03 Jan 2025 11 min read Productivity

A look back at 2024

Reflections, high scores, and the year ahead

A frozen mouth on the summit of Denali, 5/26/24.

Since 2018, I've been writing retrospectives at the end of each year (see: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020) where I track my goal progress, what I read/watched, and where I went. It's a nice way to make myself accountable to the intentions I set and I hope it provides a little inspiration to anyone glancing through.

This installment will cover:

2024 in summary
- Fitness
- Health
- Brain
Details
- Stuff I made
- Long-form media consumption
- 2024 in places
2025 planning
2025 goal summary

2024 in summary

This was a crazy year. I feel like I've been saying that at the end of each December since 2020, but 2024, for me, was an outlier in its wildness. For example, I:

Climbed Denali over 22 days, eking out a summit on the last possible day before our supplies would have run out and forced us to turn around.
Got a new job.
Cycled hundreds of miles solo through England, Wales, and Scotland, crashing in hostels, cheap hotels and on friends' couches.
Climbed giant stalactites of ice in Hyalite Canyon (Montana) while the ambient air temperature sunk to -30 Fahrenheit.
Scuba dove with reef sharks inside of a cave in Maui with Fiona.
Summited both the South and Middle Tetons (Wyoming) in one day with a pal.
Took two months off from work, in total, for solo travel.
Got really stressed out.
Feel like I need to scale back.

In 2025, my intent is to do fewer things.

💪 Fitness

I trained significantly more in 2024 than 2023 and I'm fitter for it. Thinking that my switch to optimize for training duration over miles or "number of pushups" accounts for this. I also started strength training again which was a big gap in my regimen previously.

Goals:

✅ 278:50/250 hours of training duration– any cardio exercise + strength training (vs. 205 in 2023)
✅ Get to Kahiltna Glacier, AK. This is where you fly in to begin the approach to Denali. I deliberately didn't say "summit Denali" in my goals for 2024, since there are so many factors beyond your control that prevent even fit, motivated climbers from getting to the top. Chiefly, weather.
✅ Bonus: Summit Denali. Incredibly thankful to whichever stars and planets had to align to make this possible.

Other things I tracked:

124 hours spent running (vs. 62 hours in 2023)
84 hours on cycling (vs. 41 in 2023)
54.5 hours of hiking and mountaineering (vs. 91 in 2023)
43 hours of walking and other workouts (vs. 11 in 2023)
26,959ft running vert (vs. 16,545ft in 2023)
153 total runs (vs. 88 in 2023)
832 miles run (vs. 415 in 2023)
635 miles cycled (vs. 1321 in 2023)
135 miles hiked (vs. 208 in 2023)
64 highest Strava fitness level¹ (vs. 50 in 2023)

¹Strava Fitness: “Fitness is calculated using your Relative Effort (based on either heart rate data or Perceived Exertion input) and/or power meter data. This way you can identify patterns in your training and see the big picture of how all your workouts add up over time. Your score is entirely relative to you. It serves as a benchmark, to show how many points you currently have compared to any date in the past two years.”

🥕 Health

I didn't hit my sleep quality goal last year. I did, overall, sleep better in 2024 than 2023 and prior years. I wonder if a month of not drinking while on Denali had something to do with it 🤔.

Goals:

❌ 72.18%/75% sleep quality² (vs. 70.12% in 2023)
✅ 8:23/8:00 average nightly sleep length (vs. 8:15 in 2023)

Other things I tracked:

78.3 happiness index average³ (vs. 78.1 in 2023, 79.7 in 2022, and 84 in 2021)

²Sleep Quality: From Garmin: "Your nightly sleep score is calculated based on a blend of how long you slept, how well you slept, and evidence of recovery activity occurring in your autonomic nervous system derived from heart rate variability data. The following categories are considered when assigning a score: Sleep Duration, Average stress score during sleep, Total deep sleep, Total light sleep, Total REM sleep, Awake time, Restlessness"

³Happiness index: Holistic spot-check of how good I feel psychologically and physically, based on my relationships, job satisfaction, financial well-being, goal completion, etc. on a scale of 1-100, with 1 being the worst and 100 being that life can’t get any better.

🧠 Brain

I completed all my media creation/consumption goals and came in about on par with 2023. I made fewer things overall.

Goals:

✅ 52/50 completed long-form media pieces, of which 9 were books (vs. 51 bits of long-form media in 2023, of which 11 were books)
✅ 11/10 articles published, including newsletter issues (vs. 23 in 2023)
✅ 23/20 videos created (vs. 29 in 2023)

I'm pretty lukewarm on this "long-form media" consumption type of goal after trying it out for a couple years. My original thought process here was that you can find good stories in lots of media formats: Video games, books, movies, TV. I wanted to set a goal that would incentivize me to seek out good tales wherever they were, rather than in one specific format.

