[Yearly Review][2018] Did I achieve my goals in 2018?

2018 has been a strange year. I think I did reasonably well at changing up my list of goals to reflect the changes that happened in 2017, but there has definitely been some delayed reaction to those changes.  I'll say up front that I'm cautiously optimistic about my list of goals for the year, but I also know that there have been some big failures. Let's see how this goes.

General

5.5/15 - an okay showing, but could do better

• Save a net £3000, after accounting for holidays (A bit of a fail here - I saved roughly £2500, exact amount TBD depending on interest for December. In part this was due to spending £1800 on holidays in 2018, 1/3 of which was for a long weekend in Marseille!)
• Keep my weight between 12st and 13st. (Sadly I've put on some mass this year - I'm now just under 13.5st.)
• Go swimming once per week for more than three-quarters of the year. (Strict reading of this means I fail this one - I went swimming once only 18 weeks this year. But I also went swimming twice a week a lot more, and in total have been swimming at least once for exactly 3/4 of the weeks in 2018.)
• Go swimming twice per week, an average of once per month (I made it to the pool twice during 21 of the weeks this year, easily meeting this one)
• Swim a total of 52km or more throughout the year.  (Another success, and by some margin - I swam a total of 70.8km in 2018, thanks to a higher number of visits and increasing my standard swim from 1km to 1.2km)
• Cycle to work at least once  (Complete failure. It's easy to blame the weather, and certainly the super hot summer didn't exactly encourage me to spend an hour on the bike each way, but the truth is that I was just lazy. I did ride out to Kenilworth on one of my Sunday jaunts, but that was as far as my cycling took me this year.)
• Go on a Sunday cycle ride at least 10 times. (My records show four trips this year, which is pretty pathetic.)
• Publish at least one blog post every two months, not including the end of year review posts. (We'll chalk this one up to misplaced optimism. I didn't even manage my convention round-up for 2018.)
• Attend at least one Wasps match.
• Attend at least two Blaze matches. (Big success here. I think I've been to four or five matches in 2018)
• See at least one play or musical in the West End. (We saw both School of Rock, which was amazing, and the special run of Chess, which was good but not outstanding)
• Drink no Coca Cola / Pepsi / equivalent cola-based drinks.  (After being so close in 2017, I slid backwards in 2018. I think I've had one pint of Coca Cola at lunch, and two cans. Still pretty good, but I would really like to cut it out completely.)
• Visit a Snowdome at least once for skiing practice.  (A miserable failure yet again. I had hoped to go with my brother this Christmas now that he's taken up snowboarding, but sadly his shifts were uncooperative)
• Board the loft (Hahahahaha)
• Fix the radiator in the study (I thought I had fixed it at the start of the year, but when autumn / winter came back around it was once again inoperable. Fortunately it hasn't been as cold as last winter yet.)

Work / Career Development
2/5 for this section, worse than last year. My record with work-related goals continues to be terrible.

• Publish at least one peer-reviewed paper (This continues to be my biggest failing work-wise, and it really needs to change for 2019. There is now some external pressure for one of my papers, which will help.)
• Attend at least one international-level conference. (The UK Exoplanet Community Meeting is becoming more international each year, and I did attend the PLATO Exoplanet Workshop. But the major exoplanet conference of 2018 was actually sold out!)
• Go on at least one observing run. (No visitor observing for me in 2018)
• Participate in at least one career development-related training course (I did two relevant courses in 2018 - I requalified for First Aid at Work, becoming a departmental first aider, and also attended a two day course on public engagement which was very interesting)
• Start working towards some form of project management qualification. (Unfortunately this got pushed to one side by various fire-fighting endeavours related to PLATO, but my line manager and I agreed it to be a key goal for 2018/19)

Reading
2/6, pretty bad. Again, worse than 2017.

• Read 30 fiction books. (I've made it to 25, worse than last year's total.)
• Read 5 non-fiction books. (Just made it to 5)
• Buy 10 or fewer physical books (net) for the house (Although I managed to get rid of a few, I've also bought a fair few books this year. I think I bought ten from Hay-on-Wye alone!)
• Read a total of 40 books. (30 total as of writing this post, and it will only go up by one or two more)
• Read at least 5 full magazines from my pile. (I think I just about did this one, but the pile continues to grow and my Dad keeps giving me more on top of my normal subscriptions!)
• Finish reading the "Shadows of the Apt" series. (I've made it to book 6, and am really enjoying the series so far, but I've not made it any further because of missing books. I could borrow them from my friend James, but I already have a few things of his that I'd like to return before I do so. I'd also like to own them to complete my collection.)

