) attempts at habits. Some of it is stuff that happened to me.

The "Family" category contains big milestone stuff for the kids or trips we took or even just things we habitually did as a family during the year.

Well, now having done a summary of the whole year, I feel a certain sense of accomplishment. I mean, looking at the major project list alone is pretty gratifying.

I definitely would have forgotten at least half of these accomplishments if I had not written them down. In many cases, I certainly remember doing them, but it feels like more than a year ago since I did them.

I believe the wrap-up summary will get more valuable as time goes on. I wish I had one like it for all of my years.

It takes five minutes to read the year’s summary. If I want more detail, I can read my monthly summaries. If I want more detail than that, I can read the daily entries.

I will definitely do this in 2024 as well.

And speaking of 2024…​

Ha ha, well…​ It’s kind of funny to be writing this in March of 2024. But the plan hasn’t changed one bit, it’s just a bit paused.

The plan for 2024 is to finish stuff.

To put it another way, the plan for 2024 is to not start anything new.

I have a rather impressive list of projects I started in 2022-2023 and then abandoned. I put quite a lot of effort into some of them. One, in particular, is probably three-quarters done but nobody has seen it. I really want to finish all of these.

(I used to do that all the time: start stuff, work on it real hard for a couple weeks, and then abandon it. I’m getting way better at finishing things, but it’s still a struggle. I just love starting new projects. In fact, I have THREE major projects I really, really want to start already this year and it takes willpower to not start them!)

I started off the year strong and coming out of a really strong 2023.

But I only got partway into January before it became apparent to me that my family was going to need all of me. At least for a while.

So my various plans are on hold.

It’s hard to stop working on fun projects. But they’re not going to be fun when my attention and energy are already used up.

And it’s okay, really. I love cool little software projects, but they take a distant second place to family.

The only thing I feel bad about is not answering email. I haven’t replied to anything in a while. If you’re waiting for a response, sorry. It might be a little while longer.