2016 End of Year Report

Since this is turning into an annual thing, I thought I'd try to be a little more official with the title.

I kinda felt like this was a difficult year for me. It's hard to say why really, I just wasn't happy about the way some things turned out I guess. Oh well, never mind. Let's get started.


Old Resolutions
While I did remember and work on a couple of these, I pretty much completely forgot about the whole "read more useful stuff" thing. But I do feel as if I started to make progress on the others nearer to the end of the year.

1. Wake up early
I've kinda of been all over the place, but in the last few months I've started to more reliably sleep at a decent time at night and wake up at a decent time in the morning. So I'm getting there I guess.

2. Excercise
It took a while, but in the last few months I've started to get in a bit of exercise semi-reliably. It's progress, even if it's happening slowly.

3. Eat Better
I'm trying. It's a little hard to tell what's "better" these days, but I've finally started to cut out the pastries a little, so that's something.

4. Read More
I read, like, half a useful book. Kinda dropped the ball on this one.



New Resolutions:
I say "new" but it's more of an iterative process I suppose.

1. Sleep Early
Basically I think I've been going at this from the wrong end. I can only really wake up early if I sleep early, which means forcing myself to put everything down and turn off the lights a little earlier at night. Right now I'm more-or-less waking up with the sun, but I want to try to push it a bit earlier. I don't like waking up when it's still dark, but I'm going to try it and see if it helps me with my daily routine (or lack thereof).

2. Waste less time in the morning
One reason why I feel like I need to wake up early is because I'm a very slow mover in the mornings. I tend to waste time on unimportant stuff until I feel awake enough to tackle the difficult jobs (like getting my sorry bee-hind to work). So maybe if I put more effort into using my morning efficiently, I might not need to worry about waking up too early after all. Let's hope so.

3. Use time more efficiently
Similar to the last one, but this is more about making intelligent decisions on what to spend my time on. Let's just say I played a whole lot of Overwatch this year (seriously, there's a menu that shows you how many hours you've been playing that game, and what it says on my screen scares me a little). Damn, but those special event costumes are sooooooo good!

4. Exercise
I'm starting to pick up a bit of momentum on this right now, so I want to keep trying to nail down a solid routine that's actually useful and that I actually stick to.

5. Follow single projects through to the end
I've touched on this before, but one of the reasons why I feel as if I get so little done is that I tend to leap between a very large number of projects at the same time, and most of them end up sitting half-finished on a shelf forever. At the end of the day this is kind of a massive waste of time since that work doesn't amount to anything, so I want to try to be more disciplined and focus on a smaller number of projects at a time, seeing them through from start to finish.

6. Give more time to more important projects even if they are difficult
I've realised that in my desire to get as much stuff done as possible, I'm tending to push back difficult (but more important or more rewarding) projects to focus on easier ones that I can finish more quickly and have something to show for. For example, this year I painted TWENTY ONE models (compared to about five last year), but they were mostly quite small simple models (drybrushed Ninja and stuff); nothing like the insane twenty-plus piece Casey I painted last year. Meanwhile some challenging conversions that I've been planning for years have just sat around gathering dust. But that's just hobby stuff; there's some more important "projects" that I should probably get back to... like learning how to cook...



Well, here's to hoping 2017 is a better and more productive year for me. I'm almost surprised to find myself feeling strangely optimistic. Maybe I'm just glad 2016 is over. So long 2016!