I didn’t do very well with my resolutions in 2022. I only made progress on two of the five tasks—and I still didn’t finish either one. I ended up with a success rate of about 28%. Awful!
So instead of making new resolutions for 2023, I decided to redo my 2022 resolutions. Here’s how that went.
1. Write at least 15,000-20,000 words on a fiction story: 0% (2022), 0% (2023).
Long story short, I didn’t write anything in either 2022 or 2023.
I had planned to participate in NaNoWriMo in November. I even announced it on my socials. My plan was to work on my blog posts through the week and write the fiction stuff on the weekends. But October was a bad month for me. I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t have enough mental bandwidth for both tasks; I chose the blog.
2. Try Apple Music: 0% (2022), 100% (2023).
As I mentioned in my 2022 Top Songs post, I got so wrapped up in YouTube Music that I forgot all about Apple Music.
Well, I finally got the chance to try it thanks to Angry Birds Dream Blast, the only game that I still regularly play these days. It offered me two free months in exchange for completing five levels. It was a rough battle, but I made it and claimed the special code.
My verdict? Apple Music itself works well and looks much prettier than the other services, but I’m sticking with YouTube Music and Spotify. Let’s just say that I forgot how complicated it is to use Apple services without an Apple device. I ran into a headache that required two calls to customer service to resolve. I canceled the trial that same week.
3. Write at least four movie reviews: 75% (2022), 75% (2023).
I wrote three of the four required movie reviews in 2022:
In 2023, I still only wrote three:
I learned that I can only do three reviews a year. Writing ~6,000 words takes a lot out of me. It’s frustrating because there are so many movies that I want to talk about. But I know my limits now and I have to abide by them.
4. Learn more Korean words: 0% (2022), 0% (2023).
I didn’t study Korean much in either year. In fact, I ended up uninstalling the Duolingo and Language Drops apps altogether. For some reason, Korean just isn’t sticking to my brain. It’s like Japanese filled it up and left no room left for other languages. I’m not going to give up, though. I’ll have to figure out a different tactic.
5. Take three LinkedIn Learning courses: 67% (2022), 0% (2023).
I completed two of my three courses in 2022. I passed the SEO Foundations in May and Agile Foundations in June. I also received badges on my LinkedIn profile for similar assessments. I didn’t take a third course because I couldn’t find anything that caught my interest.
This year, I didn’t take any courses or assessments. I still didn’t find anything that I wanted to take, and I didn’t want to take a course just for the sake of taking something.
Conclusion
Ultimately, I raised my success rate to 35% this year, which is a 7% improvement from before. Better, but still bad. If I were in school, that would be a big fat “F.”
To be honest, I’m done making resolutions. I like the idea of putting goals down on paper and measuring my progress, but the whole thing puts too much extra stress on me and I’m not sure how effective it actually is in the long run.