What I learned from tracking all my actions for the past 6 months

On new year's day, millions of people write down their new year’s resolutions and pledge to stick by them no matter what. However, a study found that up to 91% of these were not achieved. Every year, I was one of those people that didn't follow up on their yearly objectives and tended to forget over time what they wanted to achieve in the first place. Enough was enough and I decided to do something about it! Shortly after the gong hit midnight and welcomed 2022, I implemented a tracking mechanism based on OKR methodology (Objective, Key, Result). Here it allowed me to plan periodic reviews and retrospectives. At first, this was initially supposed to be a personal matter, but this initially changed after multiple discussions with friends and family members, as well as in several meetup groups. Over time, I realised that my experiment could be found valuable by a lot of people. We are at the halfway point in 2022, so it is time for my first personal retrospective! :)

At the beginning of the year, I identified my growth objectives and assigned tasks based on several past experiences. I grouped them into seven topics that I wanted to track and improve. To be sure to follow up, I set one important constraint: Reviewing each of my tasks at least twice a week and to ensure that I was on track to meet the milestones in each objective. Below are the seven growth areas (not ranked):

• ?? Progressing to Financial Independence
• ?? Enhance Health
• ???? Move to a New Country and Learn a new Language
• ?? Curiosity, Self-Improvement and Creativity
• ?? Relationships, Friends and Family
• ?? Traveling and Discovering New Horizons
• ?? Build up Work-Related Skills

Let's dive into each one of those yearly objectives!

Progressing to Financial Independence ?? :

• Continuing my investment strategy since 2018, I invested on a monthly basis whilst keeping and maintaining a balanced portfolio. Even with the recent crash in the markets (especially in crypto and equity), my investments remained untouched and continue to invest monthly (DCA) as it’s a long term strategy. Overall, my portfolio increased by 2.37%. Taking into account that the S&P 500 having decreased by 17% and Bitcoin by 59% in the same period, I see this as a win. For full transparency, this includes a monthly income’s salary, which I re-invest on a monthly basis.

• Moving abroad and living in another country means I had to change my medium of investing in stocks as I was no longer eligible to invest in my UK ISA anymore. As of today, I have yet to find a tax-efficient way to invest in Germany. This is why the portion of cash and equivalents increased that much in six months.
• On the learning side, I have only read one book related to finances and plan on reading more in the second half of this year. In addition, I take a high interest in reading several newsletters and watching various YouTube channels in relation to the topic. These are not being tracked as of yet.
• The one lowlight in my financial goal is the difficulty to purchase a property in France. With high prices and demand, achieving this whilst living in Germany makes the task even more challenging.

Enhance Health ?? :

• As the common saying goes: Health is the new wealth. Admitting that I have ignored and not tracked this matter in my life, I decided to take ownership and the results have been incredible. I started working out regularly, totalling to 61 sessions (2.4 days per week). Starting off the year by doing three sets of ten push-ups and three sets of ten crunches per session (30), I am now capable of doing two sets of fifty (100) of each without too much struggle.
• I walked 1 997 074 steps (= 1463.63 km), averaging at 10973 steps per day, which is greater than the 8000 step recommendation. Fun fact, this is roughly the distance from Paris to Budapest.

• What surprised me the most was the fact that I was on a vegetarian diet for 60 days (2.3 days per week), which was more than I thought I would do. That is including my time abroad in France, Italy and Czechia where eating vegetarian meals was deemed to be rather difficult compared to eating back at home.
• The lowlight of this objective category is about the alcohol, with 112 days (4.3 days per week) with at least one alcoholic drink. This is due to the many trips, celebrations and after-works that we had since January.
• As a result, I lost 3.3kg, resulting in a normal BMI of 19.7. This is most likely in connection to the better quality of food in Germany and participation in sport

Move to new country and learn new language????? :

• In February 2022, my girlfriend and I packed up our belongings in the UK and moved to Germany. The move proved to be much tougher than I previously imagined as we arrived in the winter season and unfortunately in the middle of a storm. But with summer fastly approaching, I’m positive it’s only going to get better. We settled down in our apartment, completed all the paperwork and made great friends in Berlin.
• Now the focus is on learning German. I worked 182 days on Duolingo (strike of 586 days!) for a minimum of 25 minutes, and listened to 202 German Podcasts. I recently registered for 1:1 German lessons and will start in July.
• To date, I have only read 2 children's books in German, with the objective of reading 2 complete German books, such as Harry Potter which will be challenging as my German level is currently A2. This will be one of my focuses for the rest of the year.

