Annual Review 2024
Writing a personal Annual review is the equivalent of getting a report card from your teacher in school days. The difference is that in real life, no one's opinion matters more than your own. So you may aswell take the time to see how you did over the past year. At least that's the way I think about it.
Annual Reviews are a good exercise to give yourself time to reflect back on your year. I like them for one single reason. No one is as invested as myself in me doing well. No one. I guarantee it’s the same for you. So take some ownership. You don’t have to share you review in public. If you are not where you want to be in life for whatever reason or in any bucket, work, health, wealth relationships, I guarantee you a review will help. It’s like staring in the mirror exposed and saying to yourself, no hiding.
Anyways, I didn’t publish last years, but I will publish this one. Some of you might find the questions useful prompts as questions to ask yourself. If you think this is self-indulgent, screw you. People who grow and improve think about growing and improving in any area. Don’t be hard on yourself for thinking that too. Ok let’s get started.
2024 is my fourth annual review. These are a good opportunity to take stock of where I am at, where I’m going and where I want to get to.
Here is my TLDR year in review:
- Got Married
- Spent time with family
- Travelled to Portugal, Greece, UK
- Finished a small apartment
- Pivot in career - physio to software engineer
- crap finance planning
- Physical fitness nosedived
Like last year, an over-arching question is “Are my current choices helping me to live the sort of life I want to live?”
Here are some guiding questions that I find helpful to start with:
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What went well this year?
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What did not go so well this year?
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What am I working towards?
For these questions, there are four buckets to follow, health, relationships, work, wealth.
What went well this year?
Married my best Friend
This was the best thing I did this year and will probably turn out to be the best thing I do in my life. I married my best friend Amy. We had our wedding in Ennistymon, Clare in June. The day went better than both of us could have hoped for. It was brilliant to have our family and friends with us. Having a small ceremony and a buffet style approach meant that we got to spend the day with people that mattered to us. I’m biased but I would recommend a smaller wedding for anyone considering it in the future.
Being a Dad
In fifty years, I will probably look back at these years when Darragh is small as my favourite. He is 2 and growing up quick. The phrase that I think captures parenthood the best is this, “The days can be long but the years go fast.” A big part of being a Dad is trying to be present when I am here. It’s so easy to get distracted and try to split attention. This is a reminder to myself more than anything else. I think the best part about being a parent is the amount of true moments of laughter and joy you get with a toddler. They happen almost on demand. Sure, life is busier but it’s worth it.
Study
I completed all the module sections of a PostGraduate Diploma in Cloud Computing and Software Development. This took a huge amount of hours over the year during evenings and weekends but I am sure it will be worth it in the future. For the next few months, I am looking forward to exams and assignment deadlines. I love learning but now I will have the time to be more focused on what topics I want to work on.
Travel
This year, Amy and I travelled to Portugal after our wedding by ourselves. It was a great few days. I doubt we are going to get away for the next few years with just the two of us but it was lovely to do. We also travelled to Greece for our honeymoon with Darragh and it was a brilliant break even with a leg brace in situ. Bringing a toddler on a holiday is a lot easier than I had expected.
Rental Income
We managed to increase our rental income which was good. This is important because it’s allowing me to take a pay cut to make a pivot in my current career and it meant that we could afford for Amy to job share this year.
What didn't go so well this year?
Training / Fitness
I probably trained well for 8 months of the year. Still, I am finishing the year in the worst shape physically that I have been in ever. I’ve realised this year that training is way more beneficial for my mind than my body. It’s stupid that I have this thing I can do every day that helps me to mentally stay really stable and I haven’t used it. I played football again with Moycullen GAA and it was nice to be involved with a team again. The downside was that I ended up on crutches twice this year. In the last game I played this year, I had a partial tear of my patella tendon. It meant I missed six weeks of work. It’s 3 and a half months later and i am only back to running now. When this injury happened, I lost interest in trying to modify gym workouts too. As the year ends, I am probably in the worst shape physically I have been in over the past 10 years. My diet has slipped big time too. That’s ok though. I have thought a bit about the triggers, behaviours and habits around this. I am still getting about 2 decent workouts a week in but I plan to sort this out. I am a big fan of tracking data so I will post a few numbers here for 2024.
Current weight 82.5kg = too heavy
Gym workouts 72 = 6 per month or 1.5 per week.
Runs 42 = 3.5 per month. Some of these were actually GAA training sessions, some I didn’t track so there are sessions on top of that too. It’s lower than last year.
Current Gym Lifts
Deadlift = 140kg
BackSquat = 105kg
Bench Press = 100kg
Row = 70kg
Shoulder press = 25kg db
Chinups = 8
Muscle up = 0
Work
It’s funny, I could almost copy and paste what I wrote last year. In my current role, I am still working as a staff-grade physiotherapist. The job I have is quite rewarding but the scope to progress is limited massively. On one hand there wasn’t the opportunity to be promoted in my current workplace. On the other that is an excuse. There’s another way to look at this.
I am starting working as an intern Software Engineer which is brilliant and something I am really looking forward to. I have been working towards this role for the past 3 years. While ideally, I would have preferred to be starting a graduate role, the company seem great and I feel that I will have the opportunity to progress pretty fast.
I have had a lot of conversations over the past few weeks about making a career pivot in my early thirties. This is interesting because half the time, I think people ask the question from the perspective of their own position. They are looking for my answer to justify their thoughts which seems silly really. I made my decision months ago and that was when I thought about it the most. If you are thinking about a scenario like changing career, this essay by cdixon was a big factor in helping me figure out the wording to the problem I was trying to solve. https://cdixon.org/2009/09/19/climbing-the-wrong-hill
Working on the Internet
I built out some projects this year. If you are reading this, you are on my own website https://www.mikelynagh.com/ Having my own domain and tiny corner of the internet is great. I will build out this site over the coming year.