TV and film
3/5, a minor improvement on 2017. But YouTube continues to be the majority of my viewing.

• Watch one TV show from my collection (that I haven't previously watched). (The shows on my hard drive continue to lose out to new shows and YouTube)
• Watch at least five complete seasons of TV shows (different or the same show) (Great success! I've watched at least 9 seasons of TV this year - it's hard to be exact because I can't be sure how many seasons of Supervet we've watched)
• Watch at least one film from my collection (that I haven't previously watched). (Yes, though those films were either newly acquired, or on TV rather than the DVD copy)
• Watch more than 20 films (combined between cinema trips, home, film nights, etc.) (25 as of writing this post, and counting)
• Acquire 10 or fewer DVDs (net) for the house (I'm not 100% sure that this is a failure, but I'm pretty sure)

Wargaming
2/9, absolutely pathetic for what is my main hobby. My hobby time outside of playing at the club has been limited this year, so I've concentrated on building models. But the increased number of Warmachine / Hordes players, and the increased focus on more competition-style play, has meant that these have mostly been new Convergence or Cryx models. 

• Paint 10 models. (Continued abject failure on the paiting front)
• Play at least 1 game of Warmachine / Hordes with a fully painted army. (It's been close with my Convergence, but I didn't manage it)
• Play at least 5 games with each of my Warmachine / Hordes factions (Cryx, Convergence of Cyriss, and Circle Orboros) (This one was close as well, but I've been let down by only playing two games with Circle. In part this is because I've missed quite a few games nights this year.)
• Achieve a Warmachine/Hordes win rate of at least 50% (54% for the year is ok)
• Play at least 3 games of X-Wing (We had a three-round tournament earlier this year, and I managed a couple of other games at some point)
• Play at least 3 games of Dropzone Commander (Only one game, which was fun)
• Build my Dropfleet Commander models (They continue to sit in a box)
• Play at least 1 game of Dropfleet Commander (Given my failure to build the models this was going to be difficult. It was made more so by two of the three players moving away)
• Play at least 1 game of Warhammer 40K 8th edition (I continue to want to try it, but the increased number of Warmachine / Hordes players at the club has made this harder)

Board gaming
5/6 complete - boardgames to the rescue for my overall success rate! 

• Play at least five different games. (23 different games played this year which is actually pretty close to last year's tally) 
• Play at least one new game (I played 7 new games in 2018) 
• Achieve a win rate of at least 33% (Currently sitting at 42% for the year, which is a lot better than I thought it would be after the first quarter of 2018) 
• Teach my girlfriend at least one new game  (Thanks to our new games nights with our friend Adam, I've managed to introduce my girlfriend to six or seven new games)
• Host or attend at least two board game evenings with my friends  (We've managed to have four of our new semi-regular games nights, and my friend Ben had is birthday trip to Thirsty Meeples in Oxford again.)
• Finish Pandemic Legacy: Season 2  (We're so close - we made it to the end of November, so only have one or two more games to go. Unfortunately schedule clashes have meant long stretches with no games, and my reluctance to be out late on Wednesdays [as well as Mondays and Tuesdays] has mostly limited us to one game per session)

Computer gaming
1/2 is what I thought I would get here, and I fully expected it to be a new game rather than completing an old one!

• Finish 1 game's single-player campaigns. (I've had basically no time to play computer games this year. Sad face.)
• Start at least one new game (DiRT rally was my new game this year, though I also bought Dark Souls 2 after watching a playthrough on YouTube. I also have some games outstanding.)

It seems my optimism was misplaced! Overall I completed 20.5/48, which is a poor showing. I changed my goals fairly substantially for this year, so I'll put some of it down to finding my new equilibrium,  but I'm particularly disappointed with my results for the Work and Wargaming sections. Unfortunately, while the latter is just for my own edification, the former has been an area of underachievement for several years, and has potentially serious implications if I don't turn it around next year. And as in previous years, I continue to have one-off goals that hang around without being completed.

2018 has been a bit of a backwards slide from 2017 in terms of this list, and there are some developments and changes in my habits and lifestyle that still aren't full reflected in the goals that I'm setting myself. So 2018's list will see some more changes as I try to get better in the coming year. I'm also going to improve my tracking for a few of the regular items to try and help me keep tabs on my progress throughout the year.