How My 2023 Flags Turned Out
First, the overall picture
How the Flags 🚩 I planted at the start of 2023 turned out
- Get up early and read on 300+ days
✅ 311 days
- Hit my exercise target on 300+ days
(10,000 steps / heart rate up to 170 / 300+ calories burned in one session)
⭕️ Not tracked
Around 100 times 3. Keep a diary on 300+ days ⭕️ 191 times* 4. Plan on 300+ days ⭕️ 58 times
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Sleep a full 7.5 hours on 300+ days ⭕️ 85 times 6. Write 52+ high-quality WeChat posts ⭕️ 27 posts 7. Read 50+ books ✅ 51 books
-
Listen to Dedao for 144+ minutes a day
(details below)
⭕️ Daily average 70 minutes (at 1.75–2x speed)
- In 2023 I completed one "off-the-books" task: levelled up my climbing 🧗 — I can now touch V4.
*Diary: roughly 130,000 characters
My Dedao stats
By comparison, the completion rate on the Dedao study list I drew up for myself is too painful to look at.
Ha, how pitiful — I finished hardly any of it.
When it comes to learning, I follow my whims more and more, and I don't know whether to be happy that my "curiosity has finally gone through the roof," or worried about my "stress-free slackness."
Compared with 2022, I set quite a few fewer flags in 2023, but the sense of reward didn't drop.
First, because the intensity of individual items like reading went up by 30%;
second, as HBS teaches — too many metrics on a balanced scorecard blur the strategy; most of the time, LESS is MORE.
Honestly, I like my 2023 flags better: more focused, and with higher leverage.
Reflecting on what I did and didn't complete, a few thoughts:
Routine is very, very important. The only two targets I hit were both tied to my "early-morning check-in"; a fixed time and a fixed action are absolutely key to building habits and getting things done. One post a week is easier to manage than 52 posts a year. Every bit of progress needs to be internalised and embedded into every day, every hour and every week of life. Remember the motto I love: what counts is persistence — why rise at the third watch and sleep at the fifth? Nothing is less useful than one day in the sun and ten in the cold. Optimising time management takes method. In my diary on January 7, 2023, I wrote: "Two big ways to save time: subtract, and combine."
Subtract: cut entertainment, cut pointless socialising, cut the photography hobby, cut binge-watching, cut shopping, cut the beauty salon too... Try imagining the last day of your life and you'll see what you can't let go of and what doesn't matter. Then decisively cut the "second-tier" things. Combine: listen to Dedao while washing up and walking; exercise together when meeting friends; put on a face mask before writing; read while stretching... and so on. With work, exercise, and time with family and friends on top, how could there ever be enough time? It has to be combined with other time — so I've basically stopped driving and listen to books on the road; driving is distracting and not very safe anyway. This year I put both of these into practice, and they helped a lot.
When it comes to learning, I follow my whims more and more. I don't know whether to be happy that my "curiosity has finally gone through the roof," or worried about my "stress-free slackness."
Sleep always gets sacrificed and needs special attention. It takes a herculean effort not to sacrifice the most important things in life, like sleep, like family. Setting targets for them keeps us from going off track.
Review your goals regularly. If I'd reviewed my Dedao list earlier, I'd have done much better.
Every year more of my flags fall than stay standing, but that's all right. It reminds me of a line a French winery wrote in a bad-weather year:
The weather made the grapes sour; let this glass toast the imperfections of the year.