Curiosity, self-improvement and creativity ?? :

• ?As of 2021, I became an avid reader, completing 11 books and 16 graphic novels (tracked on GoodReads ). My two favorite books were "Atomic Habits" and "The Phoenix Project". I didn't really identify with "Zero to One" as it was too American-centric. In total, I read 2968 pages (16 pages per day).

• In addition to the 16 graphics novels, I completed 2 new Mangas: Kingdom and Vinland Saga, respectively 724 and 194 chapters. It is hard to only select my top 2, but I would select "Il était une fois en France" and "Le monde sans fin".

• My interest in reading grew and I started attending numerous book club discussion events and joined 2 meetups. I intend on being consistent, finding it very interesting and knowledgeable.
• Reading so much also improved my writing skills. Having published 2 articles for the first time online, I personally feel I am well in advance from the initial prevision in this category.
• I also watched 12 documentaries, went to 4 exhibitions, attended 2 theater plays, 2 comedies and 2 music festivals/shows.

Relationships with friends and family ??:

• Changing both countries and jobs at the same time was tough. A lot has changed in a very short period of time, but I have seen things improving, yet it has been challenging.
• I met my friends more than I expected thanks to 2 weddings, several trips to France and various celebrations. Furthermore, I also made new good friends in Germany and saw my family three times, which was more than last year.
• However, I couldn't organise a holiday trip with friends for our birthdays, which was upsetting but not the end of the world.

Traveling and discovering new horizons ??:

• I visited 10 cities (2 new), 6 countries (1 new). My favorite trip by far was Rome. As a huge fan of ancient history, I don’t understand why I did not visit the city sooner. Before the trip, I listened to the 200 episode podcast about The History of Rome from Mike Duncan, which I definitely recommend. There is no holiday planned yet, but Athens and Istanbul are on the top of my list.
• With international borders reopening, traveling is becoming what it was pre-Covid. It is good to be able to travel again and I hope to do more this year!

Built up work related skills ?? :

• ● Since coming to Germany and starting my new position, I’ve settled in the role well at AWS Customer Engineering in Berlin. I passed a new certificate (AWS Architect), several training courses and led 13 interviews which was more than I planned for.
• I’ve only read 1 software related book and am looking to purchase others in the second half of the year
• I also started to look at taking a sabbatical next year and attended a talk from fellow colleagues on the topic.
• On a personal side, I also worked on a personal project to create an automated network of relationships from biographies, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I wrote an article about it: How I Created Social Media Based Books Using Cloud "

When looking at my overall yearly completion, I am in advance with 62.69% with only 50% of the year passed.

In conclusion, it was a positive experience. I was able to follow up on my new year resolutions and it seemed like I found a system that works with my data-driven personality. I got a lot of value in tracking my progress for the past 6 months. It takes some time to prepare and set-up, but once you have the spreadsheet and tools, it is not that hard to keep track. It looks like a lot, but when you track, you start to realise that you do a lot without even noticing. This is due to the recency bias where the things you did in the past are less present in your mind. The idea of this article is not to make someone feel bad or trying to compete. I am sure everybody is doing a lot but do not notice it in the long term as we all tend to forget what we did several month earlier. I believe that tracking helps you recognise your own success.

I will keep on tracking and try to add more data points like movies, family or digital wellbeing. I might also write another article on my tracking process and the tools I am using if you are interested. Let me know in the comments.

The complete tracking spreadsheet can be found here in the Retrospective of Half 1 2022

As a final word, I would like to give a big thanks to @YoannLopez and @JamesClear for the template and inspiration! Thank you also to @Anne-Sophie, Sachin and Chris for the review! :)

Questions? Clarification? Improvement? Need to brainstorm an idea? Share them below in the comments — I’d love to help and hear them!

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Jeremy Labrado, Software Development Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Berlin, Germany. Passionate about personal development, lived in France, Germany, Netherlands, NZ, UK and USA. You can find me in software development and book club meetups.