Best of 2020

Well, despite a global pandemic that forced us all into lockdown, I managed to maintain my sanity and mostly stay on track with the goals I’d set. Here’s how I did.

Health

Fitness

I’d initially set a goal to run 25 miles a week, but scrapped that after I got the spin bike. That shifted to just “do some form of cardio 5 or 6 days a week.”

You can see from this graph that I briefly was up to running 25 miles per week, but that fell to about 10 per week after I got the spin bike. My spin biking has gradually climbed to 80 miles per week. My goal for Q3 is to pass my AWS developer certification, and I’ve been watching a Udemy course for that while I ride. So I’ve shifted to just running once or twice a week. I’ll likely pick back up that mileage after I pass the exam.

Career

My tech reading this quarter was “Java: Concurrency in Practice.” I finished it, and will write a blog post on it this weekend.

I also set a goal to get in the habit of checking dashboards every morning for services I’m in charge of. I averaged 3.3x/week for that, which is 66%. But that trends upwards, meaning that I got better at it toward the end of the quarter. This habit resulted in me finding and fixing several issues much more quickly than I otherwise would have, so I’m going to continue it next quarter.

Finance

I met 58% of my savings goal. Not great, but there were some necessary pandemic purchases that put a dent in that, like a spin bike, bike carrier for stocking up on groceries, home organization purchases, etc. With those out of the way, it’ll be easier to meet this goal next quarter.

Media

(This part is just for fun)

Books

I read 2,273 pages in 7 books over the course of the quarter.

Here’s the breakdown by page count:

And by recommender. 43% of the books I read were recommended by my dad, and 14% by my sister.

Video games

I played 3 video games this quarter. Animal Crossing was one I chipped away at over the course of April and May, where Last of Us II I got into and beat about a week after I bought it.

I really enjoyed Outer Wilds, which was recommended by a coworker. This game started off as a master’s thesis and was such a clever way to tell a story. Essentially, you explore this solar system and piece together what happened to an extinct race of intelligent life that came before you.

Notes

• I used Tableau for these visualizations.
• I used Productive to track habits.