Much like Nicholas Felton's totally awesome and inspiring Annual Report, I've always wanted to write up a personal year-end summary of the things that I did, consumed, and accomplished that year. Below is my first attempt, which summarizes 2018. Hopefully I keep up this tradition and, 60 years from now, my kids have many of these to read.
I saw 52 films this year. That’s a far cry from my pre-kiddo life when an average year busted into triple digits. Alas, I’ll take 50+ as a solid win.
Below is a breakdown of the film ratings that I doled out in 2018:
Of the films that I saw this year, below were my top 10 (in order of preference).
In 2018 I saw one or more seasons of 17 television shows, about half of which were based on documentary-ish shows (i.e., mostly-non-scripted, based on a true events).
Each show that I watched in 2018 is listed below (in order of preference):
According to Spotify, I listened to 16,190 minutes of tunes this year (though, as I write this, there are still some days left in 2018).
My most listened to artist was Drake at 28 hours, followed by SZA, Hayden James, Kacey Musgraves (who liked one my tweets!), and Dawn Golden.
My most listened to individual songs were (in order):
Below are my favorite newly discovered artists from 2019 (in order of preference):
If you’re into this sort of thing, dig into this Spotify playlist which is comprised of the tunes I listened to most in 2019.
We are probably living through the golden age of the podcast -- there's so much great, and incredibly targeted, content to choose from. Of all the different mediums listed above, I probably consumed the most content from podcasts this year.
Below are the weekly/monthly-produced podcasts that I frequented the most in 2019 (in order of preference):
In addition, below are the season-based/single-run podcasts that I completed this year (in order of preference):
I had an epicly awesome year on the scale! On January 1st I weighed in at 184 pounds -- oof. On December 31st: 164 pounds. I lost 20 pounds exactly in 2019!
How did I do it? I ate less food. Like, a lot less.
Losing the first 10-12 pounds was not terribly hard. I aimed to eat 1,200 calories per day, and usually 90% of those calories came from one large meal (almost ways dinner). Other than coffee in the morning, I mostly fasted all day until dinner, skipping breakfast and lunch. The weight came off quickly.
Once I got to 170 or so pounds, I stalled big time -- eating less no longer resulted in pounds lost. That’s when I started doing full or multi-day fasts. I wrote about my longest fast (three days) in this blog post. Through out the year I completed a few fasts, each between one and three days long. This approach got me down to 164 pounds.
My goal for next year is to get down to 157 pounds. That’s only seven more pounds, but losing any additional weight at this point is incredibly hard. The obvious next move is to start exercising (yuck!), which I’ll probably end up resorting to in 2019 to hit my goal weight.
I traveled to 13 places in 2018. Most of them work-related (I do a lot of onsite trainings for Onit clients all over the world) -- a few were family trips.
Below are all of the places that I traveled this year (listed in no particular order):
Far and away my favorite trip was to Disneyland with Jeannie and Brighton. The DL is one of my favorite places on Earth (I've gone by myself before, as a grown ass man); seeing it through my two-year-old daughter's eyes was amazing.
Below are a few other interesting stats and events from this year:
And that's it! A great year -- here's to an even better 2019!