Ask HN: 2023 New Year's resolutions check-up | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: 2023 New Year's resolutions check-up

11 pointsdfee10 comments

Did your 2023 New Year's Resolutions work out?

What are you resolutions for 2024?

I'm also looking to get ahead of 2024 with resolutions that I'm inspired to work towards.

I'm not a fan of setting multiple resolutions (hardcore focus), so I've only set one for this year: to get 1 (one) paying user for my SaaS app.

It didn't help that I finished building it in November, but well... here I am still waiting for that one Stripe notification.

Next year I'll try something easier, like running a half-marathon or something.

Personally, I found focusing to be far worse than not focusing. People don't do resolutions because if they did them, then life would change. Not necessarily by a lot, but something changes. If you had finished building it in February, you'd have to figure out why it hasn't had one paying user. And now that you've built the app, you can still bring the resolution forward next year, but hesitate to.

So I find the lifehack is to have two targets. You procrastinate on one then do the other. You take baby steps to avoid selling that app and end up doing the half marathon.

My goals for 2023 were:

- Alternate marketing weeks and coding weeks to force myself to actually do marketing work.

- Focus on SEO and get to 5,000 monthly visitors.

- Get to $5k MRR (which I think is a bit more realistic than my $10k goal last year).

I'm off by an order of magnitude on the traffic goal and still at $0 MRR. Here's my 2022 year in review post where I laid out those goals: https://www.teaminal.com/blog/2022-year-in-review/ (2023 coming soon)

Update! 2023 year in review post here: https://www.teaminal.com/blog/2023-year-in-review/

If something's worth doing, why wait for the new year? Just start today!

I started trying to exercise every day last year. I've been getting lots of compliments about my body, so it must have helped!

Also now I can do a full back-bridge without assistance from an exercise ball.

1. Fix one of my abandoned projects since 2018 or so: Tremendous success.

I planned to get it up for the users who paid a one time fee $25 for it in the past, and the product had a ton of tech debt. Heroku was charging $5-$7 for it so I hesitated. Ended up getting hosting fees tax deducted and getting it up and running opened up a firehose of potential wealth. Made new friends as well, which counts for more than money.

2. Released some products at work: also tremendous success, and we're barely keeping up with this. Kind of fun just randomly searching the internet and finding a review or people on social media offering tips on your product.

3. Learn langchain and code a raytracer in Android totally using AI: Mixed

Ironically, this was probably the easiest. Bear in mind GPT-4 was only released this year. At the start of 2023, 3.5 was pretty dumb and there were lots of complex architectural plans to teach it to do this. Now I could probably just upload a PDF and some template code. I might just do this next week before the year ends.

In the stoic tradition, I don't compare myself to others, only compare to who I was yesterday, and if I didn't get better, then it's a hard fail. So my resolution is to continuously improve from the day before.

And how's that going?

But also, I do not understand the intent behind a comment such as yours. I do not mean to single you out, you just happened to be the most recent commenter I have seen this from.

Comments such as yours do not address the question at all. Is the intent to just pat yourself on your back? Is the intent just to comment and say something (despite its relevance)?

Please help me understand.

> And how's that going?

It's going well

> Comments such as yours do not address the question at all

I answered. "my resolution is to continuously improve from the day before". Sorry if it sounded vague, but I have no 'specific' resolution other than to improve. That could be anything. Working out, writing, blogging, coding, whatever.

My goal was to improve my trait conscientiousness, mostly organisation etc.

Ive done this to some success, moving from low single digits percentile to somewhere near the population mean.

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