Last day of 2023, how did you manage to achieve your goals?

I'm leaning towards having a mastery-oriented (as opposed to performance-oriented) goal orientation. As such, I'm always focused on working to improve myself in a wide variety of things. There are no big goals for me, only directions. That said, I'm satisfied with the delta of where I'm at now minus where I had been this time last year. And, the direction I'm headed looks promising.

I love yearly goal setting and tracking! I achieved 4 of my 6 goals for 2023. The biggest thing that helped me was my progress tracking spreadsheet [0].

I try to define very achievable monthly milestones. Over the past few years I have learned to love the feeling of focusing on just this month's set of milestones and accomplishing them in time.

For anyone that's interested, I'll share a link to a sample of my progress tracking spreadsheet [0] -- nothing complicated, but it can be helpful to have a predetermined structure in place. Feel free to make a copy for your own use!

[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13G9L1t82BtIggxEqeFUV...

Early career guy here. Thankfully, 2023 was a good year for me. And long overdue; the last few years have been rough. This year I:

1. Got married to my best friend

2. Met important KPIs at work, got a good raise

3. Published a few cover stories for a magazine--as a writer, writing the front-page story for a magazine has been a dream for a long time

4. Made good headway on personal creative projects

Counter-intuitively, what helped me most was narrowing my scope. Juggling wedding planning, hectic work schedules, assignment deadlines, etc. was stressful, so I just focused on what I could do each day, then every week or so I'd take a look at long-term objectives, recalibrate my objectives for the next week to align with those, and then not look at those long-term objectives again for a while. I learned a lot about breaking projects down into their constituent parts and making them manageable.

2023 wasn't the best for me, but I did manage to do the one thing I really said I would. I finally released publicly my first side project after years of just working on ideas or focusing on work-stuff.

Even better, the "launch" went great [1] and gave me the necessary boost to keep at it!

It took lots of late and endless nights, much experimenting and tinkering, but I kept reminding myself to keep it minimal and just have it work.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38155544

As 2023 ends, it's been a fulfilling year. We welcomed a new child, a personal highlight for my family. Career-wise, I explored new opportunities, launched a product, and am gearing up to start my business in early 2024. It's been a year of both joy and professional growth!

> "Greeting people of HN" Purposefully ignoring the bots?