In recent years, I have been slipping on reviewing and setting annual goals. I used to set goals during the winter holidays, which were a nice respite and reset from the regular routine.
The holidays are still a change of pace, but since having children, they haven’t provided the same distance from life to reflect on life. However, I still like the idea of doing these goals; it just takes a little longer.
Setup a Personal LLM Chatbot
I set this goal both to better understand generative AI and to have a private option for inputing my data. I’m quite pleased that I finished this project relatively early last year and wrote a blog post about it.
In the blog post, I mentioned that I hadn’t used the setup. Since then, I have used the Raspberry Pi but not the generative AI. I never quite got the wake-from-lan to work consistently, and the performance and results of the model were not as good as freely available options online.
I use GitHub Copilot for work. Otherwise, I use ChatGPT about once a month typically for some open-ended work-related question where a google search would just return SEO-optimized blog spam.
I’m not going to make any projections about the future of generative AI. I’m glad I did this project to understand it better, and I know I have it as an option, but it certainly isn’t pressing.
Say Grace
I picked this goal as a way to slow down and express appreciation. And saying grace was a specifically difficult way of accomplishing that, which is maybe exactly why this goal was so good.
Weeknight dinners are a total frenzy.. It’s a sprint between finishing work, picking the children up, making dinner, and sitting down to eat. The last step is toug part because children are particularly vocal in expressing their hunger.
Typically, I am putting parts of dinner on the table while finishing up with things. By the time I’m sitting down to eat, the rest of the family might be well into dinner. As such, the beginning of dinner is poorly defined.
I will continue to think on this one.
Drive the Speed Limit
I do! Mostly. Sometimes I’ll speed up while moving with traffic, but when I notice, I also slow back down again.
I set this goal because it’s a safe thing to do but also to find one area where I consciously fight back against my urge to rush. I’m not aware of spillover effects into other parts of my life, but I do feel good about this one.
Final Thoughts
Stay tuned for my 2025 goals. I haven’t quite settled on them, though I have tried out some new routines in the past month. I will reflect on whether any of them need to be reinforced with a goal.