The great thing about habit tracking so ruthlessly with my Personal Dashboard is that I’ve got tons of data to rip apart for an annual review. Let’s see how the year went…

Entertainment

10,438 pages in 55 books

Favourites include This Is Dyslexia, The Extinction Files and New Eden trilogies (via Goodreads)

59 movies watched

Don’t Look Up, Back To The Future, Gladiator & Jojo Rabbit getting 5-stars (via Letterboxd)

23 vinyls in Archive Collection

Plenty dance classics from late 80s and early 90s including 14 7″ and 9 12″

477 podcasts listened

Now following Hed Kandi, Disco77 and Software Social

Entertainment Clippings

  • Morning Kindle time (with a daily Ticktick habit) really encouraged me to read more often, smashing previous records, establishing a newfound love for the written word
  • Saturday Pizza Night with the kids also helped us dive into some classics and new releases from the plethora of on-demand services at our disposal
  • Vinyl hunting in charity shops and eBay started a new habit of logging my Archive Collection through Instagram posts (and an IFTTT recipe syncing with a Google Sheet)
  • Hacking the Apple Podcasts database and getting an Apple Home Mini in the kitchen helped track the extra podcast listening time I’ve lost from remote working (aka no commute time)

Health

103 workouts over 2,924 minutes

33% runs, 28% HIIT and 16% weight training

Average 76.6kg

Ranging between 74.5kg and 78.5kg

Health Highlights

  • Hit 75km goal in January for Maggie’s Centre, raising £210 in the process
  • Painful joints resulted in regular physio, custom orthotics and daily resistance band training to build up leg strength muscles
  • Shifted to HIIT in March to focus on core strength
  • Got 12kg dumbbells in the Summer to focus on functional strength
  • Generally feeling healthier now I’m in a habit of 3-4 workouts a week
  • Exercise definitely reduces around school holidays – I need to work out how to do fitness with the kids


Sides

House Finesse

41 releases including 16 new mixes.
34,906 downloads (across all shows)

Make Life Work

16 new episodes over 3 seasons.
1,856 downloads (across all episodes)

Sides Show

  • Making @Fesshole with Rob Manuel was the most popular MLW episode (thanks to some timely RT’s)
  • Party Time with Disco 77 – his debut residency – was the biggest release day on House Finesse
  • Finally got some female talent on HF with guest appearances from Anna Cee and Amy Lauren
  • Hooking IFTTT and Zapier up with Google Sheets opened my mind to endless life tracking/hacking on my Personal Dashboard over the year
  • Euro 2020 motivated me to setup footballcal.com based on previous Sports Times efforts but saw very little engagement
  • On The Side went very quiet this year with interaction severely dropping from the community – likely due to reduced capacity/motivation following the novelty of Lockdown 1 and 2.0

Career

606 Trello’s completed

Since monitoring from 1 October 2021

46 average weekly actions

Most productive week before Christmas with 58 items

Work Milestones

  • Returned to ASOS in March as Engineering Manager following 13 months as Delivery Lead at Alibaba Group’s WorldFirst
  • Recruited 3 engineers, promoted 3, lost 2
  • Setup and hosted 10 Lightning Talks and compèred 3 Tech Develops wraps
  • Introduced quarterly remote Speedback sessions to all my teams to encourage more rapid, honest feedback between engineers
  • Focused energy on Tech Brand, Emerging Talent and DEI initiatives across the EM community in Tech
  • Worked on a PETALS framework to measure morale on a weekly basis
  • October had the most office visits with December the least (thanks to Omicron variant)