2023 Goals

Posted on: 9 January 2023

I enjoy having goals for the year. They act as my guide for the year when I’m feeling a bit lost. Yes they have the power to overwhelm, which is why choosing the right goals off the bat and giving yourself a break is crucial.

So, without further ado, my goals for 2023:

Garage gym renovation

I decided mid way through last year that I really, really wanted to a) tidy up and renovate my garage into a home gym and b) start the 5x5 workout. I didn’t have the time nor funds to fit this into 2022, but I’ve put it at the top of my list for this year, as I really want to achieve it.

Lighting in office

I’m sick of staring at my poorly lit face on my screen during video calls. When there isn’t enough light, webcams compensate by increasing the ISO, which adds noise, leading to a poor quality image; and lowering the frame rate, leading to choppiness.

My new home office doesn’t get enough natural light as the only window is north facing. I’m going to get some combination of LED ambient room lighting and a key/ring light, especially for calls and screencasts.

I want to start getting better in front of camera, and hopefully having both good audio (I already have a mic) and video (lighting and potentially a new webcam) will give me the kick I need to follow this path.

Start composting

I’ve yet to set up a proper composting system since we moved house over 2 years ago. Inspired by my own post(!) 3 years ago, I plan to change that in 2023. After reading Zero Waste Home, I learned composting my food and paper scraps is an essential part of the ethos this book preaches.

Start a side business

In some ways, I’ve always thought I’d make a good entrepreneur. The Internet has levelled the playing field and made it possible for less shouty, introverted types to launch businesses and start making money online. The past few years I’ve been consuming a lot of this type of content and it’s more than whetted my appetite for starting a little something on the side. I’d love to test the water with this in 2023, even if it doesn’t lead anywhere.

Prioritise sleep

I talked about my struggles with sleep in my 2022 in review post. I’ve already added a “bedtime” column to my journal database so I can start tracking this data. I always find habits much easier to build and stay consistent with when they’re tracked. Even if that data remains private, I still feel accountable to it.

Fitness goals

2022 was such a bumper year for fitness, and I want to get this ball rolling in 2023. I’ve already mentioned above my desire to start the 5x5 workout, which will take some doing to carve into my current schedule and stick with.

I want to continue the small amount of progress I made at the end of last year with my swimming. This means a swim session at least once a month.

Bouldering is a hobby I used to enjoy consistently on a weekly basis for a number of years prior to lockdown. I’ve not been back since 2020 and I’d really like to. A friend of mine I used to go with has recently returned, which is just the incentive I need to rekindle my enjoyment of climbing.

I’m aware I’m starting to run out of time in my schedule here for all these goals, but I’d love to start cycling more. I’m surrounded by the beautiful South Downs and I have a decent enough road bike gathering dust in my garage. I’ll have to sacrifice a few runs to fit in the occasional bike ride, but I’m fine with that.

For running, it would be advantageous of me to predict an increase in mileage this year. It’s more likely I will back off slightly to make way for other activities. Running is so crucial to my physical and mental health though, so I doubt I will take my foot off the gas too much. My race challenge this year is to run a sub-1h40 half marathon.

This site

I achieved pretty much everything I wanted last year on this site. The beauty of the Notion integration means it will continue to refresh dynamically week-on-week. With that said, I don’t want it to stagnate. I have a few modest goals I’d like to achieve:

Visual books page

At the moment, this is a text list as I couldn’t find a reliable API for books. I want to revisit this to bring some more interesting elements to this page.

Weekly feed

This page is long, and text-heavy. I want to condense the weekly data down and make it a bit more attention-grabby. I’ll be playing with this and plan to build and preview in public on Twitter as I go.

Opinions

As much as I love collating and presenting my consumption data for my own use and others’ curiosity, the real value in this is my opinion of it. I’ve started book review blog posts and I already review films I watch on Letterboxd. I want to build in a mechanism for leaving a quick review of a podcast or TV episode too. This information would provide context for the episode and is much more valuable than the cold data.

Fitness page

There’s tonnes of interesting metrics that could be added to this page using my walk and run data. Popular times, popular days, furthest run, average run length, fastest run, biggest mileage week, etc. I'd also like to dig into some Strava maps to see if I can vary up the media on the page.

Design spruce-up

I've never really been happy with the design of the site, nor do I consider myself a designer by any stretch of the imagination. However, there's scope for some iterative improvements that could bring some more harmony to the site.