I did manage to build some full stack applications and I learned a lot from these projects. One of these that might have some potential is https://gaaclubscore.vercel.app/ It’s an application that tracks club match scores. I have to add more features to make this more automated but it is an interesting project. I have it included here because I did not get enough eyeballs on it this year.
I didn’t earn any revenue from internet work either this year. The simple reason for this is that I didn’t focus enough on it. I am ok with that decision though as I had limited time and I chose to focus on study. I plan to change this next year.
Keeping in touch with Friends
I see my family a good bit. I don’t see my friends enough. When you become a parent, it’s an easy trap to fall into to say life is busy. But that’s a lazy answer. That was the line I wrote last year and it is the same this year. Our wedding was brilliant to see my friends in one place. And my stag. It seems like everybody gets a bit busier every year. I think that I can still make a better effort to keep in touch with people over time even when I don’t see them as often. A phone call or a message goes a long way. Being Irish, a big factor is that a lot of reunions inolve alcohol. Birthdays, funerals, weddings, christenings. There is always alcohol involved. I really hate hangovers. A good solution here is having zero beers. It’s something I will do more often next year.
Finances
This is the second year in a row that I have included finances here. It was an expensive year for 2 big reasons. We got married. We renovated and finished a small apartment. The results of this mean that I am not saving anywhere what I would like to be each month. By the end of next year, I think it would be good to aim to be saving 35 - 40 per cent of my earnings. I know this is a big target but I think that it is achievable.
I have started to track my finances over the past few months and this helped a lot to figure out spending patterns. I have built up a small emergency fund and started a private pension. Having an emergency fund gives me huge peace of mind. I am going to set out some targets below around finances.
Alcohol
I had way too many days this year where I drank too much and lost the following day because of it. I think i have an exceptionally low tolerance towards it. The other thing I have an issue with is stopping at the amount I planned to. I don’t think this is a good practice. I enjoy one or two beers. The issue i have is that I don’t stop at one or two. I have thought about giving it up cold turkey. I don’t know if i actually want to do that. I am a social drinker only. As I am writing this now, I realise I don’t know exactly what type I relationship I want with alcohol. The only thing I know for sure is that I don’t want the current one that I have.
What am I working towards?
So what's the end game? Where do I want to be by January 2026.
When you try to do this, even for yourself you realise how hard it actually is to do?
Reflecting back on the past year, I didn’t spend enough time thinking about goals and targets that were important to me. This meant I was on autopilot at time and the stuff I said I wanted to do didn’t happen. For 2025, I am going to create buckets for different areas of my life. Instead of setting hard targets and goals, I want to be directionally correct more often than not. That’s what the below exercise is about.
START, STOP, CONTINUE
START
Early Starts
I am a morning person. I have a kid who is an early riser too. The past year, I tried to work on stuff late at night but I am not nearly as productive as early mornings. This is something I plan to build into 2025. Start early mornings and have a clear plan of exactly what I am doing at that time.
Review Blocks
This was something I tried to do once this year. It didn’t work. But I love the idea of it. It is like giving yourself a yearly scorecard. I had probably aimed too high to try and take a full day 4 times a year. I can definitely commit to a block of hours for planning on a quarterly basis.
Writing
A few years back, I published a weekly article. This forced me to write. I had forgotten how good writing is to help me to think through my ideas better. Next year, I am going to commit to writing more. I will keep some of this private and some of it public. If you want to be a better thinker, writing is the single best exercise to help that in my opinion.
Overview Planning
In the past, an exercise I did but didn’t stick to consistently was to plan out weekly actions and overviews for 30, 60 & 90 days. This is a simple exercise but acts as a good way to focus on increasing results. I am going to do this by printing out a template. I think having the written document helps to keep it relevant as it is a visual cue.
Weekly Planning
For the next year, I am going to try and build a habit of setting a weekly calendar for myself. The idea here is to include the main stuff that I want to do each week and then stick to it as much as I can.
STOP
Doom Scrolling
I think scrolling social media at night time is the single worst thing I am doing for my sleep. Youtube shorts are so hard to stop scrolling from, they are an example of a great piece of engineering for making a sticky product. I plan to stop going on my phone and I think the best way to do this is to have a hard cut off point. I might try and find an app that will just block all social media cold turkey at a time.
Evening Snacking
I ended up eating way too much junk food this year. Most of that ended up happening in the evenings because I was studying and trying to get a sugar rush. This wasn’t even out of hunger. Eventually I think that it just became habitual.
CONTINUE
Date Nights
I feel bad writing this here. We tried and failed at this last year. But it’s too important not to make a priority. I think a good cadence would be one big date night every month and one small time slot for us every week.
Planning Workouts
I am back to training weekly. I am going to do a half-marathon early next year for two reasons. It will be a focus for training. It will help to build back a running plan while continuing to rehab a knee injury.
Finance Tracking
I did this the last few months of the year and it was eye opening. Just the simple action of writing down my spending meant that I knew where my money was going. Some of the spending I did was just stupid in hindsight. I will definitely keep this up.
This has gotten pretty long. For a follow up on this, I am going to write an article on the monthly actions I am going to focus on for 2025.
If you have written a yearly review, I would love to read it! Best of luck for 2025.