However, I've tended to take the lazy way out and watch lots of film and TV instead of reading books. I still plan to track all of my various kinds of media intake, like video games and movies, but I want to focus on reading again in 2025. I think reading helps me build my imaginative clarity and it also gets me away from screens. I think I might even try paper books again vs. my Kindle. While it’s a super convenient little device, the Kindle flattens the reading experience so that the character of the books’ typography, marginalia, diagrams, etc., become boringly uniform; their souls are sucked out. Might just stick to using it for travel.

Details

✍️ Stuff I made

Writing

Videos

💿 Long-form media consumption

Books: I've italicized books that I read in part but put down or come back to as reference. I've bolded books that I'd especially recommend. I didn't read as much this year.

Ocean's Echo, Everina Maxwell - great read.
Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir - Entertaining; little sad at the ending.
Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds - It's not bad at all, but going to come back to it.
White Sun War, Mick Ryan - Interesting look at future warfare in an escalation scenario in the Taiwan Strait. Characters are super cardboardy but that's not really the point of the book.
For We Are Many, Dennis E. Taylor - Book two of the Bobaverse series. Delightful.
We are Legion (We are Bob), Dennis E. Taylor - good stuff. Entertaining. Like a more amusing Ancillary Justice.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien - read on Denali.
Love is a Dog From Hell, Charles Bukowski - reading samples of poetry here and there. Bukowski is best paired with a beer.
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin - Broken Earth Book 2.
The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin - The Broken Earth Book 1. Outstanding. The writing, dialogue and characters (pretty much everything) are so refreshing after Sanderson's high-schooler novel-writing style.
Well of Ascension, Brandon Sanderson (30%)- I find Sanderson's dialogue to be awful and the characters very cardboardy. I couldn't bear it and put it down.

Film and TV

Nosferatu - Gross yet excellent.
Severance, Season 1 - Very compelling.
Deadpool & Wolverine - Funny, messy.
DiDi - Pretty good. Was hoping the main character, Chris, would experience a bit more redemption.
Coda - Excellent; was in tears.
Peanut Butter Falcon - Delightful; funny.
Rewatch: Warrior, Gavin O'Connor - One of my faves.
Rewatch: The Witch - Robert Eggers' directorial debut film and it is fantastic, subtly creepy. Great Halloween watch.
Blade (1998) - Cheesy, but good fun. Hadn't seen it before.
Beetlejuice (1988) - Watched because of the Halloween season. Very slapsticky; not funny. I was hoping for something more for this cult classic.
Blue Eye Samurai - Fantastic.
The Penguin (Max) - Very good.
Fallout (Amazon Prime) - Excellent.
Rewatch: The Matrix - Still amazing.
Rewatch: Deadpool 2 - Also great.
Rewatch: Napoleon Dynamite - still very funny; very awkward.
Rewatch: Step Brothers - still very funny.
The Bear, Season 3 - Not as compelling as the first two. It's pretty backward-looking and character-studyish.
Hit Man, Richard Linklater - Very good.
Fall Guy - Fine.
The Tourist (Netflix) - Alright. Pretty slow.
Argylle - We shut this one off early. Really terrible!
Sugar (Apple TV) - Excellent. Really cool LA noir throwback. Not a huge fan of the bizarre twist at the end of the third to last episode. Seems unnecessary.
The Three Body Problem, Season 1 - A confusing and bizarro mess, but entertaining at points.
Dream Scenario - A big-time bummer and not what I expected.
The Green Knight - Hard to follow.
Rewatch: Dune Part One - Rewatch after seeing Part Two.
Dune Part Two - Fantastic. In my opinion, the Villaneuve Dune series is the best book to movie adaptation since Lord of the Rings.
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me - Rewatch.
Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet - Intense French courthouse drama.
Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos - That was a wild ride.
Tokyo Vice, Season 2 - Excellent.
Tokyo Vice, Season 1 - Like The Bear, this is another fascinating series that's been going a while that I only just discovered.
Mad God (Phil Tippett) - One of the most lunatic films I've ever seen. It's a claymation horror show, but there are moments of intense beauty.
Dodgeball - Rewatch. Still holds up, maybe not as funny as I remember.
Reacher - The Amazon Prime show. It's so bad, but interesting enough to hold attention.
Zoolander - Rewatch. Infinitely quotable.
American Beauty - Rewatch. Cringey, but so compelling. Bags are beautiful.
Leave the World Behind - Solid. Ends super abruptly. Would recommend.
True Detective: Night Country - Pretty good so far (on episode 2). Compelling. Still not living up to season 1 imo.
The Bear, Season 2 - chef's kiss.
The Bear, Season 1 - how did I sleep on this for so long? So well shot and acted. I love the underlying theme about striving for excellence.
Saltburn - wild, intense, but pretty good in my opinion.

