2016 Year End Review – Project Worthwhile Life

2016 Year End Review – Project Worthwhile Life
William J. Daish Memorial Trophy (1971 Women's Singles )
William J Daish Memorial Trophy (1971 Women’s Singles) Dennis Mayor collection of Photographs State Library Victoria

And now it’s time to look back and complete my 2016 Year End Review. It started with my 2015 virtues because I felt they continued to be a sound basis for a worthwhile life in 2016.

Beauty

Beauty has the components of body, presence, house and garden. At the end of 2015, I thought presence, house and garden had all progressed well, but I didn’t want to let them go. I had wanted to come up with new goals but ended up defaulting to my 2015 goals. My body goal remained getting down to ≤61 kg (134.5 lbs) from 63.9kg (141 lbs).

Body

Mid-Year: overall lost ½ kg (1.1 lbs). Rating: ????  In October I reduced my target to ≤59 kg (130 lbs) based on further medical advice.

Year End: I was dogged by various digestive and bronchial issues for the second half of the year, which bothers me a bit given my transplantiversary review. My December weight was 62.2 kg (137 lbs). Rating: ????

Presence

Mid-Year: I stuck with my guidelines, and didn’t make any purchasing mistakes. Rating: ????

Year End: I was happy with my clothes, but less with my hair. I experimented with different colours, and particularly enjoyed purple. Rating: 😐

Home

Mid-Year: I continued my cleaning and decluttering. I recognised that it was time to do some redecorating and upgrading, but didn’t make a plan for that. Rating ????

Year End: About the same as mid-year, but we have a longer to-do list than before. Rating: 😐

Garden

Mid-Year: We worked so hard in the garden in 2015, so it was heartbreaking to lose so much of that work to the storms. I feel like we needed a do-over with new plants. Rating: ????

Year End: We bought indigenous plants from the local nursery and didn’t lose them in the Spring storms. And we had some good food crops that were shared with the dogs, birds and local wildlife. Rating: 🙂

Friendship

Friendship’s components were creatures, friends and contribution. These were also business as usual (BAU) and by default last year’s goals.

Creatures

Mid-Year: We continued creating environments for the dogs and native wildlife. I noticed some creature changes over the last six months – probably related to storm damage. Or the new fox. Rating: ????

Year End: The dogs had their twelfth birthday and are still mostly going strong. We still have lots of birds visiting and I love that so much about this place. We haven’t had much of a rodent issue this year, so I suppose that the fox had become the night time control for them. Rating 🙂

Friends

Mid-Year: This was about making and maintaining friendships – “real” and “virtual”. My virtual friendships were thriving, and I was keeping up with old friends, though I felt a need to develop new local friendships. Rating: ????

Year End: I’m finding that despite my efforts at maintenance, some of my friendships are dying off. It’s a shame but it’s a natural response to my changing relevance in some lives. I have plans to find and cultivate more relevant relationships to supplement the survivors. Rating 🙂

Contribution

Mid-Year: In essence, contribution was about treating strangers as friends. One of the amazing things about virtual life is that it is so easy to do that. Rating: ????

Year End: I started making micro-loans (which are very rewarding) and buying suspended coffees. Rating: 🙂

Pleasure

By the end of 2015 pleasure consisted of adventure and recharge; pretty clear-cut – try new things and enjoy guilt-free moments of idleness. Weirdly, that was a struggle so I kept the same goals for 2016. I added the requirement to turn my computer off by 9 pm and read a book a fortnight.

Adventure

Mid-Year: I included experiments, and I enjoyed them, but coming up with new ones was difficult at times. Rating: ????

Year End: Adventure mainly became a way of adapting to a new web host and a new phone. Rating 🙁

Recharge

Mid-Year: I found I still wasn’t reading as many books as I wanted to (outside of my book research). Rating: ????

Year End: Recharging remains problematic, and I continue to struggle with the feeling that I don’t deserve to relax and recharge because I don’t go out to work or earn as much money as I once did. Rating 🙁

Wisdom

Wisdom comes from growth and choice. I didn’t set specific growth goals because I was learning a lot about publishing, blogging and business stuff. Choices are easier though still limited by circumstance; kind of BAU but still needing work.

Growth

Mid-Year: I was learning a lot of new and interesting things, but couldn’t tell what was going to be useful before I learned it – a productivity/effectiveness thing. Rating: ????

Year End: Mainly learned about websites and businesses, which was what I started the year aiming for even if it doesn’t feel like much at the end. Rating 🙂

Choice

Mid-Year: I was finding making choices easier; perhaps because I was practising. Rating: ????

Year End: Choice is a funny old thing, and it seems that in an attempt to manage my health I mainly chose to nap. Rating: 😐

Wealth

I set an income target of $29,163, half of the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia recommendation for a comfortable retiree living. I also wanted to reduce our expenditure with a Lean shopping methodology, Just-In-Time-Delivery, set budgets, and negotiate better rates with our utility providers.

Income

Mid-Year: I wasn’t doing well at earning money, in fact, I was doing so badly I reduced my goal to $1,000 a month because it was so depressing. But the books offer the potential to make money for the rest of my life (plus 70 years) so I wasn’t too upset about that. Rating: ????

Year End: By the end of the year I had earned less than 10% of my target, but more than during 2015. Rating: 😐

Expenditure

Mid-Year: Aside from the misfortune of reaching the end of our appliance(s) life-cycle(s), it was a sound approach. Rating: ????

Year End: My personal expenditure has been modest, though we had to make some big household purchases. I negotiated cheaper utility provision! My business expenditure has been extreme by comparison to income, but it still cost sh*tloads less than opening a bricks and mortar business. Rating 🙂

Overall

Mid-Year: I acknowledged the need to renew my focus on body, the garden, friendships (particularly new local friends), and new book reading idleness. Rating: 60% ????

Year End: On balance, 2016 has not been kind to beauty; body in particular, remains an issue. On the surface, friendship looks good but there are gaps that need filling. Pleasure needs more work. Wisdom hasn’t been too bad, but I think that I need to take a more active role managing it. The aspects of wealth that I can control are controlled. Rating: 46% 🙂 . For 2017 I need to work on converting the 31% 😐 .

How was your 2016? Did you achieve your goals? Do you have more to do in 2017?


If you would like more information about 2016, click here for the monthly progress reports.

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