Video games

Thronefall - A very simple, lovingly-made indie game. Super addicting with fantastic artwork (44.7 hours of play)
Skyrim Anniversary Edition with the Nolvus Ascension mod pack. It was fun to briefly rekindle an old flame, but it's overmodded for my taste with all of the effects, new items, new magic, and altered layouts for previously familiar places. While there are undeniable improvements over the original Skyrim, Nolvus still just feels like an unwieldy patchwork of indie Nexus Mods layered over a framework that is showing its age. (7 hours)
Subnautica - Love the craft/build system and sense of mystery as you explore an alien ocean world. (11.6 hours)
Helldivers 2 - Okay. Not really a big fan of this style of game (online multiplayer shooter). Seems like it would appeal to Call of Duty fans looking for something a bit different. (8.6 hours)
Baldur's Gate 3 - Excellent. One of the best games I've played. (287 hours 😲)

⛰️ 2024 in places

Overview: Covered a lot of US and British territory in 2024. I made this with a custom Google Map that I had chatGPT create a KML file for based on the list below.

December

Victor, ID
Salt Lake City, UT
Maui, HI
Victor, ID

November

Victor, ID
Salt Lake City, UT
Bisbee, AZ
Salt Lake City, UT
Victor, ID

October

New York City, New York
Victor, ID
London, United Kingdom
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Inverness, United Kingdom
Kingussie, United Kingdom
Ardeonaig, United Kingdom
Stirling, United Kingdom
Edinburgh, United Kingdom

September

Cambridge/Woodditton, United Kingdom
Bangor, United Kingdom
Holyhead, United Kingdom
Beaumaris, United Kingdom
Llandudno, United Kingdom
Cambridge/Woodditton, United Kingdom
London, United Kingdom
Victor, ID

August

Seattle, WA
Victor, ID

July

Santa Fe, NM
Brooks Lake, Togwotee Pass, WY

June

Victor, ID

May

Anchorage, AK
Talkeetna, AK
Denali National Park, AK - Climbed the West Buttress route
Talkeetna, AK
Anchorage, AK

April

Salt Lake City
Victor, ID

February - March

Victor, ID
Salt Lake City, UT

January

Bozeman, MT (Ice climbing in Hyalite: Genesis 1, The Hangover--2 pitches, The Dribbles--all 4 pitches, all while temps 0 to -30F)
Victor, ID
Salt Lake City, UT

2025 planning

While 2024 was one for the books, I was very stressed out during the close of the year, mostly due to the demands of starting a new job and learning the landscape in and around my company.

I'm a fan of the computer scientist and writer, Cal Newport. In his book Slow Productivity he lays out three principles that I want to use to theme my approach to 2025:

Do fewer things
Work at a natural pace
Obsess over quality

I'm going to significantly cut back on the number and scope of my goals. No huge mountaineering objectives. No metrics around my myriad hobbies like brewing beer. I want to take on fewer creative projects. I want less distraction.

I've come up with four main personal themes for next year:

Stay fit: Basically, continue what I'm doing exercise-wise. Target 4-5 hours of training each week. Try for three running/cardio sessions per week, two sessions of weight training.
Improve my craft: Refine my approach to product strategy, get better at extracting insights from customers and prospects, get better at stakeholder alignment.
Build things by growing my technical skill: Learn Javascript and system design more fully and make use of AI tooling to build projects on the side.
Continue writing: Make videos and essays. Read more books to support this.

I set goals at the beginning of each week. These goals tend to ladder up to annual goals. So, another tactic I want to experiment with this year is reducing the volume of expectations I have of myself on the weekly level. I'm going to aim for, at most, one personal creative project or portion of a project (e.g. building a module of an app, writing an essay, editing a video), and one work project each week (e.g. building a metrics dash, working up a strategy doc, preparing a PRD, etc.). I liked this quote from Newport that captures the thinking behind this:

Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most.

--From Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

Goal summary for 2025

As always, this is a list of intentions, rather than a list of hard, inflexible commitments. See here for more of the reasoning on that.

Maintain a sleep quality of 75%+, sleep time 8+ hours average for all of 2025 (Stay fit)
Do 250+ hours of training duration (Stay fit)
Publish 10+ pieces of writing or video (Continue writing)
Read 15+ books (Continue writing)
Complete a Javascript course (Build things by growing technical skill)
Launch a software-based side project – to give myself something to learn for (Build things by growing technical skill)

I have a couple other ones I didn't include here for privacy reasons. But each theme listed above in the planning section has at least one corresponding goal.

Cheers to a new year!